Yup. Played with it at IBC Amsterdam.

Interesting "debate" between the CanonA1/G1 and the SonyV1 . . interesting. And maybe not what I thought either . .. the plot thickens, like the thickest plot on the Planet Plot . .oh yes . .

Lotsa comments . . Here yah goes:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=140

.. oh yes, I failed to mention that I did skip around the corner and ask a nice Canon man why I should buy the Canon A1/G1 over the 24 hour newly pressed-released SonyV1.

The article says the base camera is priced at $4900 USD. Seems like the price of the Z1 is gonna have to drop like a stone.

I'm pretty sure there will be a review posted by someone soon.
Randy

If it said $4,900 the price just dropped a $100. I wonder what the street price will be for the $6,600 combo after the initial feeding frenzy is over. My new HVR A1U lists for $3,100 and I'll pay $1,800 after I get a rebate check.

Spot has a 1st look here
http://www.hdvinfo.net/articles/sony/firstlookv1u.php

Konrad

An awful lot of things electronic drop to 60% of list after an initial break in "test the market" period. This should be no different. In a while, $2880? Who knows. Although the camcorder looks a bit high, it is the accessory hard drive that is REALLY expensive. With todays prices you should get a 1.5 TERAbyte drive for that price, or less.

I dunno.. The Z1 price has only dropped 10% since it came out. So I don't expect this one to drop dramatically anytime soon. Though I do expect it to drive down the Z1's price.

The HD is listed as a 1.8" drive, which of course isn't the commodity that our 3.5" PC drives are. And it discussed a lot of shock-proofing for it. Plus it must have some specialized electronics for the capture aspect (it's not just copying files, you know).

$2880 for the FX7 maye not the V1.
It seems that Sony doesn't vary or drop pricing too often when it comes to their electronics.

http://www.vasst.com/resource.aspx?id=5f0e6287-0a9c-49a6-ab6a-7a9431fe3407

Not having 24pA does seem a bit limiting, only a little bit but still.
If it wasn't for the local support issue my money would certainly be with the Canon which does seem more aimed at the serious shooter.

Great! Now all we need is a portable HDD that will record to Cineform ICs.

going by spec alone, it seems the canon still has the leg up...
The glass will be the dominant element (pardon the pun)

The HDD recording bit which was mounted (in the shot) would really REALLY make this cam top heavy.. sony's are already notorious for poor balance (compared to the DVX100, the Z1 is a little overweight up top)umm..

The 3xCmos seems to be a good option when it comes to competing with the Canons, but in all honesty, the Digic2 Engine (as found in the H1/A1 as well as al of canons top shelf digital stills gear) will be a tough one to beat. No i mean REALLY tough.. cmos or not...

This statement intrigues me
"The combination of the ClearVid CMOS Sensor and the EIP technologies also result in a feature called “smooth slow rec. (recording).” Due to the speed of the camcorder’s signal processing, video images can be captured at very high speeds, up to 240 fields per second, allowing very fast movements to be recorded in precise detail without creating artifacts or signal degradation."
So are they saying that in SD mode (NTSC Land...) this is akin to overcranking?? It would be interesting to see this and if its only SD, then its useless to most of the people who'd like to take advantage of it...

"20x optical zoom lens with F2.8 at the telephoto end for greater light sensitivity and long-range image acquisition for maximum shooting flexibility."

Interesting that theyre using Stills terminology with Fstop details... i dont know why theyd bother considering taht everyone in video land knows that alot of light is lost at full zoom.. more than likely people will crank the gain up anyway, so these figures really dont mean much in our world... 2.8 is a good fast speed for a stills lens, but there are things we can do (and get away with) that photographers cant... so this fast lens rating is pretty much a misnomer.
Add the extender theyre refering to, and more than likely youll gt about a f4.5 to f5 rating... either way, 2.8 might be a little soft for HDV, f4, woul dthen be the optimal setting (without the extender) and f8 and above with the extender in good light...

Its an intereting camera, no doubt.. but in all honestyu, un til we get into the guts of it and check out the gamma/colour configurations, lens in a variety of environemnts and of course resolution and colour gradation, (ie shoot into the sun... try that with a Z1.. then try it with a DVX100 and tell me which one looks good... ;) ) we wont know..

its an interesting time... im surprised they jumped ahead with this though... i really REALLY was expecting an MP4 recording unit to follow on from Z1

24pa has no value in an MPEG format; PA is for assisting in decoding overhead for DV...doesn't benefit HDV at all, hence the lack of it.
You can't really compare this to the Canon XLH1 (which I love, BTW) because they're very different animals. The V1 has greater rez, but has a significantly lower price and substantially fewer features.

Let's see if I get this correct.
We have 24p in a 60i stream. I understand the advantages of 24pA for DV over 24p. I don't understand why HDV would not also benefit if you wanted to extract the native 24fps and edit on a native 24p timeline. That it's HDV, DV or HDCAM shouldn't matter surely.

Not that this affects me directly, I'd just shoot 25p!

a fast lens is a fast lens, we know that you do loose light when you zoom (because you're pulling light from such a small area, but full zoom at 2.8 a 62mm diameter lense and a 5.6 on that same lense at full zoom and you'll certainly see a dif. I don't think that it's quite this misnomer that you think it is, unless there's something I'm missing. Mind you that seeing a smaller lense almost always makes me weary and seeing smaller chips make me just about turn tail and run, but I'll withold my judgements till I can see it and shoot with it (rental or something) myself. I usually will take the word of a man who knows what he's talking about too :).

Dave

You do extract the native 24p, via the flags that are inserted at capture. 24pa is more than just extracting/removing the inserted pulldown.
Remember that the GOP frames aren't the same as intra-frames.

"but full zoom at 2.8 a 62mm diameter lense and a 5.6 on that same lense at full zoom and you'll certainly see a dif. I don't think that it's quite this misnomer that you think it is, unless there's something I'm missing."

thing is, our shutter speeds work a lil differntly.. well tehy do and they dont.. being that we have motion to contend with, so if we bring it down to lets say 1/25, the motion blur may be excessive.. even if the lens is rated at 2.8... lets say u zoom all the way through and slow ur shutter.. yes it would mostly look ok, but try some fast motoon and fair enough u get that low light performance, however its at the cost of the motion sharpness..
not sayin the lens sux.. im not.. to pull off native HD resolutions it at least has to hit the 3mp mark... and resolution will absolutely kick butt on this monster... but for what we do, and the fact most if us wil l use gain in lower lit environments, those lens readings are misnomers as tehyre really dont pertian to waht we do and how wed use teh camera in a real world environment...

3 CMOS sensors and high speed frame recording to remove artifacts - that sounds stunning.
With my FX1 I shoot almost everything on a tripod because movement generates artifacts - would this be the concept of shooting 25 separate HD camera still images and stitching them together to make a progressive movie so that even with pans it would be perfect. Would this make great camera persons out of even the excited amateur??

With my FX1 I shoot almost everything on a tripod because movement generates artifacts - would this be the concept of shooting 25 separate HD camera still images and stitching them together to make a progressive movie so that even with pans it would be perfect. Would this make great camera persons out of even the excited amateur??

IMO the HDV codec is pushed REALLY hard with 1080i... this noise your seeing is the codec... in low light situations, when u add gain to teh factor, that noice cuases more noise in teh mpg stream...
prolly to a point of not being able to handle it... sure its watchable, but its really REALLY struggling..
With these cams though, the native res should help in that sense as interpolation (upscaling) doesnt exist... interpolation also adds noise and softening of images.. this softening generates edge noise and edge bleeding, couple that with HDV codec.. and well u get the picture... (pardon the pun)

As for panning with progressive scan, its a different kettle of fish.. if uve ever shot progressive scan, you must change ur way of thinking.. the way you shoot, the way you expose a shot... almost everything you do has to compensate for motion jitter, as its pretty much like film.. interlaced is very flexible and very easy to handle when it comes to panning...

I'd have to disagree with the last part of your statement. The degree of motion jitter and artifacts has nothing to do with interlace V progressive, it's a product of the frame rate. If you could somehow shoot 24i you'd have pretty much the same issues to deal with as shooting 24p. At the other end of the scale 50p and 50i are pretty much the same in terms of motion issues.

I'm also not so certain about the first part of HDV creating more noise in low light either. The smaller sensor elements used in HDV camcorders are where the problem starts. The extra gain makes the noise more visible and well, yes, no form of temporal compression handles noise well. But it's not adding new noise, just perhaps making the noise blocks bigger. What's worse though is it's eating up bandwidth that could have been used to encode actual image data.

"The extra gain makes the noise more visible and well, yes, no form of temporal compression handles noise well. But it's not adding new noise, just perhaps making the noise blocks bigger. What's worse though is it's eating up bandwidth that could have been used to encode actual image data. "

u said it better than i could... but with the additional noise caused by the added gain, the codec has to adjust to compensate.. this is waht cuases teh initial gain noise to "increase" even though its not teh actual gain thats cuaseing the additional noise...

as for the frame rate... the loss of data in motion data during a progressive pan, isnt the same as it would be if it were interlaced.. That temporal fielding is additional data (you already know this) so each field would carry its own stream or field of data.. or half frame.. so that pan in itself would carry twice as much information (albeit at half res temporal fielded data) but it would still be there.
The motion would be different to a progressive 24/25p frame as ur working with full frames.. whereas 24/25i (if it was a format), would still be working with half frames.. each with their own respective image data (ie each field would be unique.. so as the pan moves, each field would record a different set of framing information... this stutter in progressive scan wouldnt be found on interlaced, as the fielding method would "fill the gaps" as progressive is really only shooting actual frames, not temporal fields... so of those 75 odd frmes (as an example of a 3second pan second pan) are shot with 75 actual frames during the pan (progressive) to do the same, interlaced would have 150 fields with those "inbetween" gaps (as found in progressive) would be filled with temporal data.

u can really tell the difference when shooting the 2 side by side.. as in 50i and 25p i mean... havent tried 50p.. maybe next time i get my hands on HD100 i'll give it a go..

Canon 1/3 3xCCD

SONY 1/4 3xCMOS