There has been a lot of talk about low light performance on these cameras so let's take a look at outdoor and studio light performance. Here are a couple of quick and dirty clips taken with my Optura 30.

Let me know what you think.

Outdoor - Auto mode - No post processing -VBR encoding

http://www.clubcts.com/video/skyatv.wmv



Indoor - Tungsten lighting 1 850 watt diffused, 1 300 watt direct - Exposure locked at +0 - 1/60 sec - stabilizer off - Manual white balance - color correction in Premiere 1.5 - VBR encoding

http://www.yoyostore.com/lib/yoyostore/throw2.wmv

*you will have to cut and paste the link to your browser

Does this cam have a color-shift problem? Why was color correction needed?

One of the bulbs is rated at 3200k and the other one is 3000k. I ran a manual white balance against a "high brightness" sheet of white paper. The original looked pretty good without the color correction but I wanted to make the white and black areas as clean as possible.

Getting the white balance settings right FIRST makes a difference for low light for the Optura 30. Otherwise, unadjusted and simply exposure locked, everything looks very amateur and orange. One good Wal-Mart $32 worklight bounced off the walls makes the image look awesome and professional. It's what I used with my Optura 30 for my first movie. I'm a college student without much money, and that's why I made my first feature film using my handy Canon Optura 30. It works so well that I even had the characters in my movie using the same camcorder (I have two). If you're interested in seeing Optura 30 footage and screen grabs (most of which are unadjusted), then check out this page on my indie filmmaking web site. The image size is reduced from the original 873 pixels wide to 600 wide:

http://murrayfilms.net/page/primary/bailey_cinematography.htm

For optura footage, check the Watch Movies page for the trailer for my movie, I Love Ashley Bailey, but keep in mind the trailer is compressed and that I've since learned to get even more out of the Optura 30. I highly, highly recommend this camcorder.

So in low light ....what is your conclusion...does it lose color saturation and is there grain to it? My op 20 does...

Thanks
Tony

Exactly right. It loses a lot of saturation, is very grainy, and there's a blurrish motion blur effect. Basically if the exposure has opened automatically all the way when you lock it, you know the camera's really reaching for light. There's a "Night Mode" which raises up the colors but is completely useless since it drops the frame-rate down to maybe 2.5 frames per second.

I don't have anything to compare to, but I know that in any lighting that requires the exposure to be all the way up (like two normal indoor incandescent light bulbs) the image will not look broadcast quality and will be blurry and youtube-ish. For any project I do, normal lighting like this is unacceptable, which is why I've invested in lights.

If home video is the purpose, you can later raise the gamma settings in your editing program and while grainy, the resulting video will be good enough to see what is going on (with normal house lighting.)

The halogen lights in classroom buildings, etc. always make the image look good because there's enough light, however. I hope this information helps.

Thanks Eric just wanted to see if your model did the same.