Can someone please upload short footage of a human face close up, if possible someone with small beard and with sunlight in half of his face...i need to see how it looks 'cause i'm looking for a camera to make action short-films, and i don't have a big budget, but if the difference between the canon XH-A1 or AG-HMC 150 and the AG-HMC 40 is really big, i wil maybe save more money and go for the ccd's, what do you guys think?...

I also have seen that the cmos sensors arent good enough to film shaky footage, like inside a car or a boat, for what i have seen the image sometimes distorts, am i right?

What framerate are you primarily interested in? And do you want the face mobile or fairly static? In good light, the HMC40 has more resolution than the HMC150, by the way.

Oh really??...well i'm interested in 24p, and it would be better if the person is moving around...i have another quetion, i've seen(youtube-cmos, not 3cmos) that cmos sensors aren't too good for mobile scenes, example, for filming inside a car that goes fast, or a boat, the image kind of fails, it makes like waves, but this is only what i've seen...what can you tell me about that?...

There are problems with high motion - google 'jello' or 'rolling shutter' and hmc40 and you'll find some discussions.

Good question ?
I have been shooting Drag Boats for a long time on the Canon XL-1s. They run around 250
miles per hour in the 1/4 mile. What will the video look like on an HMC-40 with is set in the best setting.

What would you suggest for a setting.
Thanks.

HMC40 is good, but not in low-light with it's CMOS sensors. Quality is good. I'm happy with it.

HMC40 is good, but not in low-light with it's CMOS sensors. Quality is good. I'm happy with it.

Low light performance here has nothing to do with CMOS sensor... today's CMOS sensors are plenty sensitive.

Rather, the fact that they're full raster high-definition sensors at 1/4" in size. The CMOS technology used is significantly lower noise that most CCDs, thus the fact you can crank the HMC40's gain fairly high before the noise kicks in. But that's still only 7.68mm^2 per sensor. Compare that to 17.3mm^2 per sensor for the HMC150... that's more than twice as much light collected per chip, could be more depending on the precise fill percentage of the photo cells. Or take an APS-C camera like my Canon 60D... that's 329mm^2. More pixels, only one sensor, but still a huge advantage when the lights go out.

And of course, some of the great low-light SD cameras, like the VX2100, used three 1/3" sensors... but they had to capture only 1/6th as many pixels. Thus, each actual sensor is much larger, more photos captured. And quite a few of the 1/3" CCD cameras are not using full raster sensors. The HMC150, for example, is using 960x540 pixel sensors with pixel shift, for an effective 1440x810 resolution... each sensor, however, is potentially collecting 4x as much light per pixel as a full raster sensor would be.

So at the pixel level, that's actually about a 9x light gathering advantage in the HMC150 over the HMC40, before the sensitivity of the sensor even comes in as a factor.

Oh, wow, I didn't know that. Thanks

Good question ?
I have been shooting Drag Boats for a long time on the Canon XL-1s. They run around 250
miles per hour in the 1/4 mile. What will the video look like on an HMC-40 with is set in the best setting.

What would you suggest for a setting.
Thanks.

Hey I just got on the HMC40 band wagon and I've been shooting fast motion, fast pans, and worst of all in high contrast super glare environments. I'm shooting Kitesurfing at my local beach. After reading the HMC book by Barry Green I tested out a lot of the advice he shares and it really helps. Being that I'm shooting in similar conditions...

Ideally I would shoot 720 60P at a fixed shutter speed of 120. No higher and definitely no lower if you can avoid it. If you must shoot full HD then stick with 30P however the 60P option really holds its ground when it comes to slow mo, especially the detail in the water that is slung off the side/bow/rooster tail of the boats.

One last note from the book in case you you're not aware of, try to keep the minimal amount of zoom to avoid some of the drawbacks with the CMOS sensors. I haven't had much of an issue but just something to keep in mind. And I've been using a gradient polarizer and its helping HEAPS with cutting down light and glare off the water. You get a softer blown out image when your iris hits the 9 + stop marks.