I have had the camera for about three months now and it's worked wonderfully out of the box in most situations. Interviews are great, theater performances are great and news style b-roll has been great.

Most of the time I have used XDCAM HQ 720 24p or 30p, twice for a long performance I used AVCHD 1080 30p and once by accident XDCAM 1080 30p. This happened after I lent the camera to a fellow professional who needed a second camera for a day to shoot and interview and had set it to that option. He said that the footage came out great. However I was shooting an outdoor performance on a beach handheld and later on a tripod but against a shiny background that vibrated in the wind. The resulting footage was full of small compression artifacts and rather gritty on a decent sized monitor.

Since I have never experienced this before I would like to query fellow HM600 owners as to their experiences with the compression on the camera. Are there setting you find better for handheld? Is the XDCAM really that much better at 1080 30p then the AVCHD setting?

I did a test a while back between AVCHD 1080 and XDCAM 1080, and I remember thinking that the XDCAM footage looked a lot better.

I'm guessing that's because the XDCAM files have a higher bitrate (35mbit), whereas I think AVCHD is 24mbit.