I'm nicknaming it Z1Uss. Y'know, like the greek god, Zeus. Except instead of throwing lightning bolts, I throw hi-definition video!

I got to test out the camera a couple weeks ago and loved it then, and I'm loving it now, too. The 2-speed zoom handle is so handy and the ring lever is fun. The quality is absolutely incredible! This evening - when it was pretty dark outside - I hooked the camera up to my TV, put up 9dB of gain and saw absolutely no grain! The low-light performance is insane.

I'm very happy with the purchase. I've got a few music videos scheduled to be made in a few weeks so I'll post some links in the "DV for the masses" forum when I get those online.

Also, since my room got flooded this summer because of all the rain and I lost a lot of CDs (that I had backed up on my computer anyways), I get over $500 cash from insurance which will go towards a shotgun mic. And I'm not sure if the insurance company's "we replace what got damaged or the modern equivilent" policy is in effect for this, but I had a 10-year-old Windows 3.1 computer sitting on my floor that got wrecked. We paid $3,000 for it back in the day. If they gave me $3,000 cash, I'd be a very happy fellow.

What a glorious day.

Mark, please post a link to the video's here when you upload.
if you have any footage in the HDV format, can you upload it also. i would like to see what i can do with my different effects plugins with footage in the 1080 rez relm.
Darrell
FIRST CINEMA PICTURES

...This evening - when it was pretty dark outside - I hooked the camera up to my TV, put up 9dB of gain and saw absolutely no grain! The low-light performance is insane.That’s exactly how I felt when I got my Z1. The problem most comparisons make with low light between DV and HDV is that they set the cameras up for the same amount of gain and say, look the DV camera is better. What they fail to acknowledge is that HDV can take more gain before getting noisy. You really have to compare the best clean low light picture regardless of gain setting. As you’ve seen, the Z1 can handle the gain without too much noise which is fairly impressive.

~jr

Absolutely, John. Gain in HDV is especially unnoticable when downconverting to SD, which I suppose is what's happening when I hook the camera up to my SD TV.

Quick question for anyone who might know - how come you can shoot 60 minutes of DV, 60 minutes of HDV, but only 42 minutes of DVcam? Isn't HDV higher resolution (and therefore filesize) than DVcam?

The tape speed runs faster for DVCAM so it uses tape faster.

~jr

Ahh, thanks John. I didn't even think of that.

In case anyone is curious, I shot a bit of test footage with the Z1U this evening. It's compressed and the compression quality isn't all that great, but it gives you an idea of what the camera can do. The shot of me in the living room is put on Hyper Gain (42dB).

www.mumps.ca/main.php