How does pixel count affect image resolution on SD? the XL2 has about 680,000 pixels on it's CCD. The new H1 has 1.67 million. A lot more!! For HD I can see the extra pixels but what about SD? Should the H1 have a lot better resolution as the CCD pixel count would suggest or does it have much effect after the 680,000 mark since the SD format is lower res? The numbers sound great but I'm not sure how this will effect me in the real world.

I will be buying either an XL2 or the XL H1 soon. Most shoots will still be SD for some time, so the HD isn't necessary yet, but if it is that much better than the XL2 I had rather get it.

Thanks,

One big benefit for SD shooting is that HDV has four times as many color samples as DV. So if you shoot HDV and then downconvert to uncompressed SD for editing, you'd get much better color reproduction: of course you'd lose all that if you output to DV at the end of the process, but if you're producing NTSC DVDs (where you'd have to go from 4:1:1 DV to 4:2:0 DVDs) or outputting the master to a better SD video format like Digibeta you should get a better result.

Number of effective pixels (per CCD):
SD/4:3: Approx. 1.17 megapixels
SD/16:9 Approx. 1.56 megapixels

Source: http://www.canon.de/Images/83_320180.pdf.