This is just a suggestion(I tend to come up with crazy unrealistic ideas). But I was reading Scott Billups Digital Moviemaking book and found that one of the major things that separates pro cameras from consumer cameras is there lenses. Of course you've got imaging sensors(CCDS) and formats (DV, DVCPRO50, DIGIBETA) and all that, but to bump up my quality a notch higher, I intend to do something crazy:

First off, as some of you may know, I have an old 3 tube camera from the 80's that I was toying around with thinking I can make something out of it. Bad idea. Good idea though, is that it as a hardcore canon broadcast lens on it. I bought this thing for $60 on ebay mind you.

Now I also have two consumer camcorders. 1 an old crapo mini dv camera from few years ago, 1ccd. The other is a 3ccd panasonic gs120.

Now, say I do an experiment. I rip off the old lens from my crapo 1 chip camera and fixate the broadcast lens on it. What do you think will happen?

I hope that this would give me more accuracy and optical resolution than with consumer lenses which are crap.

Also, if the experiment proves successful on my crapo camera, I'll take the broadcast lens off and put it on my 3 chip gs120. Thus I get, 3 chip color with a broadcast lens on mini-dv tape.

Sound like a plan?

I doubt the chip sizes are the same.

Of course I know the chip sizes are different. But you know the Canon XL1 cameras, and how you can mount EOS lenses on it? Well, same idea. Maybe I'm just lost in my crazy world and need a girlfriend to keep my mind off of cameras. But screwing with cameras is a lot easier than finding a date...whatever. Tommarrow, I'm trying the damn experiment.

I wanted to do the same thing and never quite got around to it. I had, at one point, an old sony 8mm camcorder that had a very nice fujinon 10-140mm manual lens attached to the front of it. I wanted to convert it to an XL type mount but never got around to it. The chips in both cameras weren't that much different in size, from what I could tell from the naked eye. I was actually able to get a bit of an image from it when I put the lens in front of the XL2 body. So theoretically, yes it is very possible, just alot of time and work.

Since the lens was designed for a camera with a much larger CCD than your camcorder, you'll end up with images much larger than you're used to - ie. you won't get a wide angle as such, the lens will be more like a telephoto.
Of course, if that's what you want, get those screwdrivers out...

Robin

Hey Josh, how did the project go? have you gotten to it? im interested to see what a difference it can make, i also read Scott Billups digital movie making.

I say go right to the the GS120. I have one, and while the video is okay for family stuff, it really struggles on defininition. So you see if you do the cannabalizing, I will know if it worked. :)