Last month we were on a four day location production shoot and used the HVX200 shooting DVCPRO 480 widescreen. We had done tests between DVCPRO50 and DVCPRO and didn't see any difference so with only three 4 gig cards we opted for DVCPRO. We had prior to this trip shot in 720 30PN at 60 frames a second for some promos and it turned out beautifully - very nice slow motion, very clean picture. What we experienced on our location shoot looked to be bad compression on certain clips. It was chunky sometimes around the edges of a persons face or their arms and seemed to appear where the signal could have been a little oversaturated, specifically with deep blue and red colors.

Has anyone raised this issue?

It is hard to tell what you are referring to but I think you are seeing the heavy compression of DV or DVCPRO. DVCPRO50 is much milder with that stuff. Reds tend to be blocky with DV. Post some pix.

If I'm not mistaken, bit for bit DVCPRO (non-HD) is miniDV. So the colorspace is 4:1:1, which means there will be major blocks around bright objects, particularly reds.

Most NLEs have a smoothing algorithm you can apply before going to DVD. But, in general, shooting in another format would be smarter.

If you're shooting 720p (DVCPRO HD) this shouldn't be as much of an issue, although it is more compressed per pixel than DVCPRO 50.

I think Matthew's right, I think you're seeing 4:1:1 color sampling. DVCPRO is indeed bit-for-bit the same compression system and color sampling as DV (in NTSC territories; in PAL territories it's 4:1:1 vs. DV's 4:2:0).

DVCPRO50 would probably have performed much better, due to it having twice as much color resolution and less overall compression.