Not that I'll be able to buy one of these anytime soon, but after looking at the sony site, there were a few big changes that they tout that I didn't see in Simon's images. I'm not talking about the filtering.

http://bssc.sel.sony.com/BroadcastandBusiness/minisites/HDV1080/HVR-V1U/devices.html

First of all, they say it's supposed to be smear-free. Clearly, there is some smear here:

http://www.simonwyndham.co.uk/Sony%20V1U/V1U%20Car%20Interlaced.png

Is it horrible? Not to me, but i was expecting no smear. Second, the "Extra-low dispersion glass" is supposed to reduce fringing. I may be thinking of something else, but I think i see fringing on simon's image here:
http://www.simonwyndham.co.uk/Sony%20V1U/Interiorinterlaced.png

look at the leaves on the trees to the left. the leaves are green, but there's some blue/purple stuff that I would call fringe.

Are there settings that resolve these issues? I really like the color on simon's images, and i hope the problems he had are resolved.

Thank you.

Reduce does not mean eliminate completely.

Are there settings that resolve these issues?Essentially, no.

The lens is the lens. Looks pretty good to me in that shot. The only thing about that shot that looks 'iffy' to me is what looks like some barrel distortion on the right side (window-frame bowing out a bit). Other than that it looks fine IMO.

Purple-fringeing/CA can often be reduced a bit by shooting at an optimum aperture. Somewhere around f4. Also zoom lenses tend to 'struggle' a little at extremes of focal-length (and aperture). This is where you're most likely to see issues, if you see them at all.

Practically all lenses will have some minor 'issue' with it. If you look closely enough at anything, you'll start seeing a few flaws.

But apart from what looks like barrel distortion, that image is as close to fringe-free as i've seen pretty much.

I think you're confusing flare with smear Owen. If you want to see what CCD smear looks like, I'll send you some PDX10 frames to look at.

Barrel distortion, the zoom's downfall. OK, Sony's Zeiss and Panasonic's Leica lenses have horrible amounts of barrel distortion, but they're all made to a price point. Interestingly the 10x f/1.8 lens on the Sony HC1/A1 is the least distorting lens they've made for some time.

tom.

Exactly - I owned a HC1 and never really noticed any barell distorsion at all. Frankly, no CA either. But the noise and resolution loss in low light were horrible...

thanks for the response.

I understand what you're saying. Before I came here to check up on the camera, I saw the story by DSE in Studio! Monthly. I was mainly curious about the box on top, which turns out to be a hard disk drive. For me, that and longer battery life w/ CMOS chips are the major selling points. I also looked at the Sony site to get more info, and came across the "Smear-Free" claim. What we all know as flare is now being labeled smear. Why they wouldn't just call it flare, I don't know. I was intrigued that a camera would have no flare when pointing at a light source. I figured it was something inherent in the mystical CMOS. Look at the site, you'll see what I mean. I think it's a matter of their illustration not matching up.

http://bssc.sel.sony.com/BroadcastandBusiness/minisites/HDV1080/HVR-V1U/devices.html

This is what I read that confused me about the lens:
"Variation in refractive index is small, so focus is less affected by color and chromatic aberration (color fringing) is reduced." -sony.com/professional

I do really like the images that I've seen in this thread, and if I can find a place in Dallas to rent one of these (when it comes out), I will. If I win the lottery, I'll buy one or two. ;-)