Mark Donnell
October 27th, 2006, 12:52 PM
This may not be worthy of a thread, but I had been debating over how or whether to enter HD or HDV for over a year. This forum gave me enough information to make a decision. I bought the HVX-200, and I am extremely happy with the decision. I shoot mostly sports events and outdoor activities, for my own enjoyment as a hobby, rather than as a business. Last week I was in Austin and shot my first files with the HVX, some at the botanic garden, and some of a regional high school band competition, all in 720p60. Getting used to the P2 cards with the P2 Store was not difficult at all, although I'm still in the early learning phase. The camera, mounted on a monopod, is easy to handle and small enough to be truly portable. At times the 13X lens is a bit undersized for close-ups, but better than the 10X on the DVX-100. After shooting, I took the camera with its component-out cable to Best Buy and Circuit City and played some of the video back on a few of the large plasma screens (for which I am also shopping). The results were amazing ! The manager of the video section at one store said he wished that he could keep some of the botanic garden footage as a demo tape for his plasma TVs. As for criticisms, I have only a couple minor ones. I have nearly lost the rubber EVF eyepiece cap several times already, because it doesn't travel well on the camera and I remove it during transport. Panasonic should have made either a flat rubber or solid cover cap for the EVF. I plan to order a few more of their rubber eyepieces because I know I'll lose one soon. Second, there is no lens cap. The lens is well-protected by a large bulky matte-box type of attachment, but this also makes the camera considerably longer for travel purposes. I have ordered an 82 mm lens cap from B & H. My one other complaint is that the P2 Store is very sensitive to movement while downloading files from the P2 cards. It really does need to be flat and motionless during the downloads. If it senses movement it stops transferring and auto-starts again when the movement stops. Maybe the high data rate makes this unavoidable, but I have used laptops with shock-mounted hard drives that you could jog with during hard drive access without problems. Anyway, thanks to everyone on this forum who so generously provided endless information to help me make the switch to HD. I will try to pay it back to others in the future.