The new cam finally turned up yesterday morning, along with a rode mic, varizoom shoulder mount, screw in clear + polariser filters, red eye .5 wide adapter, a Sony eye cup, and a pack of warm cards in a cool cordura bag.
I have devoted many hours already to giving the presets a good customise and am finally happy with the colour this thing is producing after the dreary Out of the box look it came with. I've changed the speedy focus to the slow setting which is still pretty fast.

I'm quite impressed with the warm cards which have a blue tinge to them and give the camera a pleasing golden glow. The reverse of the cards are pure white which makes the image slightly blue in comparison. Both of these options appear better than the auto WB setting, so money well spent i think.
I have not managed to get a picture on my Apple 23 inch cinema display yet. The manual is not as idiot proof as i'd like it to be. One picture seemed to show a mini firewire going from the cam to a big firewire on the ACD. I gave this a go but to no avail. My tv is not HD friendly. I'm impressed with the quality of the lcd having originally been concerned about its size. I love having an iris ring up front with the zoom and focus. I also like the ability to do really smooth slow zooms which my pdx 10 only did with a stutter.

I spent ages trying to decide whether to get this or the panny HVX 200 but i think i made the right choice. Had the HVX been shipping with 2x 32 gig P2 cards instead of the 8GBs i would have bitten the bullett and gone for it, but thats a good year away. By the way, if there's anyone reading living in London I could do with a camera buddy to get out and shoot some stuff. I get a bit nervous carrying around expensive gear on my own in public here. People get mugged for i pods in London.
I'll post some grabs when i get a chance to get out and shoot something worthwhile.

Dom, I am really interested to hear how well the Red Eye does. When you try it out would you please take some wide shots with lots of detail (like trees on the horizon, etc.) and post a still or some footage? I am particularly curious about edge to edge sharpness.

Thanks

Stephen, I put up some clips here some time ago:

http://www.dvfreelancer.com/media/video/xha1clipsmall.mov

You may have to register to look at it, I'm not sure. They are some random shots from interviews and some cutaways I shot. There's one full wide angle in a park with a guy walking toward the camera on a field of grass. There are trees in the background, so you can see how the camera looks on a panoramic wide shot. The QT compression I did for the web site is pretty heavy, so it doesn't look as good as it really is, but you can get an idea of things. I was surprised at how it did not get soft on the big wide shot, as other 1/3" chip cameras I've used.

Really nice shots and colors there Bill. What camera is this? Was that a .5 Red Eye in the shot you mentioned?

EDIT, I just looked at the name of your file so I know what camera it is now. DOH!

No wide angle adapter. That's the wide angle of the lens itself. For my purposes it's wide enough for most things. The shot with the big rock in the foreground was at full wide angle too, or nearly so.

Sorry--I missed the part about the adapter. I read through the post kind of fast and thought he wanted to see what wide angle shots looked like--I overlooked the Red Eye adpater part, so my footage is irrelevant to the question. Sorry 'bout that.

Ok Steven, i'll make a point of doing that once i get out and shoot something worthwhile. I did have a play today in my living room and the extra coverage is pretty good, though the door frame at the edge of the shot was like a banana. What's the best way of posting stuff so anyone can have a look at it in high quality?

if there's anyone reading living in London I could do with a camera buddy to get out and shoot some stuff. I get a bit nervous carrying around expensive gear on my own in public here.

Hey Dom, I'm in London and I'll ride shotgun with you. Send me an email (public profile), see if we can't arrange a convenient time.