Thanks Evan. I just gave that link a quick look, and it appears that CMOS chips are a little more complex in their workings than CCDs. I'll have to do more reading.

That link's primarily useful as a reference for the exposure control as it relates to aperture & gain - I'd take everything else as an interesting theory but probably not accurate. While the CMOS's output is being sampled/processed as a 14bit signal which is then mapped to HDV's 8 bits, his explanation of what is going on with the exposure is probably more complex than the reality - which appears to be that ND filters are introduced internally at f.4 to try to maintain it across the widest range of exposure.

I do know that the CMOS manufacturing process allows for chips to be mass made inexpensively and built with processing circuitry on them (potentially, all the camera circuitry on a single chip even). I wonder how far Sony actually went with that in the HC1/A1U.