New DVX100A, Image Quality Questions

[Steve London]

Greetings,

My DVX100A is right out of the box and I'm newer to DV than that. I've done photography for a million years though, taken thousands of digital stills, am pretty good with Photoshop and done decent amateur videography for more than ten years. And, I think of myself as a bona fide member of generation D. All of which baloney means I hope I can become reasonably knowledgeable and proficient at DV at maybe the expert amateur level with a year or so's diligent effort.

In reviewing my first 20 minutes of shooting I am disappointed at some of the images' quality. In particular, I don't like a strong, bright halo along the edge of some objects, such as a frame-filling face in contrasty, indoor lighting.

In addition, I see noise in dark areas and even strongly saturated colors that I didn't expect.

Most settings factory default: Gain 0, autoexposure on, autofocus on, etc.

Is the halo problem one of too much sharpness in the default setting?

Is the noise problem one of too high gain?

Or, is it all a consequence of the fact that at the moment I cannot capture the DV to my PC and examine it there? (IEEE1394 card on order.) Instead, I have simply hooked up the composite video out to the input of a 24" Sony TV (good DVDs look good on this thing to me) and that is not a fair way to judge camera image quality?

[Ken Tanaka]

Welcome Steve,
Well, it's always hard to reply to posts such as this because we cannot see the same image you see.

However, given your newness to video and to the DVX100A I suspect that you're seeing a rather default image produced by some amount of auto settings.

Take quite a bit of time to first understand how the camera behaves in its various default scene file settings. Remember, it can shoot in several modes and the settings for each are different.

Then make sure that you have the camera on manual iris, manual gain, manual focus, etc. This is a camera that really needs operator intervention, unlike most other prosumer cameras.

Unless there is a defect in your camera (unlikely) I guarantee that some hours spent exploring its settings will pay off in some really outstanding images.

[Tung Bui]

I've played around with the 100A in the last few weeks. There is noise particularly in uniform greens when the gamma mode is set to cine-V with thick vertical resolution and the detail level turned up to +4. When you turn down the detail abit you get less grain.

Haloing occurs when you turn up the detail level past +1. This is done deliberately by the electronics on all cameras to give it a sharper appearance. Clearly this is fake and it isnt terrribly useful but I find in bright environments it can be OK.

[Tung Bui]

You need to plug it into a tv and play around with the settings. I got my girlfriend as a guinea pig for it. I'm in the process of getting a portable color tv to lug around with the camera for awhile while I'm shooting to see what the different settings will do.

The grain during daylight shooting is rather distressing I think but I think its just an artifact of too much sharpening in thick mode.

If you shoot in thin mode you will see vibrating lines when you move the camera even alittle bit(on the pal models anyway) Just to warn you. There has been alot of discussion about this if you check out the boards. I think this camera has so many controls it is difficult to learn them and some of the controls cause artifacts.

[Frank Granovski]

I am disappointed at some of the images' quality. In particular, I don't like a strong, bright halo along the edge of some objects, such as a frame-filling face in contrasty, indoor lighting.

As with photography, lighting is 75% of the art.