Planning of doing side-by-side comparison on FX1 and HC1

[Wayne Morellini]

Kaku, thanks for your great work.

Originally Posted by Kaku Ito

CMOS seems to have more dynamic range, but the dark and bright area is controlled by their new processing scheme called Enhanced Imaging Processor (Gawd I sound like advertising). They separately handle the image and the birghtness, resulting the ability to make only the dark area brighter. So, now you know why that coffe ban scene was possible.

I read the English translation of the brochures, from what I can tell, it exposes pixels individually, depending on exposure, is this what the brochure is actually saying? This is something I have been raving about in the Digital Cinema camera projects for a while, because of the great dynamic range it gives. There are two schemes I know of, one that adjusts the gain per pixel (I think this is the scheme behind the "Autobrite" technology by smalcamera) and one where the pixel/field is reset when it overexposes and re-sampled (the dual slope scheme used in the fill factory Ibis5a). It seems like the scheme, and definitely a desirable feature.

Originally Posted by Radek Svoboda

Even if was rolling shutter and breathing existed in production model, would it effect anybody's purchase decision? Extremely unlikey. Camera's superior overall performance is what natters. No camera is perfect.
..
Still is nice to know. Radek

For most it shouldn't matter too much, but sometimes it does matter. In movies you don't want bad rolling shutter. Unlike a 1 foot slanting truck on a TV screen, it can become 20 foot slanting truck on a big screen (much more noticeable because of size and distance) and potentially all action shots will be effected. If you look at the digital cinema camera project threads you will see tests of cheap industrial camera with rolling shutter. Nice colour images (like HC1) but even gentle pan will make sides of buildings lean over. To reduce the slant they ran at double speed and moved the readout into frame blanking as much as possible. The smaller the slant is (the faster the readout) the less relevant it is. There is probably a metric for how small the slant has to be at speed before it becomes unnoticeable enough.

Unfortunately the rolling shutter on the HC1 does not look like the best. You can see that the first field slants inwards, and the next field slants even more. This is unlike the even slant you would get from 60i interlaced from a 60p rolling shutter image.

[Anhar Miah]

hehe :) @ Mike Farrington, I speak two lanuages fluently and am able to read another whilst understand a futher two. so what does that make me; quint-lingural?

Anyway @ Wayne, what infomation do you have about Sony's EIP, I read somewhere that the HC1 does not have a ND filter because "it doens't need one"

Thanks


Anhar Hussain Miah

[Mark Kubat]

Excellent preview reporting from "our-man-in-Japan" Kaku Ito!

Hooray - thanks so much for shedding so much light on this new cam for us - certainly very impressive for the money...

Kaku, seems like such a small, portable cam is going to be a popular choice for you on the bike, no?

Definitely replacing your GS400?

[Kaku Ito]

Mark,

I never tried DV mode with HC1, yet, so I will determine to replace GS400 or not(I have tree GS400s, but these are good to hand them over to athletes when they go to race events).

HC1's zoom ring works better than GS400's, but DVC30's zoom ring was better. I won't expect that Sony will make the zoom ring better than HC1, but I will probably buy the prosumer version, HVR-A1 as second unit.

My plan now is to combine HDR-FX1 (for wide angle shots for whole views), HVR-A1 (for getting into woods) and AG-HVX200 (for 60p to use with slow motion).

My concern is how Wayne described the problem with rolling shutte effects for larger screen. I show my movies to people with my company's HD projector and 120 inch screen. Although HC1 is great for money and everything, I do not agree to Sony about skipping of this kind of issue because everythingelse is tempting.

[Wayne Morellini]

Kaku

It is only an 120inch screen, do tests to see if it looks good. It might be so small as to be virtually unnoticeable at high movement rate (for instance, how fast was that bus moving, it might have flashed by too quickly) and most people won't be making block buster action movies with this. I imagine it is not much a problem for Sony, as if they fixed every little thing there would be no need to buy really expensive cameras.

[Wayne Morellini]

Originally Posted by Anhar Miah

Anyway @ Wayne, what infomation do you have about Sony's EIP, I read somewhere that the HC1 does not have a ND filter because "it doens't need one"

Just those brochure links posted before by Radek (English translation is really odd, and hard to understand) that seems similar to what I know about other sensors from:

www.fillfactory.com
www.smalsensor.com

And examining frames in previous posts. I am still waiting to read confirmation of this, but it looks similar.

[Thomas Smet]

So far I am having a hard time telling the difference between the FX1 and the HC1. I think this is amazing considering how different each camera works.

My only concern is that outdoors in sunlight always looks pretty good even for a single chip camera.

Any chance of us getting a comparison between the two cameras indoors in a poorly lit environment? This is where I think the FX1 would start to look better but I could be wrong.

If the HC1 looks just as good there then this camera might not be so bad for productions. I know it isn't a pro camera with a pro feel but since the other new consumer HDV camera uses the same chip but has more pro features that camera might work very well.

At first I thought the color was a little flat but then when I looked at FX1 footage I noticed that was a little flat as well so it wasn't a big deal.

[Kaku Ito]

Thomas,

I posted the night descending clip of HC1 to see how well the cam would shoot at night on the street. Hope this help a bit. I will look for the similar footage that I shot last year with FX1.

[Kaku Ito]

Thomas,

They perform about the same in automatic mode, but the differences are the controls. Zoom ring function of HC1 is okay, but FX1 has far better dedicated zoom ring (I'm probably not really telling YOU this but to other novice people to know the differences in price). But HC1 is so light and since some people have problem holding FX1 for long time, HC1 can be used by wider range of users for wider range of application. For what I do, buying three of HC1s instead of one FX, then get a couple of friends to help me shoot, say, mountainbike 4X race (slope style cross race using mountainbikes) would result in making more interesting video than shooting with one FX1.

I have to go to the downhill mountainbike course and shoot the similar footage with HC1 to see how will it will do (FX1 was not satisfactory for a lot of situations especially fast panning on downhiller passing by fast in front of trees (gradated leaves with different colors). But HC1 is going to save me a lot because of the size, that I would be able to fit HC1 in a waistbag but FX1 has to be in a large backpack like Kata Teddy. I will do this maybe next week.

[Kaku Ito]

I added the bike routine clip shot with HDR-FX1 to compare the one by HDR-HC1. My bike is different now since it is stolen.

[Thomas Smet]

I know the controls are not the best on the HC1 but what I was thinking was the A1U. I know the controls still are not the best on that camera but they should be better than they are on the HC1. As far as I know the image block is the same on both cameras but the lens may be a little bit better on the A1U.

[Kaku Ito]

Thomas,

I just wanted to clear it to the novice people reading these posts.

Do you think Sony would improve anything on A1 for the price difference? Besides the audio connections, the chassis will be different material (magnesium?), more manual controls on gain, iris settings. But I would guess the lense would be the same. I'm hoping that Sony will make the zoom ring feel better (probably not) like AG-DVC30.

[Thomas Smet]

Does anybody know when the A1U is coming out or more information on the camera?

I'm not sure if the lens will be better or not. It was more of a hope than anything. Looking at your great samples you posted I really am having a hard time to tell the difference between the two when it comes to detail. Clearly the CMOS chip has more detail than the FX1/Z1 chips but a much lower quality lens so it seems to come out the same in the end. Which in a way I guess is nice because with decent lighting conditions you really could use the new AC1 and A1U as a second camera to edit with FX1/Z1 footage.

[Kaku Ito]

According to Mr. Masuda from Provideo Station Shinjuku, it will be available a couple of months later, which should be sometime in September.

[John Stanley]

Thanks for all of this good info.
I'm curious to know if anyone sees a good reason NOT to use HC1's for filming weddings. I may get an FX1 and an HC1 for this, and I'm still reading these posts comparing footage, especially indoors. I wonder if the 2 cameras mix well, but my main question is whether I could use 2 HC1's and save a little.
(BTW, I can't afford 2 FX1's. :) )
Thanks,
- John