Cheapest camcorders with HD-SDI out for music event space, any thoughts?

[Drew Lahat]

As of Feb. 2016, the bar is at $2,000 and you have three options: the aforementioned Canon X25, JVC GY-HM200, and Sony X70. All at $2,000, and pretty darn good cameras for that price point.

I think Cat5 baluns are a horrible idea for this application; they’re bulky, not meant for moving situations, and there’s nothing about Ethernet connections that’s very sturdy, especially if you have roving cameras. At this day and age I’m not even talking about analog signals, I think that’s utterly out of the question, and digital HD video over Cat5E (let alone Cat5!) can be very unreliable. This is all from personal experience, selling Geffen, Kramer or Extron adapters to customers a few years back and having to deal with complaints and problems.

So stick with BNC cables and HD-SDI.

What IS a very viable option to you is today’s new ultra-cheap HDMI-to-HDSDI adapters. The Chinese have “cracked the code” and you can find a bunch of those on Amazon for $40 apiece (yes, they’re all the same product with different labels slapped on it…). And they work! I just ran the exact setup you described – filming concerts on a (very?) low budget – and had a couple of those on hand. They did the job without an issue. Those cheaper adapters used to be limited on the type of signals they could handle (anything besides 1080i and 720p60 was iffy), but they got much better so basically if your video switcher can handle the HD format these adapters will, too.

So here’s an HD-SDI camera for $170: you buy a $130 HD handycam, slap the SDI adapter, and voila! Your switch already takes SDI so you’re all set from there. Of course you can use any camera with an HDMI out.