HVX 200 CCD Chip – Panasonic Question

[Chris Borjis]

No Worries George, rest assured someone with the expertise WILL crack open the HVX and the Canon to see what makes it tick.

[Dom Silverio]

[quote]The analogy makes sense at first blush, but the car performs as you want, who the heck cares what’s under the hood.[/quote]

when the industry loves advertising numbers – 4:2:2, megapixel, 50 Mb/s, etc – them hiding a value that is standard to be publicly known does not bode well. I surmise it is nothing impressive. If it was it would be all over the brochure.

Prove me wrong. I doubt Pana would dare.

[Ron Shook]

mpe,

[mpe] “I surmise it is nothing impressive.”

In terms of pixel count, most likely not. But there are all sorts of trade offs when designing one of these camera, particular when you’re looking at these itty-bitty 1/3″ chips. If you use lower count chips with larger pixels and employ both horizontal and vertical pixel shift to crank the sharpness up a bit, as Jan has indicated, you end up with presumably greater sensitivity and lower noise than the opposite approach. The competitive camcorder with twice the pixel count might suffer more in sensitivity and noise while not achieving much more resolution, if any. If you’re going with a built in lens that has its own limitations, the lower pixel count with its benefits may very well be able to service this inexpensive lens quite adequately. Perhaps Panasonic simply wants you to judge from the picture not the specs, by refusing to divulge them.

Ron Shook

[Toke]

[George] “like buying a car and Toyota not telling you if its a inline 4 or v8 engine you are getting.”

This might be not so far in the future. Already in some mercedes, you can’t open the hood without a service remote controller 🙂

My guess, in the light of those first chart pictures, is that one chip has only about 720×720 pixels.

[Luis Caffesse]

[Ron Shook] “Perhaps Panasonic simply wants you to judge from the picture not the specs, by refusing to divulge them”

I agree Ron, that’s clearly the strategy here (much like Canon did with the XL1 back in the day).

You can’t help but question it though, seeing as every single other camera that Panasonic sells has the pixel count right there on the spec sheet. I’d be curious to see if this is going to be become a standard for the company as a whole or if it’s just something they decided to do with the HVX.

Interesting marketing choice I suppose.

Luis Caffesse
Pitch Productions, LLC
Austin, Texas