HVX200 ……real HD?

[Frank Nolan]

According to the ATSC, there are about 20 or so different formats that are considered HD. DVCProHD, which the HVX can shoot in either 720 or 1080, is one of those “standards”.
Look up the ATSC website for more information.
https://www.atsc.org/

[Barry Green]

Just look at the footage. Of course it’s “real” HD.

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[Dave Neyman]

I agree with Barry. Just look at it. It’s great! It is a compressed HD but HD none the less. I compare it to shooting still in RAW vs. JPEG mode. They look the same when you shoot them but the RAW does give you some more options for corrections later. The HVX-200 shoots similar to JPEG files in that the ompression is done in camera. It really does look amazing. I’m currently shooting a 12 episode series and the clients keep comenting on how good the footage looks. They are shocked that something that good is coming out of a camera that small.

Dave

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

I guess it really all depends on what you consider to be “True HD”. If you mean true 1920 X 1080 X 3 CCDs recorded as 4:4:4 10 bit logarithmic RGB files, then no, no it is not. But then life is full of compromises. It’s definitely is not a standard def DV camera either. As others have already said, it meets all of the SMPTE/ATSC requirements, and it is definitely an HD camera.

Instead of getting into every detail of the number of charge wells on the CCD’s, how the A/D quantizes it, what the DSP does, and how the codec works, just look at the picture on a good monitor. If it’s not “true” enough you can always offer someone $6000 for their Viper or Sony F23.

[Nelson May]

thanks for all the input. I know this camera has a good track record, but I was starting to hear a few people knock it. When you are about to drop 5-6K that you don’t have betting on a decent return, one can get a little jump and does a lot of digging. I have been very satisfied with the 100A and B.

[Accountneedsrealnameupdate]

We have two of them and I’m really happy with them. At the end of the day, I feel it’s the best camera for the money. There are other cameras in the sub$10k class that do have higher resolution CCD’s, but that’s only one of many factors. One of the biggest challenges for all of the little cameras out there is that they all use 1/3″ CCD’s, so in order to fit more charge wells onto a chip, you have to make them smaller, which means less sensitivity, less dynamic range, and more noise. The truth is if you lock down an HVX-200 on a tripod and put it next to the Canon XH or one of the Sony’s, (the 1440 HDV cameras), and shoot a black and white resolution test chart, with no motion, and under studio lighting, the other cameras do win for MTF, (modulation Transfer Function). That is to say that yes, they resolve a higher number ‘TV Lines’. One could almost say they are higher resolution, but it’s not quite that simple.

I’m going to skip over the importance of the A/D and DSP and just go to the next big challenge. How to store the data. The HVX-200 uses the 4:2:2 100 mbit DVCPro HD codec which contains 4 times more data than 4:2:0 HDV long GOP mpeg, but it does not take advantage of mpeg’s inherent GOP bandwidth savings. The DVCPro HD codec pre-filters 1080 formats to 1280 X 1080 and 720 formats to 960 X 720, (most recording codec’s do some sort of pre-filtering like this, but they don’t put it at the top of their marketing). DVCPro HD is a 4:2:2 codec, which means that only the Luma gets recorded at 1280 X 1080, the Chroma gets knocked down to 640 X 1080, (or 480 X 720 for 720P). For comparison, 1080 HDV prefilter to 1440 X 1080, but 4:2:0 means the Chroma is sampled at 360 X 1080.

If you think HD is 1920 X 1080 with full 8 bit RGB for each pixel, this might sound kind of shockingly bad, but the truth is you cannot get “True” 1920 X 1080 4:4:4 recording for under $10K, so you really need to compare systems in the same price range. As a side note about resolution, it’s important to understand that the numbers just represents a sampling grid. It specifies how often samples are taken, but not what’s sampled or how. The quality of color behind those samples is equally important to the shear number, after all, an image is nothing but color data, so more samples of lesser quality aren’t really better.

When you consider the motion artifacts of mpeg and the noise from the higher res, (smaller pixel), CCD’s, just counting lines on a resolution chart doesn’t really tell the whole story. I guess the simple answer is that there is no simple answer. Look at the monitor and buy what you like. Me, I like the 200.