[Toke]

I think choosing the media is just about expenses.
Card reader is cheaper than optical drive which is cheaper than tape drive.

Using solid state for acquisition might be a bit more reliable than optical
disk, but then you have one more workstage for dumping the memory card to
optical disk.

In couple of years price for a 50 GB bluray disk will be something like $2,
so hd or solid state can’t compete as an archival format for at least a
decade or so. I’m not sure even if hd will ever be reliable enough for
archiving.

My bet it that summer 2006 one TB of bd costs $50, hd $500 and p2 $64,000.
So the question is do you acquire straight to disk or through the cards.

PD-disk might be a bit big in the camera, but think about 72 Mbps of
1080p24 for 40 minutes and not with 60% of it as a total waste.
And that’s 80 minutes with double layer.

Why is that, lots of people are telling that you can have only one bitrate
with tape system (dvcproHD) and that’s why you have to dump that 60% of
recorded data, but when card based system arrives, it just keep on dumping?
At the same time sony can record with 5 different tape speeds and bitrates
with hdcam…

Btw, sony has had a dvcam deck many years that can transfer data with 4x speed.
So they could easily release quite cheap dvcamHD camera with 45 minutes of
recording time. But they won’t because they will be getting better profits
out of selling PD-disks than tapes.

Anyway, I’m happy to get anything progressive 16:9 above 25 Mbps under $30k.

And then if we could bet more color depth out of these cameras than 8 bits.
That’s sooo 80s’…
Getting signal out of dsp before compression would practically just be installing
the hd-sdi-socket, but of course not, we need something like Reel-Stream to do that.

It’s nice to have great improvements with video cameras, but if you are not an ENG-shooter,
we are still so far away from optimal digital cinema cameras.
Maybe there are only big enough markets for cameras that have these “full auto” buttons…

[Toke]

Well, if dark pictures are funky…
With 1280×1080 camera would be even less sensitive than fx1/z1.

[Toke]

My guess is 1280×720 chips with both vert&horiz pix-shift, so it gets better luma resolution for 1080p.