Sony New Consumer HDV Cam
Usually I only talk about strange future products or products from Apple but today Tim asked me what I think about the new Sony Consumer HDV Cam. Well I didnīt know about it but what I found out made me very happy. Apparently Sony is doing some things right lately. The Camera is called HDR-HC 1 and Sony is taking one radical aproach - they ditch CCDs. Yes no more half or 3 or 3rd chips only one CMOS. Well you may think - wasnīt CMOS something that was used in the past and dismissed as to blurry and not good enough and analog and all - so every digitial camera - moving or still switched to CCD. Well yes you are right its this CMOS technology that years later has been refined and put through modern production lines and now outdoes even 3xCCD chips and is cheaper to produce. Sony implements it first in a moving picture camera (I think - I have not heard anyone else doing it yet). Noise in dark shots and red blurriness should be a thing of the past for consumers.
Sony doesnīt stop here. It puts some nice little "details" in the cam that should have been in cams all along. Firstly the "zebra" finder lets you see if you have overblown areas in the picture - a lot of pros will tell you that this is a very handy feature. Also it implements a digital zoom function only for you to see if your shot is sharp - no more zoom in, adjust sharpness, zoom out.
Another noteworthy thing is that the specs read "can use MiniDV and HDV Tapes". Well? What? HDV Tapes? I have not heard of them and could not find any reference to them other then some pro resellers already having them in stock. My very first reaction was: "YES. Less compression! More Datarate!" The thing I really do not like about HDV is the HIGH compression rate in the chroma channel. Try to pull a key or color correct HDV footage and you see what I mean. If the new tapes would double the data rate then this would be revolutionary and rivial digital betacams in terms of quality when you go back to normal video resolution! But as said pure speculation until someone enlightens me on those new HDV tapes...
Anyway great camera all around - not so very cheap for 2000 Euros but definitely more within range then the pro-sumer models and the CMOS really is yummy.