The IMAGE *is* that good. The CAMERA has serious limitations - the praise for it is primarily based on it packing so much into such a small and cheap camera, and the fact that they found a way to tweak the CMOS chip to give better low light and noise performance than other cameras using the same/similar chip. But manual control, while it can be done, is not at a professional level (again, there are hacks to, for example, get a real f stop reading, but it doesn't natively provide it), and I'll say again that the focusing is such a pain with that little dial that for the first time in my life I actually use auto-focus (which, with the "instant auto focus", is surprisingly good) and then lock it rather than focusing by eye for most shots, unless its a formal shoot with a field monitor.
24P workflow is tricky because it doesn't embed flags for pulldown removal in the datastream (and doesn't have the equivalent of 24PA for lossless pulldown removal which is kind of a moot point with HDV anyway). If you need to edit IN 24P you have to jump through a few hoops. If you have FCP Studio 2 it is much easier, but you still have to put everything through compressor to remove pulldown. (Of course if you don't have to deal with film out, PAL, or a 24P HDcam master, you can just edit the 24P at 29.97 and everything works just fine. And you can always shoot good ol' 60i). But for what is it now, $800? Pretty amazing. Oh, the other drawback is that it is still HDV, which imo is a severely compromised format, but you don't get to move up from that in HD land until you're at the $6000 level. The higher end Canon HDV stuff mentioned here by others is indeed superior on the camera level and more similar to the DVX100 in layout/features (albeit pricey), though it's still HDV and if you need 24P the 24"f" version on those cameras has less resolution than the HV20's true 24P, though that's more than made up for by the lenses and cam features. Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com studio vlog/blog: www.brookhinton.com/temporalab [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
