HD-SDI 4:2:0 or true 4:2:2?
 

Regarding the new Sony's PDW-F330 XDCAM HD, Michael Devlin info us from this here:Is it the same thing at the Canon's XL-H1 or not?

Ask someone to shot some red, blue, green, magenta, cyan and yellow triangle shapes and then we will know for sure

I don't see a reason for that since all the ccds have the same resolution.

There's no reason other than:

to save money on a cheaper DSP,
to differentiate between low end and high end products.

Graeme

Canon XL H1 vs XDCAM HD HDSDI output
 

In the post referenced above I think I mentioned that we were comparing the HDSDI output from the Sony HDC-X300 (same image processing as the XDCAM HD) to a Canon XL H1. My impression is that the Canon is full 4:2:2. There are several tests we did which would support this. The first involved chroma keying and wire removal shots. We captured HD SDI from both cameras into Avid Adrenaline Media Composer HD using DNxHD 220 10bit. For Chroma Keying we tried both the Avid Spectramatte effect and the Boris Continuum Keying effect.

We found that the Canon pulled a very clean matte with almost no work. In fact, sometimes we could let Boris pull the matte with no manual cleanup. The resulting images were extremely clean, with very good definition on the edges, and only a few places where we had to define a manual matte or use other tricks. In contrast, it was very difficult to pull a clean matte with the X300, and we could never eliminate all of the edge crawl from most shots. As always, proper lighting was absolutely critical. Small changes in lighting can make it very difficult to pull a clean matte.

We had similar results with wire removal, where the clean edges of the Canon image allowed us to define a narrower wire region and disturb the background less.

We also monitored the HD SDI output in a Leader LV5750 HD waveform monitor / vectorscope which has a digital data dump feature. While trolling through the data is a bit tough, certainly my impression is that edges are transitioning in 1-2 pixels with the Canon, versus 2-4 pixels with the X300.

I should mention that on other tests (lattitude, vertical smear, etc.) the X300 greatly outperformed the Canon. If there is interest I can post a more complete comparison.

While the X300 is the "same" CCD and image processing as the XDCAM HD, I have an early X300 and I believe Sony has made some improvements since then. Playing with the PDW-F350 a few weeks ago the images looked pretty good. That is why we ordered one. Obviously we will run a more complete set of tests once the F350 arrives (end of this month hopefully).