Some first impressions
 

I went to a JVC demo day of this camera yesterday here in San Francisco. They had 3 cameras, one of which was hooked directly to a high end HD monitor via the Component outputs, so we were seeing the uncompressed HD off the camera head.
I have to say I was very impressed by the picture quality. No artifacts or CA that I could make out. Of course this was pre-compression, but if you could record that signal (as you CAN) you'd be in great shape with this camera. The presenter talked about a firmware update that was released a short time ago, so maybe some of the problems seen on the early release models will be fixed on US versions. They certainly made a point of saying that they have been doing very thorough US QA testing and that's why it's taken longer to get it released over here. The only thing that bothers me slightly is the magenta tinge to skin tones, which I don't like, hopefully that can be dialed out. It wasn't anywhere near as pronounced as on the footage I've downloaded from the web though.
I was blown away by how small the camera is, front heavy unless you put a big battery on the back, it'll take quite a bit of balancing (when shoulder mounted) according to whatever extras you have attached, as the unit itself is so light. I loved the focus assist feature though, that one's a winner.

Just some first impressions,

Paul

The "bad pixels" problem is most likely comes from flying the best batch of cameras from Japan. Going over the North Pole, gamma radiation is very heavy. It tends to wipe out pixels. About a decade ago, Sony lost several shipments of CCD camcorders that way.

Normally camcorders travel by boat. When theyare flown in -- the first batches -- come into USA QC, software is run which maps out the bad ones.

It looks like the level of QC wasn't or couldn't be carried-out in other parts of the world.

That should mean no bad CCDs in Australia/Asia/New Zealand etc as your not flying anywhere near the poles.

Unfortunately there have still been reports of this problem from these regions havn't there?

I have flown my camera over greenland and had no bad pixels.

And all this time I thought it must have been alien gamma ray scans from orbiting UFO's...

Thank you Paul Mogg for that report...........

Pappas

Technicality: Gamma rays are electromagnetic radiation (high energy photons) that eminate from atomic nuclear sources such as radioactive materials or from massive cosmic events. The cosmic radiation that gets in through the earth's magnetic polar regions is Galactic Cosmic Radiation (GCR) which is comprised of highly charged particles, mostly protons but occasionally as heavy as iron nuclei, that just whip around randomly in space.

Don't know off the top of my skull whether airliner polar flights really can get enough GCR to ruin batches of camcorders, but it would surprise me if it routinely happens. However, GCR does gradually cause hits on the camcorder CCDs used on the International Space Station. Accordingly, the photo/TV guys like to replace the cameras every couple of years. I don't have a direct comparison at hand for the polar regions at airliner altitude with the middle lattitudes at 210 NM altitude where the ISS orbits, but it is true that whatever GCR does get through the atmosphere and happen to hit a CCD can -- if it is sufficiently energetic -- damage it. Similar devices, like computer RAM, can also be affected by a GCR hit.

When the Shuttle payload bay cameras were gained up to max during orbital night during STS-114 recently, you could easily see the white scintillations ("speckles") in the images due to electrons discharging the CCD pixels whenever they passed through the South Atlantic Anomaly. This didn't seem to damage the cameras and is a different thing entirely than GCR, but was cool to watch.

For those who are interested, here is our Space Radiation and Analysis Group's public web page with basic info on such radiation, and also has links to other pages such as a NOAA primer on space weather:

http://srag-nt.jsc.nasa.gov/AboutSRAG/What/What.htm

Can somebody clear me on this?: This component uncompressed signal, in case you can capture it (HD-SDI converter eg?): what would be its bandwith? with Andromeda+DVX100A they get the full RGB 4:4:4 signal captured (and upconverted if you want), they get it at about 200mb/sec (25MB/sec) recorded to an iMac Mini HD they have wisely attached to the back of their LCD display (where they monitor the uncompressed signal) I think.

From another post:
Have anyone confirmed this?

PAUL: Can you also talk more about Fujinon lens quality and cine-like reproduction (just "your first look impression") compared with DVX or XL2?

Thx!
Luis

not en easy number.... :S but you could easily record 130 non-stop minutes on a 2x160GB RAID.0 array... (or 20/25' on a portable iMac Mini...)

but.. has anyone confirmed that the JVC indeed offers 4:4:4 component output?

Sorry, it was the decade ago shipment by Sony over the pole to the USA that revealed the problem. This may have led to firmware to map out "bad" pixels. But, this firmware may not have been working on the first batch of HD100 which went by plane.

JVC USA seems very sure the USA models will have not have the problems of "the first batch" that went to the other parts of the world.

Now that could mean a new firmware load and/or a greatly improved QC process in the USA. In short, we should not expect the "early"reviews from Region 50 to predict the quality from those shipped into the USA and Japan.

Every single HD100 is being checked after arriving from Japan.

"JVC USA seems very sure the USA models will have not have the problems of "the first batch" that went to the other parts of the world."

Don't mean to sound cynical, but would anybody at JVC say otherwise?

One camera with dead pixels or color shifting could be dismissed, but when I hear of multiple cameras with the same 3 imaging shortcomings, its enough to make me start to question JVC's commitment to this camera. Either the cameras left the factory this way or they developed the problem in the time it takes to get from Japan to Australia. Neither scenario makes me want to fork over $5500 to be a beta tester.

A thorough and extensive QC process would certainly explain the lengthy delay associated with the US market customers not having their cameras yet.

On the cine-look question someone asked about. I was really just interested in what the picture quality was like off the camera head, and it looked very very clean to me, if you've got that you're golden at this price range.
I haven't even read the manual so I don't know what cine-gamma modes are available. But interestingly, one of the main JVC guys there suggested to me that the camera will have a cine-gamma mode which will give you a very flat image that you later post-process to your liking. I asked if this was similar to the "Film-Rec." mode on the Varicam, which has a mode that gives an extremely flat picture, but the CCD's are at their most sensitive in this setting and you get the maximum latitude specifically for film-out. He said yes. If that's correct it sounds like they're really trying hard to cater to low budget film-makers, which you have to applaud them for. Others here may know more about this than I do, (and it's possible he or I might have mistaken what was said), but I thought it worth mentioning.
By the way, on the Varicam, to shoot in "Film-Rec." mode you monitor on a display that is set up to artificially add back in the gamma so that you can see what you're doing.
A question for anyone who might know: If you set up this camera to shoot 24p and a 180 degree shutter (1/48th) what the heck will you be getting out of the uncompressed component output? Will you be able to derive 24p motion using software to select frames from the output 59.94 signal??

Cheers,

That's the message I'm getting. Plus, it's very likely the JVC importers in these other countries have neither the tools or training to do much with imported units. Except for AUS, there's likely no HD equipment in any JVC operation.

I'm promised a unit this week -- so we'll see.

Europe sure has HD.