About the lens
 

Today I have gotten some internal information about the lens. I do not really know, if they are new for You, but here they are: Canon was the first choice for JVC to build a lens for their GY-HD100, but Canon was not interested in this job. So JVC went to Fujinon. JVC knows about the lens problem (colour aberration), and referring to this at present their relationship to Fujinon is a very fraught one: JVC is making pressure on Fujinon to get a better lens quality for the same price. This better lens will be shipped with the HD100 one day, but assumedly without an official statement. In such a way customers, who have already bought the camera, will not get the right to exchange their old lens for the new one for free.

All sounds very believable. The problem with Canon is I can't imagine them wanting to offer lens options for the HD100 to make it even better as they knew it would compete directly against their HL1 (I am not aware of any current 1/2" or 2/3" Canon camera). It works for them for the lens to be cheap. Maybe in the future they might offer something but I'm not holding my breath, its going to be some time.

For their DV camera (canon xl1s), the stock lens was sufficient to resolve a sharp enough picture for the typical fuzzy NTSC, and comparable picture quality to my competitions BETA SP work -so it was hard to justify the manual lens. However, for both the JVC and Canon shooting in HD, the lens' and their faults will be visible, and especially when capturing via uncompressed SDI.

It all adds up, substandard lens, compression, and small chip size. Yet, that next little step up is about 4x the price...