Difference in mini-DV quality?

[Philip Brubaker]

Hi! I'm researching what kind of mini-DV camera to buy to finish a doc I'm working on. I shot part of it on a borrowed Sony camera (not sure which model) and I want the rest of the movie to look consistent with the original parts. My question is, is there a marked difference in picture quality from mini-DV camera to camera? If I wanted to buy say, a Canon, could I shoot confidently knowing that it will cut together seamlessly with the Sony footage?

[Lisa Shofner]

cameras, models of the same brand or different brands, are a lot of the time hard to cut together.

especially if you don't know what you had before - do you know if it was 1-chip or 3-chip? Any idea what it looked like?

I've tried cutting a 1-chip and 3-chip together and the difference is so huge, luckily it doesn't have to look like it came from the same cam.

Even if you use the same camera model and brand, you might have different settings which could hinder cutting the footage to look exactly the same. However, you might be able to fix it up in post to match better.