HC-3 5 lux is better than GL2 6 lux?
 

I read the technical detail of the 2 cam, and it sais, my canon
gl2 is 6 lux for noise-free picture, and for the hc3 5 lux is enough.
Is this real?
I just thinked, hc-3 has little optics, little sensor, and need more light for good picture quality. But when 5 lux is enough, then i buy one for 2nd camera!

And what about the dynamic range? Often when i shoot landscape, either the clouds are overexposed or the land is too dark. The gradial grey filter doesnt help, because it has a straight line and the mountains aren't straight.
Can the cmos clearvid sensor better handle this?

thx,
Marton

From what most have said about Sony's lux ratings is that they are only good for comparing against other Sony cams. I'm quite sure the GL2 will handle low light better than the HC3.

Your second question is interesting as I have not shot any high contrasts with my A1U therefore I don't have any footage to compare. Hopefully someone else can chime in..

Thank you.
I know that i cannot compare the lux number, because in one model canon
says, minimum lux 0.2 (in manual mode). I think this means, when you change the shutter to 1/4, and add a gain.
But when i see the 5 lux vs 6 lux in another document, i hope that this means in 1/50 or 1/60 shutter, iris open and no electric gain.

When the first cmos sensor camcorder arrived, i read that it can better handle high contrast video. (maybe better that 1 ccd model, but worse or equal than 3ccd model?)

1cdd or 3ccd it doesn't matter. Dynamic range won't get better even if there are 1000ccd's. A CMOS has better dynamic range (14bit with the hc1) BUT the dv-format and the hdv-format only has 8-bit's for dynamic range regardless of camera. So the camera has to compress that 14-bits to 8-bits. The hc1 does a pretty good job with it in high contrast situations.

I actually think it does a pretty horrible job of it in high-contrast situations. Whether you be shooting sunsets, in the car looking through the windows, in a house looking through windows, etc.

that simply a case of extreme contrast. lux levels outdoors (you mentioned shooting thru windows) can be 100,000 lux and no that isnt a typo.
Lux levels indoors can fall to 50 or 100lux no problem.

So to expect almost any camera (especially video cameras as they have, as a 'species' far less dynamic range than film cameras), to expose correctly a room in a house WITHOUT the windows bleaching out is simply unreasonable.

It's about learning about exposure, the basics of photography, and exposure correctly for your chosen subject and get that part of the picture right. If there are windows in the scene and its reasonable daylight outside, and you're exposing for a fairly dim interior, the windows WILL bleach out.

I must say Alex, its my opinion that you seem to be currently a fairly unhappy man with your equipment (and/or subsequent results) you bought in early April, just judging by a few of your recent posts ! Just an observation thats all.

ps.Prech i agree with a previous poster - lux ratings are really quite arbitrary and are only useful as a guide within one manufacturers machines and even then its still arbitrary. It's essentially that companies 'judgement' or internal measurement of some sort as to AT WHAT POINT the image is no longer 'usable / useful / acceptable'. So honestly comparing a canon min.lux rating against a Sony min.lux rating really isn't going to provide much helpful infor at all as to their real comparative capabilities.

The reason why graduated filters don't really work that well with smallish camcorders is because of inherent massive depth-of-field with camcorders with small sensors.
HC1 for example has 1/3 in. sensor - its TINY. That sensor is 4.8mm wide by 3.6mm high !!!!
I don't think it's generally appreciated how small that is! Draw a box on a piece of paper that measures 4.8mm by 3.6mm and THAT is the entire size of the sensor in your HC1/A1 that prodcues such a nice image (in good light......).
Graduated filters come from back in the day and are really designed to work with 35mm SLR cameras - the "sensor" (film) in those measure 36mm wide by 24mm high !
- So thats a frame of 35mm film is 7.5 times as wide as the HC1/A1 sensor!!

Everything else being equal, the bigger the sensor/film area the shallower the inherent depth-of-field which makes it easy to throw things out of focus (especially with large aperture/iris) and its THAT fact which makes graduated filters work on film SLRs quite well as the filter is right next to the lens, and as DOF is really shallow on an SLR, the filter appears out of focus and this 'blurs' the line between the colored part of the filter and the clear part of the filter.

In a camcorder with a small sensor, what happens is that the graduated filter itself is much closer to being in-focus than on an SLR (due to tiny sensor, therefore BIG Depth-of-field) and so the transition between the colored part of the filter and the cleart is much more obvious and so those filters don't really work well in that situ.

Sorry for longish explanation - hope that helps though.

ps. given all the above, it does kinda follow that a filter-make COULD make a graduated filter that will work much better with a small-sensor camcorder by having making a filter with a much smooother transtion between dark and clear. But then..... it wouldnt be so much use at dropping the brightness of the sky and reducing the contrast in the scene.

Well what doesn't?? Even film has troubles in high contrast scenes. And I've gotten some pretty nice looking sunsets and shoots in a car.

Yes, but everyone knows that one of the weakness of video is the small dynamic range, film roll can see 2-3x more contrast range.
But i also can make wonderful sunsets with my GL2.
Last weekend i won a nature filmfestival, here in Hungary.
Some clips are on my homepage.

Next year, i want to make nature films in High definition, and i search a good, cheap camcorder for this job. Hc1, hc3.. or...?

Re-evaluate much closer to the purchase date - there's for certain at least 5 new HiDefintion camcorders that will be on sale in the next 2 or 3 months. Thats in addition to the current machines on sale. And it's probably more likely to be 6 new machines rather than 5.
1st quarter 2007 there'll be quite a few HiDef machines to choose from (many more than now), and who knows, even Panasonic may have finally joined the party around that time too..