How is the latitude on this camera?
 

I owned a Z1u a couple of years ago and was really depressed at how poor the image latitude was. I bought a JVC HD100 and Panasonic HVX200 and was much happier with those. How is the image latitude of the V1u?

The latitude of the V1 seems better to me than the FX1. I am really surprised at the quality of the image of the V1 in outdoor lighting. I've been experimenting with an Ultra Contrast 3 filter and the only thing I can't shoot is a completely backlit scene. I can shoot with the sun just out of frame and still get enough latitude that color correction would bring back the highs and lows. The real benefit may not be significantly better latitude, but a lack of smear. If you are shooting something in the foreground of a backlit shot, you can blow out the background completely without the light swallowing your subject. The sun will still have lens flare, but I can shoot a sunset and have the disk of the sun clearly delineated by zebra bars and retain all of the color in the rest of the scene. Since the zebra bars come up at 100ire and the camera records at least to 110, there is still a bit of color in overexposed subjects. With a CCD camera, the sun tends to turn into a bright blob all over the sky.

If I figured out how to use savefile.com properly, this is an example of a backlit scene.

http://savefile.com/files/997875

It seems to be working for me. Note that this is completely backlit but there are some clouds partly blocking the sun. You can see that there are some very bright areas that still have color and that the subjects are not completely black silhouettes. This shot is with the Ultra Contrast filter and has not gone through color correction. There is a bit of "milkyness" from the filter but it does help bring up details in dark clothing in most shots. I may have also had black stretch engaged to bring up the blacks even further. In many shots, this looks great. In a normal daylight situation with the V1 I can get just enough exposure so that the bright sky and dark ground have just enough detail that color correction could make things look good. I plan to experiment with sky replacement for very bright sky scenes.

Thanks for that footage, Marcus. I see what you mean.

Markus, the link is pointing to some infected contents - I can't remember at which stage my scanner's alarm went on, so I panicked and quickly retreated... Please see to it, so that nobody gets hurt; thanks!

Thanks, Piotr. I have deleted the file so nobody can download. Has anyone else had a problem? Please let me know if your virus scanner tells you the problem.

Thanks Markus; it wasn't your file actually - something triggered my scanner before I even got to it; two clicks into the link...