Sony HVR-Z1
 

hey guys quick question. just bought the above camera and the manual said its a NTSC camera, however i bought the camera on the pretense theat it was PAN/NTSC switchable. This is the case right? how do i change it from NTSC to PAL? Cheers.

Yep, you can shoot in PAL (50i) and NTSC (60i) to your heart's content :-) The manual is just wrong because it says the camera is NTSC only at the back. I think they just included the same text which they put in the manuals for their regular NTSC cameras (my PDX-10 manual says the same thing for example).

Go to the "others" menu. They make it hard to find.... you need to scroll all the way down the menu because it doesn't show at first on the screen. I don't have my camera here, but I think the item is called "50/60i sel" or something similar. Choose the option you want. The camera will then give you a dire warning about not allowing a restart, but everything should be fine. You should probably unplug the firewire cable if it's attached, just to be safe. You then just confirm the selection and the camera will re-boot which takes a few seconds.

Note that this option will select 576/50i or 480/60i if shooting in standard definition. In high definition it will give you 1080/50i or 1080/60i.

cheers boyd, your a star!!

Boyd is right, it's 1440x1080i60 and 50; no longer shall we call it NTSC and PAL. The color space is the same, the resolution is the same, the aspect ratio is the same, etc. The frame rate is different.

Whereas before, PAL was 720x576 and NTSC was 720x480 plus the color space and other stuff were different, 4:1:1 vs. 4:2:0 (HDV is 4:2:0).

heath