PDX-10 example frames
 

Here are some still frames of nature shots taken with the PDX-10 in 16:9 mode. They were exported from FCP as JPEG's and then stretched to 854x480. A number of them were shot with a .45x wide converter. They may give you some idea of this camera's widescreen capabilities, although stills are a poor substitute for full motion video....

http://www.greenmist.com/nature

Very impressive. Although I think the reeds in number 4 looked a little soft, the rest were beautiful. In particular, number 7 reminded me of the sunrise from Lawrence of Arabia...and who ever thought I'd be saying that about an image filmed with an affordable camcorder?

What picture settings were you using? I mention this because I see a little edge-enhancement in a few of these, and wonder if sharpness was set to normal or tweaked in any way.

(My only caveat is that these may look too good. If you stretched them to 16:9 using Photoshop, that program would have interpolated new pixels to stretch the image, unlike anamorphic video projection, which would have simply stretched each pre-existing pixel horizontally...)

Thanks David. In a way, those weeds are a good way to show all the problems that seem to be inherent in DV, which never seems to handle fine lines and complex detail very well. stretching them horizontally seems to compound the problem. In the video they are gently blowing in the wind, which makes it a bit more interesting than the still.

The 7th one of the sunset that you mentioned works well in timelapse as the high clouds move by. If you look closely at the blue sky above the sun, you can see a bit of the vertical smear which has been discussed on the PDX-10. Most of the time it creates an effect which I actually like, somewhat like a star filter. Hover, later in this clip the clouds moved a bit on the horizon and the sun got brighter, creating an objectionable opaque vertical bar above the sun.

I would have to run the original tapes to look at the settings. However I can tell you that I left the sharpness setting in the middle (default) on all these. But for almost all of the sky/sunset shots I shifted the white balance (which was set for daylight) all the way to cool and cranked up the color saturation nearly all the way using the custom preset. I find this gives much more vivid sky colors. I also notice some fringes around high contrast edges with this camera. You can see this pretty clearly in #11 next to the silhoutted trees on the right side of the frame.

It is a problem finding a way to present the anamorphic images properly on a computer screen and you could be right about Photoshop, although I didn't intentionally try to enhance them. I don't have a "real" widescreen TV, however for my editing setup I'm using a Sony WEGA 27" 4:3 screen in "enhanced 16:9" mode. When you select this from the menu it scans a 16:9 area and the dot pitch gets smaller on the screen. Actually, I think the images look a lot better on that big screen than they do on the computer monitor. Possibly this is due to the fact that the whole image is a bit softer and blends nicely without any pixellation showing.

Does turning down the sharpness reduce the "halos"? I believe the halos are a result of oversharpening, like applying too much unsharp mask in photoshop.

It's great to see actual captures from this camera though, great work! We can judge for ourselves the quality of the images from this camera.

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?tt=url&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww4.big.or.jp/~a_haru/exknow2002au/index.html&lp=ja_en

more captures from a japanese site. The smearing on the PDX10 is definitely noticeable compared to other cameras (VX2000).

The "fringes" mentioned before don't look like edge-enhancement, with would result in a light- or dark-colored "outline" around the object. What I'm seeing here is a blue line on the right of some verticals, and a red line on the left of others. I would assume that it was the result of the 4:1:1 colorspace (which essentially makes the resolution of red and blue 180x480), without enough green information to provide a lot of "Y" data at 720x480 -- probably made even more noticable by the camera's 16:9 stretch.

Ok I see the fringes now. It looks kinda nasty, but I don't think it's avoidable with the DV codec.