Does the PD170 have many interlace artifacts?
 

I saw saw some frame grabs from the Pd150p that where shot in letterbox widescreen and I saw some black lines around some of the objects. Does the PD170 have noticeable interlace artifacts when it shoots in 4:3?

Black outlines don't really sound like "interlace artifcacts" to me. Interlacing is most evident as jagged edges of moving objects. You could be seeing over-enhanced edges; these can be minimized by turning down the sharpness in the custom presets. But interlacing wouldn't really have a lot to do with widescreen, unless maybe I'm not understanding the question.

Do you really mean that the video was shot in "letterbox"? The PD-150 doesn't do this, unless you're using a memory mix matte perhaps. If you use the builtin 16:9 "wide" function you do get some pretty ragged results IMO. This has to do with how the image is cropped, then stretched to make it anamorphic, and the effect of DV compression on the results.

I don't have any experience with the PD-170, but from what I understand there isn't a difference in how it handles widescreen. Or at least, the CCD's have the same spec's and don't have enough pixels to shoot true 16:9 as you can with the PDX-10.