PMW EX1 dynamic range.....
 

is 10 stops. Professionally tested by Adam Wilt. IT's on the 4th or 5th page of this awesome review. Read for yourselves. If you don't believe it, then test it for yourself and show us the results. This camera is such a bargain( oh no, I hope sony doesn't read this and then raises the price)

http://provideocoalition.com/index.p..._hd_camcorder/

I wish my wife would see it that way. A camera that costs as much as a car?

Car dollars are different from camera dollars. Two different currencies.

Yes there is some comparison footage floating around of the Ex1 and the Xha1 - the night time really shows this up. On the nighttime shots - the illuminated signs blow out and are unreadable on the XHa1 - but the EX shows them spot on.

I often shoot gaming machines with illuminated screens/signs in otherwise low lit environments. Traditionally we have had to flood the rooms with light which is not always practical (or even doable in some cases) Here the EX1 would clearly have an edge.

My only concern is this rolling shutter thing and the test footage I’ve seen of a police car with lights flashing - shot at night with horrid / unacceptable cascading line artifacts due to the RS.

Would this drawback to CMOS rule out shooting with the ex in dark areas with flashing lights?

Only on offending frames. The flash intensity has to be intense enough to cause a problem. Also, if there are not many flashes, you can mask them in post.

Thanks Steven - sounds promising. Guess the best thing to do would be hire one for a day and see how it goes.

I can't believe this camera. When I was into HDV I struggled to get a histogram that stretched from 20 to 230 on the Vegas scopes. Now with this EX1 thing histograms go from top to bottom with no sweat. This is truly amazing.

Is the scale on the vegas scopes 0-255? If so, that's actually a larger range than the original (NTSC) scale. Black on the broadcast scale is actually represented as 16 (7.5%), and white as something like 236 (100%). This is why if you use the brightness level indicator it tops out at 108% (255). I haven't done a lot of work with HDV, but it's likely they were limiting the range to broadcast levels. I'm very interested to test this out once I get mine...