I am trying to find out what the electronics on the XL2 are doing behind the scenes with respect to the Vertical Detail setting. I know the manual says its purpose is to get rid of flickering when progressive material is played back on interlaced monitors, but I'm trying to discover how it goes about doing that.

On another forum a friend of mine has encountered the suggestion that the setting funtions by applying some form of sharpening to the image in the [NORMAL] mode, while the [LOW] mode is the unmodiifed data from the CCD.

Canon USA tech support had this to say:

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The Vertical Detail feature works by adjusting the frequency of the
vertical line information gathered from the CCD chips. This is indeed
an algorithm formula, however, the specific formula has not been
released to us by Canon Inc.
---

We're wondering what this means.

Does anybody know anything about this?

Regards,
Henry

I was able to determine in correspondence with Canon USA that the vertica ldetail setting applies a sharpening algorithm, & that the [NORMAL] setting has the greater sharpening, while [LOW] is closer to the data off the CCD.

H.

Hi Henry. Doesn't sound very likely. What would be the purpose of the sharpening algo in the first place? The image from the XL2 lens/sensor block is already at a high resolution relative to DV resolution which is why there are flicker problems when shooting fine detail with this cam. It would be good to get more detail of what the sharpening algo is supposed to be for, but I doubt if it will be forthcoming.

Richard