Got my HV20! Question about HDMI output?
 

OK. Got this little bad boy on Saturday morning. I charged it up and was ready to shoot but it rained all freaking day! Dark and overcast. Just my luck.

So Saturday evening I fire it up and film my daughter in my living room for a few minutes. This is no well lit set but is usually bright enough to create decent video with my H1.

I disconnect my HDMI cable from my digital cable box and hook it to my HV20. I rewind the footage and watch. Horrible! Very grainy, very dark and very contrasty. I don't expect it to look as good as my H1 but I expect it in the same general ballpark. So I take to testing these 2 and I shoot 5 minutes with my H1 and 5 minutes with the HV20 and then hook them up via HDMI.

Surprisingly they look very similar....both look relatively bad compared to what I am used to, the H1 just barely pulling ahead with a slightly cleaner image. I am confused as I know my H1 is a better camera than what I am seeing here. It is late. I go to bed with thoughts that the HV20 may not be the camera I was looking for.

Sunday we take my 5 year old to see the Easter Bunny at the mall. A perfect test for this camera as I do get tired of lugging my H1 around for small family things such as this. Plus malls are usually lit well.....not creatively but there is usualy plenty of light.

When I get home and watch the footage it is "better" than the living room fiasco the night before but is still looks "crushed" and grainy. The Easter Bunny was setup in front of a landscape of trees, mostly pine trees. These trees were fairly well lit yet on this footage they were almost black. This little camera just crushed any mild shading. It was all gone. What is going on?

So I decide to see if I need to adjust my HD LCD panel and I find some settings referencing HDMI. I can choose YUV, RGB, 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 and so on. I find one option that says dynamic range: Standard range or Extended Range.

It is on standard by default. So I change it to extended range and now....

TADA!

The footage starts to look good. I can make out details in shadow areas, the grainy noise is greatly decreased and the overall image becomes what I expect.

So....to make a long story hort (too late huh?)I almost gave up on the HV20 when all I needed to do was setup the HDMI connector correctly on my TV. If I had been viewing with the component connectors like I do with my H1 I am guessing that it would have looked good all along. I will test this theory later.

Now....my questions. HDMI standard dynamic range looked great for my HD cable box but I have to change it to look good on the HV20. What does this mean exactly? Is there an internal setting related to HDMI on the HV20 that I can set? Why do the blacks look crushed and the whites so blown out when using HDMI?

Thanks!

It's certainly not unusual to have to adjust each component individually. But it does point out what I've seen so often. When you see a camera you know can produce superb video and someone is complaining about it, it's almost always "OE"....Operator Error. It happens to all of us at one time or another.