Can you elaborate on this? Adjusting the brightness value doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever on my HV20.

right, i was told it will just affect what the autoexposure considers to be correct exposure. So you might see a difference if you change the setting with autoexposure on, or maybe if you turn it on, put it in manual exposure and then back to automatic. I'll check when i get home. In any case, it doesnt seem that important unless you use autoexposure a lot.

Thanks Noah

I think Im getting my head round it all now

This is an interesting thread. I'm just curious though, what camera is the D20? The only D20 I know of is Canon's EOS D20 digital SLR.

I dont see a D20 mentioned anywhere in this thread... what are you referring to?

The Arri d20 was mentioned earlier...it's a $100,000 digital camera I believe. Someone did a chart comparison in another forum showing how close the HV20's picture was to this cam....kind-a-scary.

http://www.arri.com/prod/cam/d_20/d_20.htm

Ohhh, that D20. right right. Yes that is the Arri D20. Sorry, and I'm the one who mentioned it :P . Yeah then again the Arri D20 has a ~3k 35mm sensor i believe so its hard to really compare with the HV20. I think the original graph was for cameras at ISO320, and I'm guessing the HV20 wouldnt do all that well at ISO320 as it would probably have to gain up full stop.

I just performed an ISO test with the HV 20. At 24p 1/48 F2.0, the camera is achieving 120 ISO. This seems right considering its small chip and high sensor count.

Sounds like what I'd expect. I wonder what a quantitative noise test would tell us about the sensor's performance at that level.