It’s not my worth my time or investment to shoot SD on a native HDV cam. Factor in the archive potential, superior quality, and broader spectrum of uses – the fact that people are actually shooting content in SD with the A1 is beyond me.

SD broadcast is all I do. There is nothing wrong in my display chain or my capabilities. There is nothing wrong with my camera- except by design. I preformed extensive tests in every mode before deciding to use the A1 professionally. Since then, I’ve spent hundreds of hours behind it and can confidently say that its SD options are unacceptable.

Depending on what you are shooting, you can achieve clean images much of the time in SD- but not all of the time. Shooting HDV is what it was designed for and it has proven itself 100% of the time. Doing anything less is compromising your content and simply not worth it… especially when down converting is just as easy.

For those who have not experienced these issues- you are either not shooting enough, not even using 60i, or throwing so many contraptions on the end of it, you have no idea what the cameras native footage even looks like anyway. For some of you… all of the above.

This issue isn’t exclusive to the A1 either. As Alan Roberts, BBC Research states:

“I know of no HD cameras (even up to the broadcast models) that work properly as an SD camera. The reason is that, when used with HD lenses, they produce HF resolution, even in SD mode. This high-frequency content should be suppressed in the down-conversion process, but isn't, except in a very few top-end cameras. The h-f stuff gets handled wrongly in the cheap down-converters in the cameras, resulting in spatial aliasing that worries video compressors quite a lot and gives the pictures a worrying "busy" quality on edges. The cheaper the camera, the worse the effect (and I have plenty of lab-test evidence for saying this).”

For his research on the XHG1 and A1
http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp...Canon-XHG1.pdf

Page 16 section 3.2.2

I'm going to go with Eric on this one. The Canon A1 is an HD camera. Much of the content I deliver is in SD resolution, however I have found there too be too much to lose to shoot in SD with a native HD camera. The purpose of my post wasn't so much to point out the SD problem with the A1 (I personally could care less if the A1 shot pixel vision resolution in SD) I bought an HD camera to shoot HD. So, to the OP, here is my suggestion, since everyone seems to have mixed opinions of SD, just save yourself the headache, shoot HD, donwconvert in camera or in post and live with the much better results you end up with shooting HD on a native HD camera.

Jagged Wires
 

Um, this is just me thinking but here goes. The wires, as displayed in the last image posted are two cables twisted around one another and therefore do actually appear "jagged" even live with the naked eye. If you notice all other linear features in the last grab posted are nice and crisp. In my humble opinion you just picked the wrong feature to use as the topic in this post. The initial image you posted had issues all over it.