How strange.

I use the A1 on SD a lot and have been very happy with the quality.

The reason I frequently use SD is that I do footage for regional TV for local fishing reports and they are still broadcasting in SD. They seem happy with the quality of my footage so it can't be too bad.

I too use the XHA1 in SD for almost everything. We have two XH-A1s for our Municipal TV channel in Victoria, Texas and they are perfect for everything we produce. Because we have very few resources available and because our channel is cable cast in SD, we do not shoot anything in HD then down-convert. I have shot a few PSAs in HD and like the format, but our cable company will not be upgrading the standard channels to HD in the forseeable future.

O.C. Garza
Victoria, Texas

I should add that I did find it much better in SD at 16:9 than 4:3 (for obvious reasons I suppose since the chips are 16:9 native). The main problem I had was the trade-off between too soft an image and too noisy an image - there seemed no satisfactory happy medium and I spent many hours adjusting relevant parameters in a custom preset in the attempt (coring seemed key) and it never got as good as good SD only camera. There are long threads on here somewhere pretty much confirming this. I do believe that the image is noticeably better when down converted from HD providing this was done carefully and time enough allowed for full quality conversion though I admit it can be very slow.

Oh, I should add that I use an A1 not A1s so it might have improved with the new model!