For me, my colour bars look amazing on my Dell 24s. ZERO noise. That alarms me: noise on the picture, but none on a camera-generated image.

Based on your posts, reading between the lines, I am making the following assumptions, or restating what you have given us:

1. You were indoors for these tests (assumption).

2. You were using normal household indoor lighting (assumption).

3. You were using a Samsung 50" (720p) monitor.

4. You were on 0 db gain.

We do not know if it was day or night, or if there was enough light in your room.

I recommend that you run a test with your monitors using -3db gain.

If you pricture is dark, as it normally would be with normal room lighting, add enough light to make the picture bright enough.

Be prepared to add a lot of light. Normal household lighting, is not normally enough to produce a perfect picture. Even adding one small concentrated household light (100 watts or so) is not normally enough.

The results of the color bars test shows that at least part of the XL H1 is working normally. Most likely the rest of the XL H1 is also working normally.

It usually surprises people to learn how much light it takes to properly light a scene. Over the weekend I was running some tests. I had a 100 watt area and ceiling light, and a 100 watt light pointed at some flowers. It was not enough to produce a perfect picture.

Run a test, then add more light, testing at each step for the video noise.

Dan,

It was your post in which I saw the color bars mentioned and on careful reading I see that you intended that it be used to set up the viewfinder rather than check the monitor but it seems the idea has been picked up anyway. In case it hasn't the suggestion was to connect the component output to an HD monitor when the camera is generating color bars. Clean displayed bars vindicate camera and monitor. Noisy bars indicate a problem either with the output circuitry of the camera or the input circuitry of the set. Swapping monitors or sources should reveal which (not that most of us have multiples of either around). Another way to check the ultimate quality of the recorded (or real time) images is to capture them to your computer and examine individual frames for noise.

That said there have been many comments here about the importance of good lighting and keeping the gain set low. These cameras with their tiny pixels are right on the egdge with respect to signal to noise ratio.

With respect to the noted delay times: there is a lot of processing being done in the camera "on the fly". This takes some time and that's why there is a delay. There is nothing that can be done about this.

The original footage that "got my attention" with the noise was properly exposed footage at Dana Point Harbor, late afternoon, full sunny day.
I say "Properly Exposed," because the internal meter was reading in the middle.
I'm going to run some more experiments with -3Db later tonight. I've never monitored a HDV signle before. My main experience with HDV is from my work's Sony Z1u and we only monitored the S-Out, which always looked great in almost ALL lighting conditions. One of the things we shoot here are houses - all interiors with VERY little lighting except for nat lighting and what comes from the sun in the middle of the day (which can be a lot for these model homes with all their windows).
So monitoring true HD signle is new.
I'll dig the footage and examine it more carefully.

Thanks for all the considered replies. I'm very pleased to be part of this community. I can't wait until I can contribute answers and solutions, rather than just questions.