Mark,

That lens that come with it is a compromise that jvc did, to provide a CHEAP HD lens solution that is configured in a professional body.

That said, here is some important tips to get the most from that lens.
Dont use it at FULL OPEN, avoid if you can f2. And use f2.8 if you cant help it.
Doing so will exhibit lateral chromatic aberration. Do illustrate this, take your cam, point it at a bright plain wall, gray, white or off white. Throw your iris open, and youll notice the top half is different in color shade from the lower half. Slightly green and the other magenta.

DO NOT confuse this with the SSE that was prevalent in older models. That is a vertical split that has a defined line in the middle.
This lateral CA is graduated and subtle and is not a totally bad thing and has never gotten in the way of my work.

YOU MAY use this lens at wide open if the scene is totally cluterred and can "hide" this like leaves on a tree, look ata sample below, etc.

You dont need the HZ-CA13U unless you want to use th PL lenses. there are jvc lenses available for 1/3 inch like the 13x wide but they are expensive. I use mine with a DIY lens adapter that allows me to use both 35mm and 645 mid format lenses.
If you want a cheaper way to get wider shots you can use third party WA adapters. I retrofitted a 0.5x vitacon WA lens for DSLR to fit the fujinon thread and it works fine. See a post i did on that here
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=102876

Heres some grabs you requested. The cave has gain setting, bit noisy but usable. The falls was in a dark ravine. Take note of my assistant standing on a rock at the bottom. Forget exact f stop but its wide open so note the top half of the waterfall is magenta, lower half is green. But still usable.

To show you that this baby is rugged theres a pic of me holding the cam "on the rocks" in the middle of river shooting the falls with my smiling key grip.

So order the camera already!

Ted

Ted,

Thanks for the data on the lense and suggestions.

I may look into the camera with a HD lense instead of the one it comes with.
Any suggestions?

Nice pics by the way. Thanks for taking time to send them.

Mark

Try and find the 13x. I think you can get one for less than 5k in the used market.

Brian,

Do I need an adapter as well or does the 13x fit directly on to the HD-200?

Mark

It's the same- all HD-200's are the same until they release another iteration.

Agree with Sean
 

I 'm not overly impressed with the 50/60p. Not just the macro blocking, but you really have to also think about your NLE, I use Vegas, and JVC 50p at the moment is no good with Vegas, I basically have to export it as a 1080 50i avi, then bring it into DVD Architect to use it as a SD DVD, at 10Gb per minute it's a pain.
SDI was a clincher for me. As Sean mentioned the convergent design will help give you a similar image from a camera worth $10,000 more. Also you can capture SDI into your NLE via a SDI card and use SDI monitoring with a on camera monitor.
But if you really don't forsee such needs, then the 200 is more than fine, and everything is at a pricepoint which is obvious, but it's now almost the same price for 250 as it was for the 200 when they first came out.

edit: sorry I meant Justin, I was thinking Sean Adair for some reason :-P

Adam

Sorry, we're so used to talk about SSE here that I didn't think you probably don't know what it means. SSE means Split Screen Efect and it has been fixed on 200 series. You can hardly see SSE on 100 series under certain low light situations, but not on the 200 because these have a better compensation process and can completely eliminate the efect. I have both HD100 and HD200 and the second one is much better in many ways, no SSE, better image quality, better performance in low light, software compensation for chromatic aberrations... buy it, it's an excelent camera.

And for editing the footage from hdxx without problems in any frame rate I recommend the robust program from grass valley/canopus- EDIUS PRO.

60P is beautiful. Drop it into the timeline, conform to either 24 or 30 fps and youve got beautiful slow motion.

Very stable on an XP pro sp2 system.

Our facility used Premiere for more than 10 years but abandoned it when they started the prem Pro series. For around 4 - 5 years we have 5 edit suites in our facility running them. Theyre reliable.

Vegas is a new comer. Im not a sony software fan, this came out as a software only solution for small home users to startup outfits, since the others are usually optimized with hardware.

Premiere pro is now too resource heavy, but other adobe products we use intensively, like after effects, and photoshop.

FCP is , well, a mac. I'm an IT guy, I dont like somethin I can't open the hood tweak the engine.

Ted

Adam,

For my NLE I use Vegas Pro 8. I had a new PC configured a few months back with dual quad Zeons, 4 Gb Ram a
Matrox Parhelia graphics card and plenty of HD's and 2 of which are WD Raptors 150Gb, XP Pro, SP3.

My question is, will I have issues with Vegas Pro 8 when I go to import my footage which I will probably being shooting at 720/24p?

Diogo, thanks for clarifying the SSE question. Doesn't seem to be an issue anymore.

Mark

Hey Mark
 

Vegas works perfectly for 24/25/30p, I can edit in 50p, but if you render out at 50p, it the image has multiple ghosting like your shooting at a real slow fps? Anyway, Edius and FCP now natively support it, so hopefully maybe in the next build Sony will address it.

Regards

Adam

Right Camera for birds in flight?
 

Gentlemen,

This seems to be the right place to get some knowledgeable advice. I've owned the Canon XLH1 for about a year. I like it....however there seems to be some motion blur when tracking fast moving birds. I'm being encouraged to go with the JVC HD GY-250 with the Canon 20X KT20x5B-KRS, the high definition zoom lens for 1/3" CCD video cameras because shooting in 60P vs interlaced will significantly improve the quality of my slow motion footage, which I use alot in my bird videos.

Do you guys agree with this analysis? I'm also concerned about getting the magnification I need with the 20X. With the Canon XL H1 I sometimes use a cheap Canon EOS 100mmm-300mm photo lens.

One thing that has me concerned is won't shooting in 720 cause some reduction in resolution when viewed on a 1080 P HD Monitor?

John, if you use a lot of slo-mos than 60p is the right choice for you. You can find some slow motion clips from 60p footage on this forum, I think Tim Dashwood posted some examples.

Besides that, if you like working with an H1 you'll love this camera. It's much more user friendly.

60P slow motion
 

Thanks Diogo...I'll look at the examples you referenced

We've only had our HD-200 for a couple of months and the SSE is worse than our HD-100.

The whole reason we bought a 200 was because we were told that the SSE was eliminated. Well guess what, it wasn't.

According to Tim Dashwood's DVD on ProHD, the top and bottom CA can be adjusted to compensate for the CA inherent in each lens by adjusting the green setting. My 200 shipped with proper adjustment for the stock lens so I haven't had to make this adjustment.

I still see the green and magenta feathered edges on highlight areas when wide open and full telephoto, but that is a lens issue. Until I can afford a replacement lens, I'll just try to avoid wide open telephoto work.