JVC HD-200 Pros/Cons?
 

Hello,

I am seriously considering the JVC HD-200. With the recent price drop $5,499.00 at B&H it is very appealing.
I also like the fact it has the ability for interchangeable lenses. I have also seen some footage of the HD-110 and it was very impressive.

My question is to those of you who have this camera, what pros/cons are there for this camera? Any know issues/problems?
How durable is it? Do you recommend buying the extended warrany? Overall satisfaction with the cameras HD quality.

Anything else you would like to add.

Thanks in advance to all who post.

Regards.

Mark Dalzell / Sin City Productions
Las Vegas, Nv

Buy the camera. CALL down the road a ways from you - Scott Cantrell at TapeworksTexas 866-827-3489. Great camera, great service, great deal, great friend, now. Get the mac warranty to kick in after the two year JVC warranty, just because you can, and because you just, never, know. Lots of images on this forum, from pros. But some of these pros can produce a great image from a hole in a cereal box. You really want to judge? Check out the frame grab, shot by nobody. Not even half of a clue as to what in the hell I was doing at the time. No post work. Straight out of the cam then compressed for the web.

By the way your new home, this forum, is FULL of great and helpful people. You will never leave.

Call Scott, tell him GoGo sent you. I promise you'll be happy you did.

Good luck brother

It's tough to beat at that price point. Although the canons arguably provide a bit more bang for the buck.

Pros: image quality, form factor, ready made archival solution (the achilles heel of all the flash based cameras), long record times (the other achilles heel of flash cams), lens flexibility (beware though, lenses aren't cheap)

Cons: stock lens not so hot (breathing, chromatic aberration, won't go wide),

Red Herrings: HDV format (dismissed initially as junk, it seems like it's come into its own) , split screen (a problem with eariler models only.

I'll second the Texas Tapeworks endorsement. I got my cam there and theyre a forum sponsor.

Brian and Eric,

You guys rock! Thanks very much for taking time to reply along with the information.

I'll check out your buddy Scott and tell him you both spoke very highly of him.

By the way Brian, "how much more bang for the buck" from the Canon? I used the XL H1 last year in a film class.
Nice camera, very good images but I was a bit bummed that it only had the 2.4 viewpiece and not an LCD on it which is pretty useful for gorrilla shooting.

Regards.

Mark

Mark,

A tip from halfway around the world.

Its a good choice. I'm an hd100 user. never regretted it and would probably still get the hd200 as another cam.

We have Dvx100s and sonys for our SD work before. This jvc cam is a pro-performer.

Ted

There is no SSE on 200 models.

Ted,

Good to hear you're happy with your HD-100. I too have a Panasonic DVX-100A. It's in mint condition and has served me well but I need to move up to HD.

Ted, Do you use it hand held a lot and if so do you find it cumbersome as some have said or not? I guess some type of stabalizer would be the move if you were going to depend on a lot of hand held shots though.

Diogo, please excuse my ignorance but can you elaborate a bit more on the SSE? I assume your referring to the "split screen" feature. Has this been eliminated in the HD-200 or fixed or ? Good/Bad.

Thanks to you both for posting.

Mark

I find the JVC's form factor much BETTER for hand-held shooting than these bulky camcorder designs. Bracing on the shoulder, and having controls right where they belong is key for the most importnat type of handheld work IMHO.
Of course if you are trying to do more wild, over the head, swinging around MTV stuff, a smaller camera is easier.

Hi Sean,

Well, I don't really plan on any "acrobatic" filming at the moment. LOL.
In addition to the shoulder mount shooting, how is it for basic "cradleing"
the camera?

Mark

You see what I mean Mark? This camera comes with a small army..

Eric,

Most definetly. I've been a member of the DVXuser forum for a few years and I must tip my hat to DVi. Very infomative. I really appreciate all the help and
the welcome as well.

I'll definetely be hangin' out here.

Mark

Mark,

Without any lens adapters up front to make the rig bulky, the camera as is, is easy for cradling shots. very stable on the shoulder.

Though i must add that with a 3rd party brick its more balanced than with the small jvc battery.

Tripod though is essential for polished look.

If you intend to do hand helds its ok, on the wide end of your lens. I do this often for tight situations and dutch angles.

I have taken this cam on whitewater rafting shoots, up tropical misty mountains, inside humid caves where we have to crawl through the entrance, illuminating the inside with just 5 pcs of 12v battery powered 50 watt halogens.

That gives you an idea of its robustness and sensitivity.

Ted

Ted,

How is the Th16x Fujinon lense that comes with the camera? What do you recommend if I were to look into a wide angle or tele? I know I'll need the HZ-CA13U PL mount film lens adapter for other lenses right?

I was also going to invest in an Anton Bauer battery setup. Pricey but well worth the investment I've heard.

I'm comfortable using my sticks to get the most professional look but I'm definetly a novice at best using the hand held shots. Practice makes perfect but then again there's always a stabalizer when the budget permits.

You don't happen to have any footage available you shot with this camera from the caves, mountains rafting etc. do you?

Mark

All this praise for for the HD-200 is well and justified. Except no one has brought up the 3000lb gorilla in the room- which is lousy 720p60 HDV compression. Specifically macro blocking. It's bad.

Although I don't have much experience shooting 720p24 I sure will get some this year. Shooting 702p24/25/30 avoids the longer GOP the HD-200/250 uses for 720p50/60. So after shooting a full year (30 projects) at 720p60 we will be switching to 720p24 for 2008 and change the way we shoot- less pans and tilts.

I regret not buying the 250 because of the SDI out. At the time we had to buy 2 cameras and the cost was too great, so I compromised and got 2 HD-200's. The Convergent Design flash recorder (in development) will give the HD-250 protection from obsolescence for years.

Doh!

Justin,

Are you speaking about the current camera or an older model? The only reason I ask is I found this on the JVC site (which could be biased on their part also).

Newly-developed pixel converter
To enable 720p/60 recording, a new super encoder and a new pixel converter were developed, incorporating an adaptive filter which optimizes the scalar performance of cross-converted signals, including 1080i. The resultant effects are increased resolution and reduced aliasing. Objects thus have much more natural looking edges and images are therefore extremely lifelike in appearance.

If I'm correct, I plan on shooting 720/24p to get as close to a film look as possible. At this point and for me needs, the HD-200 is more appealing price wise than the 10K for the HD-250.

Mark

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.

John, you actually get less motion blur with interlaced than with progressive. BUT 60P is definitely useful/essential for flying birds. Are you getting blur because you're de-iterlacing the 60i in post to slow it down? That would make sense, and if so then pure 60P should look great in comparison. Same with resolution, if you're de-interlacing 60i it'll probably give same res more or less as 720/60P. There do seem to be some concerns with the JVC codec struggling to cope at 60P though.
On the lens front, you can get adapters to put Nikon stills lenses on the JVC (and Canon for that matter) so can put telephotos on it.
Steve

The canon camera is NOT a progressive shooting camera, its a 24 "F" setting which is a 23.98 over a 60i image. This is why the canon will seem like it has motion blur, because the interlaced frames are having to deal with creating a progressive image over it. The sharper image will only be on a true progressive CCD like JVC's.

Yes Giuseppe, that's what I was saying, I was assuming he was shooting interlaced and therefore should get less motion blur than progressive. If shooting in the F mode then yes you'll get progressive-like blur but can only go upto 30fps and you lose your slomo possibility by de-interlacing.
Steve

Ah I see I see, I for some reason thought you were suggesting something else... but yes that is true. Forgive me, lack of sleep kills my reading skills haha.

As for a JVC owner, I can say that yes, its a great decision to buy this camera, to reply to the original post.