Then you haven't looked hard enough. There was enough mosquito noise during the NBA finals to make you think you were living in Tennessee.

Granted, it was less than during the NCAA tournament on CBS, but it was still very prevalent and quite annoying.

Then you haven't shot under circumstances where it happens. But that doesn't mean that the JVC is artifact-free, because it most definitely isn't. Get ahold of the JVC demo footage from WEVA, you'll see major quilting and macroblocking in at least one of the shots.

Funnily enough it was the CBS broadcast of the NCAA basketball tournament where I saw the most artifacts. It was downright disturbing. They'd do a slow-mo replay of a shot going through the hoop, then dissolve back to the live action, and I'd swear it looked reminiscent of pixelvision until the dissolve was completed.

Definitely see more problems on 1080i than on 720p though. There I will agree with you, however I disagree that "it doesn't happen" on 720p because it most definitely does. Just not to the same degree as 1080i.

Wild! Cool! If you already bought a house, it's probably gone up in value by $10,000 so far... real estate's been downright nutty here. Appreciation of 50% just last year alone.

What brings you to LV?

I don't subscribe specifically to Cox HD... to get that you have to subscribe to digital cable, and all the demos in Best Buy/Circuit City look awful, so I can't be convinced to switch; I'm still slogging along on analog cable. So for most HDTV viewing I'm on OTA. Funnily enough I recently found out that Cox broadcasts the digital signals even over analog cable so you can get them without subscribing to digital cable, but you'll need a set with a digital tuner in it. My XBR scanned the analog cable and came up with all the analog channels, and then it found dozens of digital channels too! Looks pretty good, comparable to OTA. But there are a couple of channels you get with digital cable/HD (like Discovery and InHD) that you don't get on the regular analog Cox Cable... the regular cable sends all the network OTA stations (less WB, for some reason) and a digital version of SD of some of the major stations (like TNT, CNN, WGN, etc).

You may get exactly that. While at WEVA I asked a few pointed questions about this camera to the general manager of product engineering. He told me that it won't be HDV, it will be a new format, and while they're developing a new format, they might go all the way. He said they were not satisfied with the undersampled HDV resolution, and especially that HDV/1080i doesn't support progressive -- he said that they may very well go 1920x1080, including progressive, and that they may go with a higher profile level to get 4:2:2. Since it'll be a brand-new format there aren't any restrictions they have to adhere to. He didn't mention bitrate, but the bitrate question is open as well... may be 50mbps, may be 36mbps, who knows? I believe he said that the MPEG-2 will not record to tape, only to disk -- so it's not limited by the bandwidth of the tape.

Again a new HD format, then? Or am I understanding something wrong?

If so, won't it be a little bit too much?
What if every company starts it's own format. Then every NLE has to read it,... will it all be compatible with each other?

It would be a new format, yes. The GY-HD7000U will record regular ProHD to tape, so in 720p mode it'll be compatible with the others. But in 1080 mode, it would be their own new format, and yes editors would need to be updated to support it.

So the question becomes: is 1920x1080/24p/30p/60i @4:2:2 compelling enough for people to adopt the format? That's the question. The fact they're going disk-based removes a lot of obstacles though -- no need to engineer a new tape drive, no need to make people buy decks, no need for programmers to write capture utilities, etc. It should be a matter of updating their MPEG encoder/decoder to work with the new profile. Who knows, maybe they already do?

Tape is dead (whether it knows it or not). Tape can say "I don't want to go on the cart" all it wants, but the tapeless options are so totally superior. It's tapeless that makes such a new format possible and reasonably practical...

Thanks for the explanation, Barry.
It's just, with all those formats, it becomes sometimes kind of confusing :-)