I see the benefit of being tapeless and going with an HVX or HMC-150 however I also see the draw backs, particularly with archiving. Another aspect that scares me is a card going bad. I already had this happen to me on a freshly opened 16gb Sandisk Extreme III on a recent 5D shoot. I lost most of the shoot.

While tape capture is annoying and time consuming tape is so resilient. You can stomp it into pieces, cut it, crumble it, and STILL get footage off of it. I'm not afraid of picking a tape up and transferring an electric shock from my rug and wiping out the media.

With that said I think the XH-A1 is the best choice out of the aforementioned lot. This is based on a few factors. First...resolution- Panasonic HVX/HMC's aren't even native 720p. The XH-A1 has full native HDV 1440x1080 resolution.

Next is customizability. I've worked with the HMC-150 and Sony EX1 and can indeed say the XH-A1 is more customizable than both of them.

Finally is price. $3399 is a bargain compared to the EX-1 and HVX. However it doesn't fair well against the HMC-150 which is priced at the same point and offers solid state. Regardless I still feel the XH-A1 is a better camera all around (sans not having a solid state option).

From what I've heard, then whilst you may well get a bad Compact Flash or SDHC card out of the packet (albeit quite rarely), their reliability once tried and tested is very good. The mottos obvious - for important work, only ever use tried and tested cards, and test all new cards before serious use.

The alternative is P2 or SxS. Part of what you pay the money for is the pre-sale testing, the claim is that all cards are individually verified before sale, whereas consumer memory will more likely just be batch tested. Most people feel that the vast amount of money saved by using SDHC more than justifies the relatively small amount of time and effort spent personally checking.

So what would be the benefit of getting the JVC HD100 (mentioned several times within this thread) over an XH A1? Just the manual lens? I'll probably get a 35mm adapter anyway, so would the XH A1 make more sense then? Keep in mind that I'm only getting this stuff for learning purposes, so what matters most is how much I'll be able to learn.

Jackie,

The A1 would be a fine camera, I enjoy mine very much. Once you start talking about going with an adapter and lenses, I start to think you'll be investing too much in sunsetting technology - unless you find great deals on used equipment. If I was looking to learn technique and was considering a Letus in addition to the A1 as a hobby camera, I would personally consider the Canon EOS 5D Mkii, purchase a few inexpensive adapter rings, and load up on old Nikkor or Pentax SLR lenses (24 or 28mm, 50mm, 105mm, 200mm) as well as buying the 24 - 105mm lens kit that comes with the camera. You should be able to load up all of this for around $4,500 and you can build it out quite nicely in the future with follow focus, matte, and other niceties for around $7,000. This would get you into solid state memory and you can create stunning images with this camera, both as a DSLR and a video camera. No, it will not be as customizable as the others we have been talking about and you will have plenty of work arounds and I don't believe the sound capture is very flexible or good. It will, however, allow you to learn DOF technique and force you to master focus.

I would not recommend such a rig for making money as an only cam. It's pretty finicky from what I hear, but it would help you learn technique. I understand there are also freeware firmware upgrades to provide more manual controls than Canon offers (check Philip Bloom's site).

I personally am waiting to see what the successor to the Mkii will be or if Canon will offer a video-centered product in the near future. Sounds like you want to act now.

Funny because I posted this same thread on hvxuser and they've come to the same conclusion (although I'm still trying to figure out why - see below) - the only difference is that they recommended the Panasonic GH1. How do the two compare?

Also, I'm still not sure that I understand the point of this: the 5D MKII costs only about $400 less than an XHA1 on eBay, although the latter would cost nearly $1k more with a Letus. All in all though, this isn't a huge price difference. So why get an SLR, especially if it's not as customizable like you said?

Jackie,

Remember you'll need lenses and rails for the Letus, so add that into your figures. My personal opinion is that the an adapter puts too much glass in front of your image, makes your camera really front-heavy and difficult to handle/move/adjust. You also have two points of focus to contend with, the focus to the frosted glass and focus form the forward lens onto the glass. Both must be perfect and understand that any camera in heat can change focus. Now you have two to worry with.

It's amazing to me how good of an image they produce, but at the end of the day its a compromise over shooting with proper glass. I've considered buying one and have one I'm testing right now. For me its an incremental purchase decision since I already have the A1. If I didn't have the A1 and was in your shoes I'd go for the more pure optical route. Once your experiments end you'll have a great DSLR even if you convert to a dedicated video camera. The Letus greatly increases your DOF effect, but works negatively on crispness and light sensitivity (one of the issues with the A1 is good by not great low light performance). Take a few minutes and download some good clips from Vimeo on a 5D as well as a A1 (not the compressed streaming video on the site, download the rendered clips). Make sure you get clips from both cameras from someone that knows what they are doing and know how to process in post.

Please understand that I've never shot with a 5D, but I've been researching it extensively for some while. I'm just sharing my thoughts on that research being very familiar with the A1.

It's the last phrase that is uppermost in my mind..... :-)

I tend to feel that manufacturers seem to have taken two approaches to get at all the cameras in this price range. Either scaled up what are fundamentally consumer cameras, or scaled down what are fundamentally professional cameras. As far as all the things go that are normally most talked about - "quality" etc - there may not be much to choose between them, but in terms of learning a professional way of working, there's a lot to be said for playing around with a "scaled down pro camera".

And that's what is really good about the JVC range. If I was upgrading at the moment, then on the basis of what I've so far used I'd almost certainly go for an EX3 which IMO offers easily the best value for money around this price point. But I'll be the first to admit that whilst it's picture quality, codec etc is superb, it's handling ergonomics are *****. That's what really sets it apart from what I'd call a true pro camera.

And the same story with most of the cameras in this category. It's not the technical quality that lets them down, it's that they handle so much more like consumer cameras than true pro ones. By manual lens, I don't just refer to one which offers manual control of iris, but one which offers a direct linkage between the iris and focus wheels, and not one which gives the control via a servo mechanism. That's why I say any of the JVC cameras will be a far better learning tool than such as the Canon or Panasonic models mentioned, they just handle far more like a pro camera. But try them out for yourself.

As far as the 5D goes, then I don't think that's the one for you. First and foremost it's a good still camera, and although it may be great for specialist video occasions, it just isn't designed in the way that a video camera is normally wanted to be. Video cameras live or die as much by their sound, timecode, etc facilities as video matters, and to give here what is really best would likely compromise it as a still camera.

Jackie,

The XHA1 has fairly good DOF with the stock lens. Here are a few random frame grabs for example.

P2 cards are extremely expensive in comparison to tapes, and if you want a permanent backup of the unedited original footage, you're going to need terabyte drives, rather than a cheap storage box.

You know, when you factor in the cost of P2 cards, actual total ownership cost of an EX1 (now that it's quite reasonable to record onto SCHC cards with the EX1) is pretty competitive with the actual total ownership cost of a "lower" priced P2 camera (with way smaller and much lower pixel count imaging chips), not to mention figuring in some additional costs for larger hard drives and such, to handle the significantly larger files (per minute of footage) recorded by P2 cameras.