Thank you so much Michael! :)

I just thought of something right now. I'm able to turn on the "fake widescreen" as well as the stretch kind at the same time. Would this mean I could have a 2.35 image?

This is not necessarily true. For example, the Sony DCR-TRV33 and Canon XL2 shoot true anamorphic 16:9, and will display the video in letterboxed format on their LCDs.

Also, note that the Canon XL2 uses true 16:9 CCDs.

Happy New Year!
Adam

You mean cropping to 2.35?
You would loose much resolution... and with DV you haven't got much to even begin with...
But for watching on a usual television screen it can be enough.

"This is not necessarily true. For example, the Sony DCR-TRV33 and Canon XL2 shoot true anamorphic 16:9, and will display the video in letterboxed format on their LCDs."

Ditto for Optura 60.

"I just thought of something right now. I'm able to turn on the "fake widescreen" as well as the stretch kind at the same time. Would this mean I could have a 2.35 image?"

I experimented with this on our old GL1 and it does indeed seem to work, but keep in mind with the pronounced resolution loss that you get that a 2.35 image isn't going to look so hot. DV in general isn't real well suited to wide panoramas IMHO.

If one used an anamorphic adapter (one of those that attaches to the front of a camcorder lens) plus the camcorder's built in true ("stretch") widescreen mode you could get high quality 2.35. Of course the problem would come in editing such footage. I don't know that any of the prosumer apps would understand such footage to properly process it. Any text one added wouldn't look right, etc., unless you added it after the letterboxing process (you'd have to add the extra letterbox bars so that your 2.35 footage would play back properly from DVD).

This topic comes up regularly, see the following:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...&threadid=3069
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=18917
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=39732
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=23390
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=22798
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=18905
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=13696

Hello

can the FX1/Z1 be up scale to 35mm without loss? also are these cams true widescreen? how can you tell?

By definition, high definition is widescreen (16:9). It should be a safe assumption that any camera which shoots HD (Sony HC1, A1, FX1, Z1, Canon XLH1, JVC HD10, HD100, Panasonic DVX200) all have native widescreen chips.

Look at the aspect ratio that they work in:

1920/1080 = 1.778
1280/72 = 1.778
16/9 = 1.778

Not really sure what you mean by "upscaling to 35mm without a loss"...

was quoting the last bit in this post