Pricing and release info for Varicam 2700 and 3700?

[Tim Polster]

The presence of the SDI port on the EX-1/3 goes a long way to muddy-up the waters in the image quality debate.

Without the SDI, I don't think these less expensive cameras would have a chance to really be compared to the more expensive models.

[Ellis Kendrick]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

The presence of the SDI port on the EX-1/3 goes a long way to muddy-up the waters in the image quality debate.

Without the SDI, I don't think these less expensive cameras would have a chance to really be compared to the more expensive models.

Maybe I'm crazy, but it just seems to me that an SDI port will appeal to a very small minority of camera users. Really, how many people are going to be able to hook the camera up to a hard disk, or one of those Panasonic P2 recorders that does AVC-Intra, etc. For most shooting scenarios, I just can't see the SDI port being that useful. I'd rather have a great codec built into the camera (ala AVC-Intra).

Also, the SDI port can't help the fact that an EX-1 or 3 have 1/2" chips, and that you can't improve the glass (at least on the EX-1).

Or am I missing something?

[Tim Polster]

No, you are right, but what is fueling this debate is one can get full raster uncompressed footage out of a $6,500 camera.

This has never been available at this pricepoint.

The other cameras have a great recording codec, but cost 4 to 6 times as much.

The portable SDI solutions in development seem like an affordable way to get a lot of information out of the camera.

To me it all comes down to money and what your type of work pays.

Good enough has many different levels.

No point in investing $50,000 in a camera rig if your clients don't have the desire or means to pay for the quality.

I am basing this upon my situation of buying equipment out of my pocket, for my business and not working for an entity that will purchase the equipment.

[Steve Phillipps]

Ellis, the Flash XDR is going to be a very portable, very useable way to get the SDI out onto CF cards - and I think CF cards have a lot going for them, mainly that they are consumer media so a) they're relatively cheap, and b) they'll tend to advance pretty quick in terms of storage space/write speed etc. as it's such a mass market.
And as for lenses, I think the debate here really must be about the EX3 not the EX1, as I don't think there really can be a comparison between any fixed lens and interchangeable lens camera. And don't be fooled about ideas of top-end glass being used on Varicams and the like - a lot of the HD lenses are pretty medicore, even the bloody expensive ones (CA being a definite issue), and so while you might see a benefit if you're putting Zeiss Digi primes etc. on your Varicam, very few people actually do (in TV world at least), most end up using Canon HJs etc., often with 2x extenders, often at less than ideal apertures, and the results often looks pretty dodgy. When HD first hit the scenes there was all sorts of talk about how you must only use primes, and if you did have to use a zoom it should be the very best quality, certainly the idea of a 2x extender would have been laughed at, you also shouldn't try to pull your own focus as you'd never get it good enough.
Steve

[Tim Polster]

As demonstrated by a lot of threads in the HD aquisition area, I think we can all agree that it is messy right now!

It has never been so difficult to decide on a camera purchase, unless one has a large budget.

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

It has never been so difficult to decide on a camera purchase...

Easy choice - get the one with pretty colors! Ooh no wait... get the one with all the cool buttons and stuff to mess with. (laughs)

[Steve Phillipps]

Actually Tim, even if you have tons of cash it's still difficult. You can go for the HPX3000 but no slomo, Varicam 2700 60P but only 720. Sony F23 and SR deck, I think that gets you 1080/60P but you've got a huge size and weight issue. Phantom HD's a great camera, and can work well for 25 fps work but it's far from a "normal" camera in operation. RED? Well plenty of issues there still.
Hmmmm.!

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by David Heath

My assumption had been that although the imagers in the 2700 were each 1280x720, it was employing pixel shifting techniques to bring the luminance resolution beyond that of the 720p system?

Hence, an effective (luminance) resolution of the order of 1600x900. (Assuming both H & V is used.) May not be up to what 1920x1080 imagers may manage, but a front end performance ............

My apologies for misleading people, but I've just been informed that it appears the 2100 (so presumably the 2700?) DOES NOT employ any form of pixel shift to enhance the resolution above that of the native sensors.

Possibly even more surprising (in a camera in this price range) seems to be the absence of any optical low pass filter. The camera therefore exhibits higher than expected levels of aliasing.

[Robert Lane]

Originally Posted by David Heath

...The camera therefore exhibits higher than expected levels of aliasing.

Is this fact, or assumption? Have you seen output from the camera to verify this?

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Robert Lane

Is this fact, or assumption? Have you seen output from the camera to verify this?

The best reference that has been forwarded to me is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/whp/whp...ic-HPX2100.pdf and in particular look at page 13, section 2.2.1, and the associated images.

"There are clear null zones, where the wanted lower frequencies beat with the unwanted alias products, caused by the presence of higher frequencies, at 720 vertically and 1280 pixels horizontally. At first sight, this is to be expected from a camera using sensors of 1280x720 dimensions. However, it actually reveals that no tricks have been played in offset positioning of the sensors, precision horizontal offset of green from red and blue is a common trick to extend the resolution, and this can be done vertically as well. The resulting performance is a little disappointing. It is also evident that there is no optical spatial filtering in this camera, to suppress frequencies higher than can be resolved."

And the images presented do seem to back up the researchers conclusions.

I'm normally extremely wary of reading too much into reviews seen on the internet. But that this has been done by the BBC R&D department and is officially posted on their site gives it an authority that few reviews can claim - it's good enough for me to consider it as "fact".

The lack of pixel shift techniques is one thing - that was, I freely admit, my own assumption - but I am extremely surprised at the absence of an optical lowpass filter in a camera at this price point. I wouldn't expect to find one in something like the Z1, HVX200 etc for both cost reasons, and also that the cheaper lenses are soft enough to tend to do their own limiting. The 2100 is likely to be used with much more expensive 2/3" lenses, far more likely to give severe aliasing without a good OLPF, and that seems to be what is being seen here.

[Robert Lane]

If there's any lesson to to reading test charts like this, it's that they have little to do with real-world usage. If we all used test reports like this as the sole basis for buying any camera then most people would never purchase anything.

Every camera has it's weaknesses and I've seen charts like this from more expensive cameras with worse results.

At the end of the day it's what the output looks like that matters, not measurbating tech-specs.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Robert Lane

At the end of the day it's what the output looks like that matters, not measurbating tech-specs.

Well yes, it is what the output looks like that matters, but from a broadcasters perspective - or anyone who shoots for broadcast - there's a lot more to it than just looking at the output of the camera or the edit suite. It's what it looks like in the viewers home that counts, and that's why I'd argue that test reports (at least scientifically done ones) do matter very much. For reasons far from arguing over just whether camera A looks a little bit sharper than B.

As example, I've posted this link and quote before (I suspect Digibeta is a typo for HDCAM): http://tvbeurope.com/pdfs/TVBE_downl...s&Analysis.pdf

NRK principal engineer Per Bohler was receiving calls from leading newspapers in Norway asking why the first HDTV pictures from Germany were so poor.

“I had to admit it was poor quality, and at first we couldn’t explain why. The EBU satellite feed was fine, giving us MPEG-2 422 profile at 24 Mbps. We recorded it to DigiBeta, and our transmission output looked good when it left us — but the viewers received disappointing pictures.

“It really astonished me that the pictures from the satellite looked so good, but collapsed so quickly when we compressed them for transmission. It seems that concatenation of different compressions from acquisition, to the EBU and on to us, meant all the headroom in the signal had been lost by the time it reached us, with nothing left for the last encoder to work on,” he said.

The main problem is the cascade of different codecs, different bitrates - all OK by themselves, but mixing in a cocktail to give unpredictable results where it most matters, in the quality of the picture at the viewers home.

And that's why worrying about aliasing is not "measurebating", because aliases can really screw up the final low bitrate compression at the very end, having been hardly noticeable through most of the chain. What's really nasty (from a compressors point of view!) is that they move in the opposite direction to moving objects they are associated with, and that can waste a lot of bandwidth.

It's also worth noting another bit from the BBC R&D analysis:

"Aliasing can cause difficulties in post-production operations where keying is used, since edges are not always where they are supposed to be."

I'd understood "measurebating" to mean picking over minor numeric spec differences. I don't call the absence of any optical low pass filtering in a camera in this price bracket minor, and neither did the source who alerted me to my earlier error.

I wouldn't expect to find an optical lpf on a camera in the price range of such as the Z1, HVX200, V1 etc, and as far as I know they don't have one - you get what you pay for. But the HPX500 seems to have an anti-aliasing filter, in spite of being much cheaper than the 2100. Don't you find that odd?