new Pannie HPX250 info

[Sanjin Svajger]

Originally Posted by Dom Stevenson

The Panny looks like a great buy for those who've already taken the plunge with P2 cards. Not so good if you don't have them. Having said that, the card prices are not as bad as they were, and there seems to be a decent resale value in them.

That's what I am thinking to. People who are already heavily invested in P2 will definitely be looking at another P2 camera. But it looks like that this is the only reason why somebody would buy another P2 camera from Panasonic. Because as of now they don't have a P2 camera that followed the trends of the market. Excluding the varicam ENG series of cameras.

This troubles me to. I'm also invested in P2 but don't really want to buy the next camera from Panasonic. Give me an AF100 with P2 and you got me sold! Or a reasonably priced 2/3 ENG type cam (cmos I presume...).

[Mark Donnell]

This is a better link to the Teledyne DALSA site info : Falcon2 Cameras

I was ready to buy an HPX-250, but I now wonder of the Canon XF-300 would be a better choice, or if I should just wait a while longer and see what else comes out. I am very comfortable with the P2 workflow and Edius 6. Switching to a new file system is not something that sounds like fun. I really like the results that I get with my HPX-170, so I may wait a bit and see what others say about the HPX-250.

[Konstantin Kovalev]

One thing about 50mbps long-gop on the XF300 is that you'll be getting a lot more recording time per GB of storage than AVC-I (depending on noise and scene complexity/motion).

[Sanjin Svajger]

I don't know if this has been discussed before: is the lens on the 250 parfocal? This is a big big problem on my 170! Zooming in and out looses focus. I'm never again buying a camera that can't retain it's focus. At least not an 1/3 chip camera with a servo focus ring that can't retain focus... Having a biger chip camcorder with a folow focus is a differnt thing.

But this small chip cameras with their small and useless LCDs and viewfinders and also their awful servo focus rings... I'm just furious as I was just watching some footage from today's talking heads shot where there are some parts out of focus, just because the cameraman zoomed out from a CU to a semi medium CU.

[Daniel Epstein]

Sounds like your lens was not working properly. Just because it is part of the camera doesn't mean it is working as intended. I would ask Panasonic to check it out.

[Jan Luethje]

A German website published a test on the HPX 250

http://www.slashcam.de/artikel/Test/...-HPX250EJ.html

Actually the first 'real test' I could find so far. Did anybody find another test - or even a comparison with the xf 300?

[Mark Donnell]

After reading everything I could find on the XF-300, it seems that it produces very sharp clear images at 1080p, but there are reports of markedly degraded performance at 720p. Since I use 720p 60 fps regularly, I have decided to go ahead and take my chances with the HPX-250. Once it arrives I will do some real-world testing of the rolling shutter and report back here.

[Sanjin Svajger]

Originally Posted by Mark Donnell

After reading everything I could find on the XF-300, it seems that it produces very sharp clear images at 1080p, but there are reports of markedly degraded performance at 720p. Since I use 720p 60 fps regularly, I have decided to go ahead and take my chances with the HPX-250. Once it arrives I will do some real-world testing of the rolling shutter and report back here.

I would really appreciate if you could test the focus between different focal distances - zooming in and out and see if the focus stays on the spot.

[Daniel Epstein]

I might have discovered the combination which seemed to produce the results you talk about. I was playing with the camera today at B+H to see if i wanted to buy one. I was using manual zoom but the camera was in autofocus. When I manual focused the lens but with autofocus on with lens zoomed all the way in and then zoomed out and zoomed in back to the original the subject very was out of focus. I thought this fit your issue. The camera was pretty slow in autofocusing when zoomed in and there wasn't much hunting so it didn't seem like it was in Autofocus. When in Manual Focus the focus held like it should.
I still haven't made my mind up about the camera but I did feel the lens was very sharp and held its back focus if in manual focus. Not so good in Auto focus

Originally Posted by Sanjin Svajger

I don't know if this has been discussed before: is the lens on the 250 parfocal? This is a big big problem on my 170! Zooming in and out looses focus. I'm never again buying a camera that can't retain it's focus. At least not an 1/3 chip camera with a servo focus ring that can't retain focus... Having a biger chip camcorder with a folow focus is a differnt thing.

But this small chip cameras with their small and useless LCDs and viewfinders and also their awful servo focus rings... I'm just furious as I was just watching some footage from today's talking heads shot where there are some parts out of focus, just because the cameraman zoomed out from a CU to a semi medium CU.

[Sanjin Svajger]

Originally Posted by Daniel Epstein

When in Manual Focus the focus held like it should.

That's all I needed to hear! Thank you for the info!:)

About the autofocus, my thoughts: if you zoom out the framing changes. To me it sound obvious that the autofocus would change it's focusing point... There could be something in the foreground that you eliminated when you zoomed in or just the change in the composition made it necessary to change focus.

[Konstantin Kovalev]

Originally Posted by Mark Donnell

After reading everything I could find on the XF-300, it seems that it produces very sharp clear images at 1080p, but there are reports of markedly degraded performance at 720p. Since I use 720p 60 fps regularly, I have decided to go ahead and take my chances with the HPX-250. Once it arrives I will do some real-world testing of the rolling shutter and report back here.

Recording to a format that requires scaling, such as shooting 1080p on a 720p cam or vice-verse will usually result in a degraded image on any camera, or are you saying that the scaling on the XF300 isn't very good in particular?

[Daniel Epstein]

Originally Posted by Sanjin Svajger

That's all I needed to hear! Thank you for the info!:)

About the autofocus, my thoughts: if you zoom out the framing changes. To me it sound obvious that the autofocus would change it's focusing point... There could be something in the foreground that you eliminated when you zoomed in or just the change in the composition made it necessary to change focus.

Hey Sanjin,
Your welcome. Of course Auto focus will change to what it thinks you want to focus on. The slowness of the lenses focusing on the center target at the long end of the lens was surprising and completely in contrast to how fast it refocused (usually to infinity according to the viewfinder readout) when zoomed out and nothing was in the foreground. Could make you think the lens wasn't backfocused

[Sanjin Svajger]

Originally Posted by Daniel Epstein

The slowness of the lenses focusing on the center target at the long end of the lens was surprising and completely in contrast to how fast it refocused (usually to infinity according to the viewfinder readout) when zoomed out and nothing was in the foreground. Could make you think the lens wasn't backfocused

Hm... Don't know that much about lenses. Is it in any way harder for a lens to focus when zoomed in than in wide angle?

[Mark Donnell]

Konstantin - I have no personal knowledge of the XF-300, but several owners have expressed concern over the quality of the image in 720p. I believe that some of these reports are on this forum under the XF-300 thread.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Konstantin Kovalev

Recording to a format that requires scaling, such as shooting 1080p on a 720p cam or vice-verse will usually result in a degraded image on any camera, or are you saying that the scaling on the XF300 isn't very good in particular?

Downconversion will almost certainly be more difficult than upconversion. The reason is that unless done in a very sophisticated manner, the fine detail captured by the 1920x1080 sensor will act to give aliasing on the downconvert. With upconversion, that's a problem that doesn't exist - but the upconverted signal won't be any sharper than what's present in the 720 signal.

What this means is that 1920x1080 imagers will give sharper (1080) pictures - but worse performance when downconverted to 720. It's quite likely that the 250 will be just as bad as the XF300 - purely down to it also having 1920x1080 sensors.

In the past (with 960x540 sensors) it's not been a problem for Panasonic - since although cameras like the HVX200 first make a 1080 raster, the real definition within that is somewhat below 1280x720. Then do the downconversion to 720 and there is no fine detail there to give the aliases!

Mark - if you're thinking of choosing the camera largely on the basis of 720p abilities, I doubt the 250 will be any better than the XF305. It's more likely to be worse, based on cost and "you get what you pay for". I'd certainly check it out before parting with any money.

Also worth thinking of the EX1, which does seem to be proven to do the downconvert pretty well. Alan Roberts tested it for the BBC, and his report concludes "the downconversion appears to be a little asymmetric, but in an acceptable way.......... It is highly unusual to see such good downconversion in a camcorder." See http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/w...X1-and-EX3.pdf

And looking at the 720p downconvert zone plate, (Fig 6 of his report) I fully agree.

It's worth mentioning that the downconversion may be influenced by such things as detail enhancement settings. Poor performance may be down to setup as well as the camera itself.