No, that part is standardized between territories. In the old days there were three main differences: frame size, refresh rate, and color systems. In HD, everything's equal except the refresh rate.

True, I've converted from 25P to 24P with the 4% slowdown, and it's not really a big deal compared to all the other time that you put into postproduction.

And you make a good point. If you live in a PAL country, it's probably more useful to be able to shoot 50i SD and HD!

Thanks for your thoughts.

Isn't it true that the 25p form of DVCPRO HD actually records 1440x1080 pixels instead of the 30p form of 1280x1080 pixels? This is because 25p compared to 30p takes up less bandwidth so the pixel amount can increase.

On the other hand that 1440 may still come from the same 960x540 set of chips so you might not really notice a difference between 1440 and 1280 anyways.

720p I think is still 960x720 no matter what standard.