I will like to see more on this camera,,,looks good and I really wanted a smaller size. Canon has a choice to make. Hopefully we see a price war!!

Black stretch? Did I miss the info?

I second that!

That looks more like an LCD screen on the left. Remember, it doesn't have the screen on the handle like the FX1 and Z1 so it seems like that would have to be on the left....

This new camera looks very cool. With the new Canons coming out as well there is some serious choice in the market now!

What do people make of this bit though?
"and has 4 times high speed scanning capability enabling "Smooth Slow Rec" function."

This sounds great about the progressive scan feature but there is one problem with it. It is great that any deck or camera should be able to play this format. Canon's 25F still has one key advantage however.

progressive 4:2:0 sampling.

Since the 25P frames are placed in a 50i stream that means they use the interlaced form of encoding which can really mess up the chroma. With interlaced video the chroma alternates every other line. Progressive 4:2:0 uses clean 2x2 pixel blocks for the chroma. 25F on the Canon cameras uses a true progressive mpeg-2 encoding structure which is why it doesn't play on other devices. The chroma detail is much higher quality however.

I'm sure this may not be a big deal to some people but if you plan on keying you may be better off with the Canon form of progressive mpeg-2. Now perhaps if you are using live uncompressed this will not be an issue since you bypass the encoder anyways. Of course the uncompressed output may be limited to 4:2:0 just like it is on the XDCAM HD cameras.

The one advantge that the SONY does have with it's flavor of 25P however is that it will work in any current NLE with no problems at all. Since it sits in a 50i HDV stream it will edit just like 50i HDV. This makes it very easy to deal with and it should have very high luma quality at least.

Even with 25P however I would wait to see what the video looks like. While it may be progressive scan it may still have that over electronic look to it and some may still prefer the look of the Canon cameras. Since SONY is using cmos I would think it would at least look more natural than the FX1.

No? They just have a progressive frame and they encode it into the hdv stream. There's nothing interlaced anywhere.

They're not. They're 4:3 960x1080. They get uprezzed to 1920x1080 for internal processing. Then the image gets scaled down to 1440x1080 for recording.

4:2:2 HDV?? That can't be right, can it?

If I were to make a choice between this and the Z1u, then it would have to be HVR-V1 and I earnestly don’t see why someone would choose the Z1u over this. I’d even get this over the XH-G1 but that would still be a very hard choice to make. The 3 CMOS chips should allow for a much better picture than all of the other HDV camcorders as long as there is lots of lighting.

It evidently uses the same slo-mo recording as the Sony HC3 does. Gives you three seconds of true slo motion by recording at a faster tape speed, I think.

Since the data being written to tape is digital (just binary 1's and 0's), speeding up the tape shouldn't change the video speed during recording. I suspect something else must be going on there...

Yeah, you're right. It's probably just scanning the frame at a faster rate. And I see where, unlike the HC3's three second slow mo, this is supposed to give you 24 seconds of useful footage.

probably works the same as the HC3 by utilizing a memory buffer in the camera (the buffer in the HVR-V1e is larger than the HC3 as noted above) to capture at a much higher frame rate then writes out to tape at the specified speed