Sony HVR-Z1U Buying HELP!!
 

Hello everyone!!! Let me start off by giving myself a re birth to the DV craze. I had about a year break due to Army training and re assignment. I have the chance to buy a Sony HVR-Z1U with a couple of accessories from a friend for $2700. I worked with a Canon XL1 for about 2 years and "upgraded" to an XL2 and let me tell you.........I was not impressesed!!! I am a beginer that's looking for a colorful sharp picture that makes people say, WOW! that looks really good! I did not get that from my canons. I have a Macbook Pro with 4 gigs of ram and adobe cs4. I have the money to buy this camera but don't want to make this big purchase and be unhappy because its not what I expected. I assume that because it's HD that the picture will be impressive. Please let me know the goods and bads, I guess everyones response will push my desicion! thanks in advance

The Z1 is a brilliant workhorse of a cam that will give you stunning pictures for years to come, and that price isn't too bad. But for just a little more you could have a new FX1000, which will give you sharper pix at the cost of fewer pro features (including XLR audio inputs and a lot more).

Depends upon what's more important -- raw picture quality or more features.

You might also want to consider the Canon A1s.

Note: You will not be happy editing HDV on a laptop.

I figured the laptop wasnt going to be suitable for hardcore editing. I have a Dell XPS 420 with an intel quad core 2.4 ghz and 3 gig ram, and it gets by pretty good, just gotta upgrade my graphics card and get better ram

By the way, what is the difference between 3CCD and CMOS

3CCDs don't suffer from Rolling shutter or Flash Banding artifacts. 3CMOS does (an example of the worst case scenario is the 1080p24 mode on the Panasonic HPX300 at long focal lengths)

Read up on this: CMOS Rolling Shutter

Heck, modern Films like Slumdog Millionaire and even 2012 (one scene especially) have flash banding issues.