Barlow,

I never believed it was true 10bits even when there were reports of it being true. This is one of those subjects that really get a lot of bad information and the way it is setup a tech could spin it in either direction.

I would have loved for it to output 10bit video but I always had my doubts. I don't think it is going to be that big of a deal however. There have been people that mixed the SDI output from the Canon H1 and the SONY F900 with great results and the limit of 8 bits doesn't cause a lot of problems. While 10 bits is better of course it isn't all that much better to make or break a project.

Even as 8 bit a digital SDI is still going to be better then a analog component output.

That's for sure.
So it does not appear to be the full 10bit word.
Short of just looking at it, is there a way to verify, such as actually looking to see if the word has its two least significant bytes filled with zeros?

I thought this would be the case as well (the old adage if it's too good to be true it usually is...)

Our of curiosity where do we start seeing 10bit + output on cameras? The grass valley infinity i think is one but im not sure what price that starts out at. I assume none of this similar prosumer models do?

cheers
paul

As a CineForm P2K user, in the future I will be recording or converting EX1 footage to 10-bit on ingest. Whilst it appears that it is an 8-bit source, when encoding to a 10-bit CineForm format, post grading should be more robust and less likely to suffer typical problems with 8-bit uncompressed, namely banding. Whilst the 8-bit source will contain 256 steps of greyscale, the 10-bit CineForm will allow those 256 steps to interpolate into 1024 steps in post grading.

http://www.cineform.com/products/FAQ.htm#ProspectHD3

Still seems like a good value camera, and if you have a paying gig, this camera should be able to earn you some bucks before anyone releases a competitive camera.

Is there any way to get a verifiable test to check for 10bit? Or at least something direct from Sony?

I use cineform too but i've done projects where i've really had to push the source (for theatrical reasons) and the HDV off the Z1 really could have been a lot better.When you protect your highlights you loose a lot of bandwidth of the data because it's concentrated in the right hand side of the curve and i also found the compression on the Z1 very destructive on shadow areas.

If this was true 10bit off the camera i would have jumped immediately but now i'll just jump a bit slower :)