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First HDTV Camcorder 286

Posted by CowboyNeal from the crispy-clear-baby-videos dept.
zymano writes "The JVC GR-HD1 will be introduced in May, it's the world's first consumer camcorder to offer 750 line resolution progressive video at 30 frames per second, recording MPEG2 video to MiniDV tape. The price will start around $2500-$3500 . Some more info here with pictures. Also check out the pro version. With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce."
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First HDTV Camcorder More

First HDTV Camcorder

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  • Maybe they should... (Score:3, Funny)

    by craenor ( 623901 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:24AM (#5806071) Homepage
    Make it record to like 6 pcmcia cards or something, that would be cool...
    • Make it record to like 6 pcmcia cards or something, that would be cool...

      That's not such a crazy idea... in fact, that's what Panasonic just recently introduced for their pro ENG (electronic news gathering) camcorders. No moving parts means a much more reliable machine, probably something the reporters in Iraq wish they had. Removable solid state memory modules also allow the field producers to plug in directly to the PCMCIA/Cardbus slot on a Powerbook and edit right on the scene with no digitizing or do

  • Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:28AM (#5806087) Homepage
    ...I've been hearing rumors that Kodak is developing a system that uses individual molecules to store information. Basically, the light contained within an image interacts with this stuff called they're making called "film"...The film is incredibly cheap to mass-produce. More amazingly, the resolution of the image being captured is practically infinite -- The only limiting factor in image resolution is how small the individual silver nitrate crystrals are.

    The 1900's are gonna fuckin RULE.

    • The practical res of 35 is 2k, 4k if you wish to be pedantic. Digital technology will pass this line soon enough, and then beyond. Film is dead. It was an amazing technology a century ago, but has failed to outrun the beast that is Moore's law.

      The 2000's are gonna fucking rule. And, I'll be there to see them. ;-)

      • Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by spooje ( 582773 ) <`spooje' `at' `hotmail.com'> on Friday April 25, 2003 @02:31AM (#5806512) Homepage
        I shoot 16mm film alot for work. I get a good Fiju color negative for about $35 per 400 foot role. 400 feet = 12 minutes. So seeing as the minimum time requirement for a feature length film is 90 minutes we can start to figure out the average cost of a small film. Let's be generous and only say they are shooting 10:1 ratio (10 takes for every one you use). That means we need to shoot 900 minutes of film. Now 900 minutes divides by 12 minutes (1 role) gives us 75 roles of folm to complete the movie. Now let's multiply the roles by $35 ot costs us per role and you end up with $2,625. This is not including developing, negative cutting or AB rolling. Let take the 900 minutes we need and let's see how much miniDV tapes will cose. I get them 3 for $10 at the local drug store. Each is 60 minutes, but at full DV I really only get 30 minutes out of them. So 900 minutes divide by 10 minutes per tape gives us 30 tapes we need to get. Now they come in packs of 3 so let's divide by 3 again and we get 10. So 10 packs x $10 = $100 I believe you can see just in the cost to shoot DV(at $100) is far cheaper than film (at $2,625)
        • Wow. It's a lot cheaper than my estimates a few years ago. That's an order of magnitude cheaper, in fact. Has the price gone down, or were my sources for ends just really really overpriced?

          Needless to say, I shot that project on mini-DV. The whole 35mm thing... the estimated quarter million in film and development, plus effects, plus editing, plus, plus, plus.... It just didn't make sense. In hindsight, I must have added at least one zero in there somewhere, and probably two. Oh well.

        • If you are shooting a film, you typically need more than 10x as much film as eventual footage.

          It's not just that you need multiple takes per scene, you often film from separate angles simultaneously and then splice together as you see fit. Also, you shoot far more scenes than you want and put together the bits you like later.

          100:1 is generous, 10:1 is minimal.

      • Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Friday April 25, 2003 @03:57AM (#5806713) Journal
        Even with the resolution of digital exceeding 35mm, digital still has some artifacts that film doesn't.

        Digital is now fine for happy snappy sort of photographs, but for anything I want to keep, it's still not good enough to replace 35mm. The other thing is I've still not seen a digital camera which will take my Nikon lenses for anything less than about 6 grand. Add that to the printer you need to get real photo quality (i.e. not inkjet) and it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.

        Doubtless in the next few years we'll see digital cameras which will take interchangable lenses for sane prices - at that point, I'll probably use film for medium format only. But until then, I'll stick with my trusty SLR film camera.
        • it gets really expensive to get 35mm quality in digital.

          Hear hear. I accept that it's probably possible to match the quality and convenience of my 2nd-hand Minolta SLR with digital these days, but until I can get it at the same price (£90 inc. lens) I'm staying put -- ATM it's not even in the same order of magnitude :).
        • But the thing is, you don't have to surpass or even reach the quality of real film for consumer use. Other factors, like
          - ease of storing lot of pictures
          - ease of duplicating pictures at home
          - ability to shoot as much as you want for free
          - ease of putting pictures to 'net, sending as email etc
          - ...

          And the quality is alread good enough so regular folks just taking pictures won't notice the difference anyway.

        • The Nikon D100 will take your Nikon lenses and 'only' costs $1,700, which is still more than a good Nikon film body, but a whole lot less than $6k.

          If you have manual lenses, you will lose TTL metering, and since the photosensor is not as large as a 35mm frame, you get 1.5x magnification (your 50mm lense suddenly becomes 75mm), but other than that, it is very nice, it doesn't have most of the problems you hear about with digital. The autofocus is fast, it can take 3 frames a second, all you Nikon lenses,

        • Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. (Score:4, Informative)

          by mbabauer ( 577024 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @10:34AM (#5808026)
          My wife is a professional photographer, and, um, couple of problems...

          1) Nikon sucks for digital. I know SEVERAL people who have the D100 and HATE IT. Controls suck, image is not white balanced well...pretty much sucks. Canon makes a MUCH beter camera.
          2) Canon 10d is $1500, 6.25 mega pixels, and is an AWSOME camera. Magenesium-alloy body, great low-light focusing, awsome controls. Oh, and its not over $6k, as you suggested.
          3) Kodak makes a 14d that is 14 mega pixels, has great color, and is under $4k last I saw. And guess what, its build using the Nikon body! Wow, that probably means it will accept your Nikon lens...hmmm.
          4) I know PLENTY of pros that use the Epson 1270, 1280, 2000, 2200 for printing photo-realistic images. Many times, unless you bust the magnifying glass out, you cant even tell its not printed optically. Then there is the whole idea that the labs, like Millers, actually print digital images for less than negatives.
          5) Most labs, including Walmart, actually scan 35mm film and print it on the same equipment that they print digital. Its called a Fuji Fronteer...look it up.

          We (my wife and I) are members of several professional photographic orgs, and about 75% of everyone I know have either already ditched film, or they are contemplating the idea. The work-flow for digital is a lot quicker, and nothing beats the instant "polaroid" that is provided to ensure you that you got the shot correct. We still have several film cameras, including the Canon EOS 3, Elan IIe...even a Bonica ETRsi 645. They have now stayed on the shelf for the 3 years we have been digital.

          Get with the times...
        • At 1200DPI or more, you can use inkjet, the problem is that it doesn't get cheap....photo paper is necessary.
      • The practical res of 35 is 2k, 4k if you wish to be pedantic.

        Where did you get these numbers from? Did you pull them out of your arse per chance? Have a look at http://clarkvision.com/imagedetail/film.vs.digital .1.html it's a bit more rigourous than your arse pulling trick and it describes the range starting at 2Mpx for 3200 ISO (very past film) to 16 Mpx for 40 or 25 ISO film.
      • The "resolution" of film (talking motion picture here, not still), is not directly comparable to digital, but assuming you're going the DI (digital intermediate) route as more and more people are, the limits are really on the scanning end. Most people for economic reasons still scan at 2K, though with the Spirit 2 I expect more will be going 4K. Some do 8K for effects work. Digital is almost at 2K -- with higher res products on the distant horizon (Dalsa, Lockheed and the like). The problem (besides making

      • Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, 2003 @08:38AM (#5807380)
        Excuse me?

        Let's do some math... using _your_ 2k as an example (real pros really want 4k [arri wants to make a 4k digital movie camera with lockheed martin for example)

        so your image is 2000 wide by 1125 high (assuming a newer, 16x9 format image) - note that this is basically the same res as hd now (1920x1080) - almoust universally agreed on that it is not as good as film (except by that hack Lucas).

        So, per frame, with a 24 bit depth you get 6.43 MBytes per frame. Now professionals normally shoot at 24 frames per second, so our of the camer head you've got to move ~154 MB of data per second, again doable, but not to a recording medium located on the camera like tape or a on-cam hard-drive. So we compress it. HDCAM (the current standard) compresses the image 13:1 so down to about 11.8 MB per second - which will easily fit onto tape, but not easily on a portable, camera mounted hard disk.

        Motion picture people hate HD for 2 reasons right now: 1 - it has to usually have a f*%$ing cable from the camera to directors monitors (normally with film, we just use a mini NTSC transmitter that goes off the video tap on the film camera, but that's not good enough for HD somehow now)
        and more importantly 2 - it won't shoot off-speed.
        Slow motion effects require the camera to shoot at many times the regular rate (don't eve start about panasonic's 'hd 60 frame per second offering - it's crap) most pros need a camera that can at least shoot 150 fps.... right now only film will do that (and also in the near future)

        doing the math again for 150 frames per second we get about 1GByte per second! now tell me exaclty how you plan on making something that will record even 30 seconds of action at that rate that is even slightly practical in a production environment. (a raid array is _not_ practical in a production environment)

        Also, film has a larger colour gamut, equivalent to somewhere near 36 (or some would argue even 48 bit) depth. It has greater latitude than digital (can see into a much more contrasty range, or for the neophytes, the range between how dark something has to be so become black, and how bright something has to be to become white) HD has somewhere around a 5 stop latitude, and some films sit at around 9.5 stops!

        Plus, when you buy a $200,000 film camera, it will still work in 20 years, and you'll still be able to get film for it, and your old film will still be usable. in 20 years, your $100,000 HD camera will be garbage, your tape will have oxidised and will now have so many errors on it as to be unusable (film keeps for over 100 years if stored properly) The beauty of film is that virtually all the tech is in the film, and not in the camera. every time Kodak or Fuji make a new film, I get an upgrade, for the cost of the film. Every time Sony makes a new Hd camera, you have to spend $100,000.

        Film will be here for awhile, get used to it.

        I have used and shot both film and HD, and one day digital WILL kill film, but that day is farther off than the moore's law pundits think it is. HD is NOT film it is pretty video.

        Cheers

        • Re:Rumors of even *more* advanced stuff.. (Score:4, Insightful)

          by agallagh42 ( 301559 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @11:07AM (#5808294) Homepage
          I think it's obvious to most people that film still has it's place in some niche markets, like those you speak of. However, digital will get there eventually. It's already there in still photography. As this article points out, it's pretty much there in consumer level video.

          Sure, it's got a bit of catching up to do in professional level video, but I give it another 5-10 years max before digital totally kills film in every aspect.

          Look where digital was 10 years ago. There was not really any such thing as digital still cameras. Even digital scanners were still hugely expensive. Now I have a 5 megapixel point and shoot camera with 256MB compactflash in my backpack that cost only about double what a high end film camera in the same range would cost (Canon S50, highly recommended by the way).

          In 10 more years, we'll probably have 20 megapixel disposable cameras for stills, and our ultra-high definition DV camcorders will record to a 100TB compactflash card at 20GB/s.

          Just give it time...
      • The practical res of 35 is 2k, 4k if you wish to be pedantic. Digital technology will pass this line soon enough, and then beyond. Film is dead. It was an amazing technology a century ago, but has failed to outrun the beast that is Moore's law.

        Film isn't dead. There are some other HUGE hurdles digital cameras have to overcome before their image quality is really as good as film.
        • First off, there's the dynamic range issue. Digital cameras have only a finite number of bits of precision with which they
    • Oh yeah....Film is real cheap. Just ask you local studio how much money is spend on film alone, for your average movie. I don't have any figures, but I remember it's a huge about....Deffinitly not cheap at all.

      As for resolution. Film has never been infinite or anywhere near close. And never will be. Those crystals aren't that small, and pretty soon digital will probably overtake it.

    • Blockquoth Mr. Poag:

      The film is incredibly cheap to mass-produce.

      Actually...no, film ain't cheap. It's damn expensive. Figure five bucks for a cheap roll and another five for cheesy one-hour development. That's $10/24 pictures, or $2.40/picture.

      In contrast, I've got an Olympus C730 digital camera. It's 3.2 megapixels--enough to get better prints than you will from that cheesy one-hour place. I can fit a couple hundred photos on a single $120 256 Mbyte XD card. Even if the card were single-use, tha

  • What took so long? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Moonwick ( 6444 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:29AM (#5806089) Homepage
    My guess would be that whole 30 frames/sec thing. :)

  • awesome (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:31AM (#5806101)
    this will allow me to pirate theatre screenings with uncanny quality and resolution.

    oh sweet lord in heaven, let this beauty have stereo mikes .. oh creator of all that is copyable .. let this fine device not be scarred by the evil of digital rights management ... I will be producing an eyepatch and parrot for my shoulder, post-haste!

    Glorious movie theatre, I am here .. I am within your comforting womb .. I wish nothing more than to suckle at your darkened swollen teat, and to distribute the nectar of your loins on P2P filesharing networks far and wide .. if the burly man by the door doesn't catch me.

    I shall distributed unauthorized reproductions only when the muse moves me, and lo, she has moved me this night!!

  • Good job slashdot (Score:4, Funny)

    by abhinavnath ( 157483 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:32AM (#5806105)
    To the editors: word.

    You have successfully posted two stories on two different revolutionary camcorders with no dupes.

    Yet.

  • Well, because... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cybermace5 ( 446439 ) <g.ryan@macetech.com> on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:32AM (#5806107) Homepage Journal
    With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.

    The logistics behind capturing, processing, and storing that much data at video rates.
  • Since this camcorder is not compliant with the regular MiniDV codec don't expect it to work with anything else but the included JVC software. Although specwise it's nice, this camcorder is has all kinds of new technology and uses it on a older standard.

    Now you know why it takes so long to produce, although the goodies are available, a good infrastructure to support them is still not ready.

  • Digital camera's Vs Video recorders (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Michael's a Jerk! ( 668185 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:34AM (#5806113) Homepage Journal
    With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce. Speed. With a digital cameria, you have *one* picture containing 5 megapixels, and a little time to process / save it. With video, you need to constantly save those same images one after the other in realtime. Video encoding/compression must be done *very* quickly in realtime.
    • Agreed.

      I wonder where these people come from, you know the ones that submit stories that actually get accepted. I had hoped that "nerds" would have a better understanding of technology limitations, but they end up comming across as geek-wannabes that are actually technology worshipers without any idea of its limitations.

      Case: a device that converts vibration into energy. Slashdot submitter's idea: use that device in a cell phone so that the phone powers itself using the vibration function. Verdict: S

  • Single CCD? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by cascino ( 454769 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:35AM (#5806120) Homepage
    The single CCD is 1/3" true 16x9 with 1290x880 native resolution.
    I don't know about you, but there's no way I'd shell out $2500 - $3500 for a camera with only a SINGLE ccd. I'm sure the resolution's great, but I'll take an XL-1 over this thing anyday.
    • Er, excuse my naievity, but what's wrong with a "single" ccd? I thought they only used multiple CCDs because they couldn't make a single one of that resolution fast enough. Now that technology has improved and you can have a high-res CCD with decent colour, surely thats BETTER than 3 joined together with dodgy prisms?

      I certainly know that my latest digital video camera that only has one, is much better quality than my old one that had three...

      Nick...
      • It's called color separation -- the three chips make for much better color quality because they don't have to composite all the color information. And consider this: if I can do that much better with one CCD in my el cheapo JVC, don't forget that the same applies to the chips in the Canon GL-2 I drool over at my not-so-local Micro Center. /Brian
        • I would have thought it was the other way round, if you've got three chips - you need to mix the three channels back together again. If it's all coming off one chip, it would all be done in the same place and properly calibrated?!

          If three is better, how come really decent 6 megapixel+ digital SLR still cameras only have one CCD and get stunning colour accuracy?

    • Re:Single CCD? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @09:12AM (#5807525) Homepage
      Bingo. My Canon XL-1 will kick this HD camcorder's butt any day just based on 3 simple things.

      1 - the XL1 has a real lens no integrated crap like this thing.

      2- XL1 has 3 CCD's

      3- the XL1 overall produces the absolute BEST picture for any camcorder that costs $4000.00 No other camcorder can record clear enough to show you DV artifacts easily. (Simply gain-up to add noise to the picture to hide the DV artifacts.

      I have seen captures from this camera and a XL1 together. (Both shot on the same set at the same time)

      you cannot tell the difference.

      plus the XL1 has had a progressive mode for over 5 years now. movie mode is 30 full frames per second.. non-interlaced..... and looks DAMN good.

      XL-1 is the only choice for doing anything serious outside of the pro SONY cameras.
      • Movie mode is most definnitely NOT real progressive video, and if you think Sony and Canon are the only choices, you should check out the panasonic DVX-100. I love the XL-1, but for true progressive video and the extra vertical resolution that comes with it, the DVX100 is the best choice, and has beaten the XL-1 and PD150 in all comparisons, and even the American Society of Cinematographers has called it "a breakthrough camera", etc. Very awesome camera.
    • The single CCD is 1/3" true 16x9 with 1290x880 native resolution. I don't know about you, but there's no way I'd shell out $2500 - $3500 for a camera with only a SINGLE ccd. I'm sure the resolution's great, but I'll take an XL-1 over this thing anyday.

      True, it has less color quality per pixel, on the other hand you have more samples to (920000 @ 1280x720 compared to 346000 @ 720x480). If you're making 640x360 (16:9) for a PC screen or NTSC TV, I imagine averaging over 4 pixels will do just as well. Of co
  • Remember: an HDTV camcorder is useless without an HDTV.
  • [quote]With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.[/quote]

    Maybe that accurate of light sensors are slower and take more than 1/30th to fully react to the range of light change it needs to deal with.

    Psh.. what am I saying... "Maybe" is a bit of an understatement.

  • This is actually major news to some people (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:38AM (#5806133) Journal
    For those of you that are not "in the know" (I work for arguebly the most successful photography and digital imaging company in history) such a pioneering effort by an industry "under dog" is profound, and highly acknowledged by the industry. I caught wind of JVC's development about two months ago, and it had alot of corporate folk racing to beat them to the punch. There are at least two other major companies that will make press releases very soon concerning similar accomplishments, and if JVC plays their cards right, they can make alot of coin if they properly manage their patents.

    Believe it or not, such specs on a camcorder, at that price, will be most highly prized by the adult film industry. Don't ask me why I know that, because frankly, I'm not allowed to tell.

    JVC made a real accomplishment here, no doubt.

    • Re:This is actually major news to some people (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @01:25AM (#5806323)
      As at least one other poster has pointed out - most people probably don't want to see high-def porn. Those cameras see everything - tv news anchors hate high-def because standard make-up just makes them look like crap when you can see individual pores on their faces. Most of the girls in porn are skanky enough to begin with. Now either they are going to have to start breeding genegineered porn actors (participators? fuckers?) with perfect skin, hair and other physical characteristics or a lot of their audience are just going to get turned off, not on by watching that stuff. Its bad enough when you can see their boob-job scars through crappy makeup on today's standard-def porn...

      Meanwhile, on the technical side, the reviews I have seen of this camera indicate that it lacks a couple of important features, even in the pro model. The first is a reduced color gamut due to being a single-chip ccd, instead of a 3-chip (RGB) system. Many consumer level standard-def cameras are single-chip and that is part of the reason you can immediately pick out something recorded on a cam-corder versus real film. Apparently, as single chippers go, the JVC is pretty good, but there are plenty of 3-chip standard-def cameras available today in the same price range that should provide significantly better color range.

      Also, related to that is a lack of flexible white balance. The report I've seen says that there are two white-point settings and that's it. Even cheapo consumer cameras have automatic white-balance and some of the prosumer ones have manual white-balance too. So, unless you happen to be shooting under ideal conditions, you could end up with your colors looking a little weird (anyone up for green porn chicks? - I kill myself with the puns today). You can fix white-balance in post, but that's generally a pain in the ass.
      • Well, they're going to shoot using high-def cameras. They're not going to distribute high-def films.

        Why won't they distribute high-def films? Not because there might not be a market for it, but because it's currently impossible. DVDs are only 720 x 480, and no-one is going to broadcast porn from your local PBS station.

        Actually, this begs a serious question. Is there currently anything I could possibly use a HDTV for other than watching my local PBS station? The local cable system certainly isn't bro
        • Yes, Mark Cuban's HD-NET is carried by satellite. Plus a lot of cable companies are now carrying HD channels of terrestrial broadcasters on their digital cable channels.

          You could have hundreds of high-def video channels on a digital cable system. The problem is that the legacy analog video channels hog huge amounts of broadcast. As the MSO's drop analog channels, they can add many more digital channels.

        • Re:This is actually major news to some people (Score:5, Informative)

          by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @10:46AM (#5808126)
          Dish carries HBO-HD, SHO-HD, PPV-HD, CBS-HD, Discovery-HD and is working on more. DirectTV has a similar line-up, I think minus CBS but plus Cuban's HD-NET.

          All the major networks have HD shows, ABC, CBS and NBC have nightly line ups that are practically all HD - the most common exceptions are the "reality" crap shows because they shoot so much footage that just gets wasted it is not yet worth the expensive for them to shoot in HD. Other than that, any show that is new in the last two years is almost certainly HD and plenty of older ones have moved up too - NYPD Blue is a great example of an old mainstay that has been modernized and made a lot more engrossing with HD, it is like a whole different show now. Miracles, which I think was canceled, was a new show that was just beautiful in HD.

          The one exception is FOX - for some reason they won't show anything higher than DVD quality (widescreen 480p) some of their stuff looks damn impressive for such a low rez, particularly 24 and Fastlane, but some looks like crap (Malcolm is always out of focus and the framing is terrible). The cartoons like Simpsons, Futurama (RIP) and King of the Hill are still all 4:3 but digital and 480p makes them look incredible. They get more bandwidth than a DVD (19mbps vs 9mbps) which may explain why they look so vibrant.

          My local cable system (Comcast) has started carrying HBO-HD and SHO-HD along with all the locals

          Here's a site that has a decent, but not totally complete, list of each week's HD programming.

          HDTVGalaxy [hdtvgalaxy.com]

          Finally, with the right equipment, depending on your situation -- surprisingly cheap equipment, you can "tivo" HD easier than regular tv because it is already an MPEG bitstream, no encoding required, just pull it out of the are and drop it to disk. At 19mbps, you get about 8GB per hour. I watch all my HD timeshifted and commercial-free, it is totally the way to go.
        • I have an HDTV. I live in the Boston area, so I am lucky in that every one of my local broadcast stations are currently broadcasting a digital signal, which include NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, WB, UPN and PBS. CBS broadcasts almost their entire evening lineup in HD. ABC and NBC broadcast their most popular programs in HD. The second/third tier networks either broadcast widescreen 480p or the occasional HD program. After going through the trouble of installing an antenna on my roof I'm getting all the channels wit
        • Why won't they distribute high-def films? Not because there might not be a market for it, but because it's currently impossible.

          It's not i>impossible. There is currently one system available that allows you to record HD and, more importantly, to distribute HD content. That is D-VHS [dvhsmovie.com]. For a list of currently available HD movies, click here [dvhsmovie.com].

    • and unfortunately it looks like crap.

      Upconverted footage from the Panasonic DVX100 makes much nicer HD.
    • Higher-res is desireable, even for porn. Suze.net is an approriate example, they keep bumping their film-scan resolutions up due to customer demands. Granted Suze Randall is an awesome photographer and makes her models look great, but I've never been disappointed with too much resolution for any purpose.

  • Just remember, kids: (Score:5, Funny)

    by Murdock037 ( 469526 ) <tristranthorn.hotmail@com> on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:41AM (#5806147)
    Hi-def digital cameras do not necessarily help you make better movies. [imdb.com]
  • Theres some great comments at this link

    http://www.camcorderinfo.com/content/jvc_introdu ce s_professional_high_definition_jy_hd10u_02_07_03.h tm

    I am all in favor of companies pushing forward with better devices, I appluad JVC. I do not see why anyone would want this at this time though. It's a bit preamture. How would you distribute the material? DVD is not HD yet, nor is DVCAM, MiniDV VHS, or digbeta or whatever. So exactly how am i supposed to view this material or share it with people? hook the camera up to the TV everytime? Maybe I'm supposed to buy JVC's DVHS deck for recording HD material, maybe I can get my friends and family to buy them too. No thats ok.

    Another thing is it records in MPEG2. I enjoy the MPEG compression on my DVDs and OTA HD broadcasts, but that material sure didnt start off as compressed MPEG. I imagine after capturing, editing, compositing and then final output the PQ would be greatly reduced.

    I work with HD material everyday, Scanning film to HD, working with HDcam and D5, rendering HD res out of 3dsmax, HD compositing with a Quantel iQ. Let me tell you, it is not easy. Being professionals even we struggle with the quirks of this new technology, EDL conversions, pulldown, audio sync, It's a beast. I don't really think the consumer level person is going to want to struggle with a non standard device that creates good looking pictures that hes going to have to downres just to view them on most displays.

    I wish JVC all the luck, I wish I could buy one to play with, but In my opinion the technology isnt quite ready for John Doe and his girlfriend to make HD pr0n.

    • Re:Great Leap forward but still falsl short (Score:5, Interesting)

      by zenyu ( 248067 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @01:38AM (#5806368)
      I wish JVC all the luck, I wish I could buy one to play with, but In my opinion the technology isnt quite ready for John Doe and his girlfriend to make HD pr0n.

      I think the initial market will be film students. Right now a lot of them struggle to raise $50k mostly to buy and develop 35mm color film stock for their thesis films. With this camera they can buy the camera and the editing setup for $5-6k, this is easy to raise in comparison. Some are already doing digital editing of scanned 35mm anyway so for them it's just the cost of the camcorder really. It's surprisingly cheap to scan film btw, like $13 for 8 minutes of B&W film; I guess it's volume since that's about as much as my local photo shop wants to charge for a 36 exposure roll of still photographs, or maybe I'm just a sucker.. The mpeg2 will suck, but at that resolution maybe it won't matter so much, a student film needs to look good on a 10' screen not a 300' one. Eventually this will make it into the hands of your uncle, and then hopefully he'll make good use of iMovie to edit the thing down to just a few minutes of torture. ;)
    • In my opinion the technology isnt quite ready for John Doe and his girlfriend to make HD pr0n.

      Actually, I think the porn actor spells his name John Dough :-)

  • This thing records MPEG-2 compressed video in a proprietary style to MiniDV tape. The jury is still out on whether HD at 25mbit/sec will be artifacted. It's still an amazing technological leap, though.

    -Brett
    • The jury is still out on whether HD at 25mbit/sec will be artifacted

      OTA HD in the USA is about 19 mbit/s, no artifacts that I have seen.
      • ATSC over-the-air emission rate is 19.34 Mbps using long-GOP MPEG-2. There are all kinds of artifacts, but most people won't notice them except for certain kinds of scenes.

        Another issue is that not all MPEG-2 compressors are made the same. Broadcast entities purchase very, very expensive MPEG-2 compressors that can do a much better job than cheaper ones. Issues like pre-filtering of noise, better searches for movement, etc. can dramatically improve the compression job.

        But there are some things ATSC emm

  • No wonder, really. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, 2003 @12:50AM (#5806182)
    With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.

    Actually, no. It's a different thing to make a camera that can take stills and one that can do continuous video. The size of the CCD is not the issue. The speed of the CCD, the processing power of the underlying electronics, and the storage density with it's associated problems is why this is an engineering challenge.
  • With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce.

    Show me a 5 megapixel digital camera that you can get at a regular store that takes 5 megapixel full motion video..... yep, that's what i thought. there are none.

    it takes A LOT of bandwidth to get all of that uncompressed video off of the sensor and through the processing circutry. taking a few still photographs per minute (or even per second), is a lot different than taking 30 5

  • ...he is taking our interest in a nicer way than most other sites we stresstested:

    Hello, my friends from SlashDot! I never expected this kind of recognition. I highly recommend that you also check out the more updated First Impresssions article that I wrote for CamcorderInfo.com! (They have a MUCH fatter pipe than I do, I'm sitting on a measely 256K DSL line!)

    Still, as I struggle with getting good enought content to justefy my SOny TRV18E, I don't think I'll shell out for this babe yet.

  • "With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce."

    Easy, with a digital camera, you can capture the image (store charge on pixels, by opening shutter), then you can take your time reading it out. Reading this out at 30 frames/second (minimum 25 fps needed for humans to think it's a video) means you have to read it out in 0.033 seconds per frame. Or, for 5 megapixels, that's 6.6ns. Or roughly 500 MHz per pixel. I think that math

  • Why not earlier? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Repran ( 560270 )
    "With digital cameras at regular stores with resolution over 5 megapixel it makes you wonder why it took so long to produce."

    Encoding a 5 mega pixel JPG is easy... The hardware had trouble to create 750p MPEG-2 video in real time. That is the limiting factor.

  • Sony DCM M1 MD Data 2 (MD View Disc) Camcorder - This camera is what, 3 years old now? And it's still a neat toy....includes an ethernet connection and on-board JAVA for web access. [epinions.com]

    "World's first MiniDisc camcorder! Record up to 4,500 still images on a single disc. Or in motion video mode, record 20 minutes of digital quality video on a single MiniDisc. Direct disk access eliminates fast forward and rewind. The DCM-M1 records digital video with MPEG2 (real time) encoding similar to DVD, and ATRAC audi
  • Anybody know just how "consumers" are to get HD off this thing for editing? Last I heard, capturing true HD required a PCI card that cost over twice as much as this camera. Or is the MPEG-2 compression (which probably sucks, btw) enough to fit it over a standard firewire interface? In any event, some new Codecs are going to be needed before this can be useful for most.

  • 750/30p? WTF? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 25, 2003 @02:06AM (#5806450)
    ...to offer 750 line resolution progressive video at 30 frames per second

    Okay... no part of that made sense. (The sites are presently slashdotted.) The two standards for HD are 720p and 1080i. This camera obviously isn't 1080i, so it must be 720p. That's 720, not 750.

    720p is 1280x720x60 fps. This camera doesn't do 60 fps, though; it does 30 fps.

    In other words, and just being a totally pedantic dickhead here, this camera isn't technically HD. HD is either 720p at 60 f(rames)ps or 1080i at 60 f(ields)ps, and this camera does neither.

    (Yeah, yeah. 1080/24p. But that's not a broadcast format, so I'm omitting it.)

  • Largely useless (Score:3, Informative)

    by tsangc ( 177574 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @02:11AM (#5806462)
    I'm pretty doubtful this camera will sell well. Most of the buzz about this camera post NAB was negative-Industrial/professional users demand 3CCD's for accurate colour reproduction, little to no software exists to support desktop editing of the proprietary MPEG-2-TS compression stream, and the DV25 tape format doesn't carry enough bandwidth to accurately represent the HD picture.

  • MPEG makes editing hard... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by captaineo ( 87164 ) on Friday April 25, 2003 @02:23AM (#5806491)
    Last time I saw specs on this camera (the site is slashdotted now), I noticed that it records MPEG-2 at over 20Mbit/sec. This is going to look quite good, since broadcast 1080i HDTV streams are limited to ~18Mbit/sec - and the camera is 720p so there are fewer pixels to compress. On the other hand, if they use full MPEG-2 it will make editing very difficult (and lossy) since the software will have to break apart and re-encode the frames around each edit.

    They might be using I-frame only MPEG, which is basically the same as JPEG for each frame, or DV. In this case the 20Mbits/sec won't look nearly as good, but editing will be much easier (and lossless).

    A good application for this camera might be low-budget filmmaking, where the final output format is NTSC but you want a better image than DV can deliver with its horribly lossy compression... I don't really see the point of working at 720p since the vast majority of HDTV systems are designed around 1080i. Well, perhaps this is just a stepping stone to a 1080i camera...

    (and just to pick a nit - there is no such thing as a 30 frame-per-second video format. Ever since the advent of color, NTSC video has been 30000/1001 frames per second, or 60000/1001 fields per second)
    • More accurate to say that there is not a color 30fps video format (although I'm not 100% certain about PAL-M). Black and white video cameras could still output 30fps if they wanted to. Most TV sets just dutifully sync right up in my experience.

    • I agree. I'm sure that if you want to edit your movies, you'd be better off with a normal Motion-JPEG camcorder that doesn't lose any quality if you edit it (each frame is stored seperately as a JPEG without relying on previous frames). Editing MPEG - especially if you cut it into small chunks, is going to considerably degrade the quality each time you mess with it. With M-JPEG it can go back on the tape in the exact same quality you recorded it in (unless you applied any weird effects that actually modifi
      • Editing MPEG - especially if you cut it into small chunks, is going to considerably degrade the quality each time you mess with it.

        I haven't edited in a few years.. But the last time I did you recoded everything into jpeg frames then edited that. Then for the final cut you stuck the Beta or DV original and final tapes into the deck and the system re-retrieved the frames and recoded them to the final tape. There is no progressive loss from recoding because recoding is done just once to final.
    • But wait, you're saying this format is going to be less lossy than DV25 which is 25MBits/sec ?
  • Of course, Jack Valenti will likely claim that the only use for these cameras is to make better bootlegs from theatre recordings... in the same way that the RIAA effectively killed DAT.

  • 16:9 CCD - All the existing consumer video cameras have 4:3 CCD's. They must accomplish widescreen by kludging the picture some way. Such as, masking off the top and bottom of the picure (letterbox style) to create a 16:9 image - losing a bunch of resolution in the process.

    480p60 - In can do 720p30 (1280x720 progressive, 30 frames/sec). But, it can also do 480p60 (720x480 (DVD resolution) progressive, 60 frames/sec). This 60fps capture is great for fast moving action, like sports. (Note that many DVD'
  • Compression sounds great, but how well does this stuff edit? Current DV is almost completely lossless (some software codecs are) and it edits smoothly. My experiences with MPEG2 are that it's not so hot for source material.
  • and it includes JVC's own video editing software for manipulating the special video - which is not compatible with most current video editing solutions

    What? If I can't get it into Final Cut Pro, why would I want it? Surely, they can write a codec for QuickTime. Besides, as others have pointed out, editing/manipulating MPEG-type compressed video is 'problematic'.

    It's nice that the industry is starting to get into HD, but I'll wait for Sony and Canon to release sub us$4,000, HD, 3-ccd cameras with a more


  • A $2000 digital camera will compete with a $100 walmart film camera. For your digital camera, you need to get high end lenses, because sensors are more sensitive and crappy lenses produce soft, poor quality images. That ads big $$$$. Not to mention all the other gadgets you need to purchase.

    Manufacturers focus on "resulution," so they can stick a big pixel count on their box, but the quality of 5 "megapixels" customer grade cameras produce are laughable to most amateur photographers. Sharpness, speed,

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