Six months ago I taught an ASP class in Japan and had a ball. All the great sushi! It was down South in Okinawa where you can find some of the best diving in the world. I only had time to take two dives, but they were both incredible. What a blast. That culture is unique. Amazingly low crime, highly efficient, and success-oriented. I was in heaven.
That week also just happened to coincide with the Japanese release of Sony's new high definition camcorder, the HDR-HC1. So while there of course I had to pick one up! I must say that the quality of the video is great if your subject is well-lit. It's not a 3CCD camera. Not even a CCD-based camera at all. It uses a single CMOS sensor which has wider dynamic range and requires less energy, but also makes a noisier (grainier) picture, and thus requires lots of post-processing to make a clean signal. Sony figured out a great solution for the noise issue with their “EIP“ processing. I swear it looks as clean as a CCD. To get more usable imager area out of their 1/3“ chip it actually does not have a global shutter! (This is the first camcorder I'm aware of that has ever done this.) Instead like many webcams it uses a rolling shutter, so subjects moving quickly horizontally through the scene will come out slightly tilted. Having 60 fields a second it scans faster than a cheap webcam, so the effect is minimal, but it's still there.
Overall Sony has done their homework on this one, and I'm impressed. Much better than the entry-level offering by JVC that used a CCD of the same size. Of course they have had two years more R&D time at their disposal, and this is their second HDV unit, so it's expected that they've worked out some of the kinks.
Buying the unit overseas meant I saved a bunch at the time and I got it early: I was out the door for $1450 whereas over here in the states back then the lowest street price was $1800. It now hovers around $1600, so I'm still ahead of the game price-wise. But I took a big trade-off to be the first kid on the block with one of these. The menus are all in Japanese! So as part of my goal to learn technical terms in Japanese, I decided to make a clickable reference for the camera:
Go ahead, click through the menu options in the image above!
This mock-up consists of a total of 57 images and 3 hours of work. I don't suppose many English-speakers out there have a Japanese HC1, but still hopefully this will be a fun reference to see what clicking through an HC1 looks like, or for those folks that want to learn terms like “White Balance” in Japanese.
Any other HC1 owners out there? I expect to post a fair bit on the technology of the camera in the coming months.