First HDTV Camcorder

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."

Comments

This is actually major news to some people

[mao che minh]

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

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Great Leap forward but still falsl short

[zenyu]

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. ;)

MPEG makes editing hard...

[captaineo]

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)