Product Reviews

Although it has taken some years for digital cameras to oust the chemical competition, camcorders have been digital for a while. The DV format first went commercial around a decade ago, and analog camcorders have now virtually disappeared. But the writing is already on the wall for DV, and Sony's HDR-FX1E is the camcorder wielding the aerosol. It's the first model to arrive in the UK using the new HDV (high-definition video) format, offering almost four times the resolution of standard PAL TV.

The HDV revolution has been storming the US for a few years already, with JVC launching the first semi-professional device there - the GR-HD1. However, this became the PD1 when it arrived in Europe (see issue 111, p79). It promised a lot, but the 720-line HD mode had been removed somewhere across the mid-Atlantic, and the PD1 ended up a novel, semi-professional standard-definition camcorder.

Unlike DV, HDV includes more than one format. These formats are defined by the number of lines of resolution, the frame rate and whether interlaced fields are used or not. With DV, the US NTSC format offers 480 lines of resolution and European PAL 576, while both are 720 pixels horizontally. But HDV unifies frame sizes. There are two main resolutions, and they're both available for PAL and NTSC. These are 720 and 1,080 lines vertically, but the horizontal resolution is more variable. The current 720-line products use 1,280 pixels horizontally, and the 1,080-line ones use 1,440. These pixels are non-square 'anamorphic' rectangles to achieve the final 16:9 aspect ratio. NTSC HDV operates at 60 interlaced fields per second or 30 progressive frames, known as 60i and 30p respectively. PAL uses 50 fields or 25 frames (50i and 25p). Broadcast and film HD offers some other combinations, but these are the main options in HDV products currently shipping in the world.

JVC's US models use the 720/30p version of HDV, but Sony has gone one better. The FX1E operates at 1,080/50i. That's more than 1.5 megapixels per frame, compared to PAL DV's 400,000 pixels or so. With so much more video data to store per second, the frame-based compression system of DV clearly couldn't be used; instead, HDV uses MPEG. This results in a data rate that's about the same as DV. One of the benefits of this

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is that HDV can be recorded on the same MiniDV cassettes as DV camcorders, running at the same tape speed. Aside from this taking advantage of the cheapness and ubiquity of MiniDV cassettes, it also means HDV camcorders can shoot standard DV when required - and the Sony FX1E is no exception.

However, you don't buy an HDV camcorder to shoot DV, even if having the facility is useful. After taking the FX1E on a number of shoots, we were flabbergasted by the results. The detail is amazing and colour handling superb: vibrant and completely faithful to the original. There are no obvious compression artefacts, as a high data rate is used for MPEG2 - 25Mb/sec to be precise. Even with four times the frame resolution compared to standard PAL TV, that's a similar compression ratio to a production DVD.

The flip-out 250,000-pixel, 16:9 aspect LCD panel gives you a clear idea of what you're shooting too. It's strangely located on the carry handle, but this makes filming from hip-height easier. Every important function has its own discrete manual control, including two rockers and a lens ring for controlling the zoom. There are two neutral-density filters, white-balance and gain presets, and a comfortably large iris dial. In fact, we'd need a few more pages to cover all the features. Similar to Sony's other semi-professional camcorders, though, you can't change the lens. This is one way Sony tries to stop its prosumer products causing too much damage to its professional market.

While HDTV has yet to arrive in the UK, both DivX and WMV support the various resolutions, making computer playback the current target medium. You can, of course, down-sample HD to widescreen DVD-Video with stunning results. If HDV has one major drawback, though, it's at the editing stage. The footage is intended to be captured over FireWire like DV, but it requires new software to do so. This is currently in its infancy. Ulead was the first to provide an HD capture plug-in for Media Studio Pro 7, and Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6 (see issue 124, p160) claims to support HDV out of the box. However, the latter will require an update (via a free download) to capture from the FX1E. So far, the slickest implementation is from Canopus. The latter's EDIUS Pro 3.1 transcodes the HDV to Canopus' own HQ AVI format on-the-fly during capture. This doesn't noticeably reduce quality, and we found we could mix a couple of streams in real-time on our dual-processor test workstation.

However, there's something almost as amazing about the FX1E as its picture quality: its price. To put it in context, Sony's most recent semi-professional DV camcorder, the DCR-VX2100E, costs just £500 less. Seeing as the FX1E can shoot DV to a similar standard, you're paying only £500 more for the HDV capability. So, if you have the money for a £2,000-plus semi-professional camcorder, buy Sony's HDR-FX1E.