The Great HD Shoot-Out - Canon HV20, Sony HDR-HC7, Panasonic HDC-SD1, JVC GZ-HD7

 

 

This month marked the arrival of perhaps the most anticipated HD camcorder of the year on US store shelves as JVC’s HD Everio finally hit the market. The GZ-HD7 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1529) joins HD camcorders from Sony, Canon, and Panasonic atop the consumer market and presents a unique opportunity. For the first time, a true diversity of consumer HD camcorders from four major manufacturers is available in the US. This means more choice than ever, and as our testing shows, there are some great choices available. HDV models like the Canon HV20 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $903) and Sony HDR-HC7 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1128.56) produce stunning video and cram a host of advanced features previously limited to prosumer cams into their (relatively) miniature frames. The long-anticipated arrival of the Everio also means an end to the months of hype that have followed since the emerging rumors in September 2006, and the opportunity for buyers to make their choice among the category’s flagship offerings. 

 

 

Canon HV20 (click for review)	Sony HDR-HC7 (click for review)

 

We at CamcorderInfo.com have been part of that hype, because on paper, the HD7 looks like a category killer – if not the progenitor of an entirely new category. It shoots what JVC calls “Full HD” at 1920 x 1080 to a 60GB HDD, and utilizes a brand new flavor of MPEG-2 compression at up to 30Mbps. And therein lies the source of the buzz . MPEG-2, of course, is used in HDV compression, and currently represents the gold standard for affordable HD video. 

AVCHD, a highly-compressed flavor of H.264 MPEG-4 offers another consumer HD option – but one fraught with workflow issues that make it problematic – at least for the moment. In our testing, we’ve found AVCHD to be nearly as sharp as HDV, but grainier, and with prominent motion artifacting. In addition, while MPEG-4 is a more efficient compression scheme than MPEG-2, engineers believe that MPEG-2’s attributes make it a higher-performance codec for video in the sub-50 Mbps range used in current consumer and prosumer camcorders. AVCHD does have the appealing attribute of recordability to non-linear media like HDDs, DVDs and SD/SDHC flash cards – but its performance shortcomings have discouraged many quality-focused consumers from jumping onto the AVCHD bandwagon. The announcement that JVC’s HD Everio would use a new flavor of MPEG-2 – and allow recording to HDD thus generated tremendous interest on the part of shooters who wanted both the quality of HDV and the convenience of non-linear media.

The question that has been looming since the HD7 was announced has been whether the new camcorder would really deliver on its seemingly groundbreaking potential. The stakes were ratcheted higher when Sony and Canon released their latest HDV camcorders, which improved upon those company’s earlier models with notable manual control and image quality enhancements. Panasonic also entered the consumer HD fray with its release of two AVCHD cams, the HDD-based HDC-SD1 and the DVD-based HDC-DX1 (Review, Specs, Recent News, $1119.99).

 

A note on practices – All video was analyzed by plugging the camcorder directly into a monitor via HDMI, then watching, discussing, re-watching, re-discussing, etc. until we reached satisfactory conclusions. The frame grabs in this review are not stand-ins for video, but they do illustrate our conclusions well enough. In order to assure the most standardization possible, we used Avid Liquid to extract frame grabs whenever possible. HDV capture direct from the tape was no problem for the Canon HV20 and Sony HDR-HC7, but no native editing support exists for AVCHD or JVC’s MPEG-2 Transport Streams. Elecard Converter Studio was used to convert the Panasonic HDC-SD1’s AVCHD files to MPEG-2 HDV files, which were then importable for any NLE. As a result of this process, the image is not automatically converted from non-square to square pixels. In order to shift the image into the correct aspect ratio, the frame grabs had to then be cropped and resized to 1440 x 810. All other images are presented in full 1920 x 1080.

 

 

JVC’s GZ-HD7 required the use of the in-the-box software, CyberLink Cinema and PowerDirector to view and work with footage. PowerDirector allows for conversion to MPEG-2, but we found the compression artifacts to be too detrimental. Ultimately, we found the Snapshot tool in PowerDirector to produce the most accurate stills.