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MillimeterTest Drive: Panasonic AG-HMC70, Part 2
Jul 28, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Back again with the $2,100 (street) shoulder-mount Panasonic AG-HMC70. In the previous installment, I evaluated features and usability. Here, I’ll look at quality and summarize the comparison of the HMC70 with the $1,900 Sony HVR-HD1000U HDV camcorder, the HMC70’s closest competitor—which I reviewed here—and the Canon XH A1.
Quality Tests
I compared the Panasonic camera with the HD1000 and the XH A1, which has produced the best quality that I’ve seen in laboratory tests—albeit at twice the price of either other camcorder and lacking the shoulder mount form factor. Briefly, although the Sony only has one CMOS imaging device, it has 2,280,000 effective video pixels—which is more than sufficient for 1920x1080 capture and processing, which the camera does before subsampling down and storing the video in 1440x1080i HDV resolution. In contrast, the Canon has three CCDs, each with 1,670,000 pixels—which is sufficient for full resolution, 1440x1080 HDV capture.
As you undoubtedly recall from poring over the first segment, the HMC70 has three CCDs, each with a gross pixel count of 520,000 pixels, and it relies upon a technique called pixel shifting to produce sufficient pixels for HD capture. I was eager to see how this would translate to quality in my tests.
I use three standard tests for comparing camcorders, all from DSC Labs. Briefly, from a workflow perspective, I shot the video and captured in Apple Final Cut Pro, which converted the AVCHD files into ProRes format, and then I imported the ProRes 422 files into the Mac version of Adobe Premiere Pro to create frame grabs, which I compared to previous frame grabs from the other two cameras.
Figure 1. DSC Labs CamBook Multiburst resolution test.
Click here for a larger image.
The first test is the CamBook Multiburst test pattern, which is shown in Figure 1. Briefly, this chart measures the camcorder’s ability to preserve horizontal and vertical detail by presenting multiple boxes with increasingly dense lines in both the vertical and horizontal axis. Resolution is “preserved” when you can clearly see both the lines and the white spaces in the box.
If you click to view the full-resolution figure, you’ll make several observations. First, the XH A1 still presents the clearest image, with 700 lines clearly legible both horizontally and vertically. The Sony is slightly clearer at 600 lines of vertical resolution (illustrated by the 600 lines horizontal box), while the Panasonic is slightly clearer with less moiré pattern at 500 lines of horizontal resolution (illustrated by the 500 box with vertical lines).
