An outrageous Japanese guy has done the unthinkable, he's compared the venerable Sony HDR-FX1 with the smallest HDV camcorder available, the new Canon HV10. Why would anyone compare a consumer little camcorder with a CMOS sensor with a prosumer workhorse with 3 CCDs?
The Canon is small and is 1 CMOS, but the specifications read as follows: 1920x1080 native resolution sensor downconverted to 1440x1080. Yes that's right, it's brought down to HDV level. The 3 CCD FX1 has 3 960x1080 sensors uprezzed to 1440x1080.
What does it mean?
Image is Everything
*Note all pics are 100% still frames grabbed from .m2t files. Camera settings on Auto*
Look at this picture below from the FX1, you'll notice that detail is not so good in the trees and the pic looks a bit blurry, like the shutter speed isn't enough to capture crisp images.
Now compare this with the HV10, you'll see the resolution difference. There's more detail in the trees and overall the picture is crisper.
Here's another outdoor scene that shows the resolution loss of the Sony FX1. As you can see the road sign is not crisp and detail in the leaves and building fascade is not so good. In the top left corner the slated fence looks almost like a board. Pretty poor showing.
The HV10 really shows off here. Not only is that fence looking like a fence but the building detail is crisper and you can see individual leaves in the thicker parts of the trees. The road sign is particularly sharp. The picture is much more contrasty than the sony.
So the HV10 kicks the FX1's butt right? In bright sunny light, it's true the FX1 is underwhelmingly bland and uncrisp, lacking detail and flat. However it doesn't take a licking without fighting back.
Here in the extreme dark (lowlight), look at the picture. It's crisp and contrasty with relatively low noise, even in the shadow areas. Here the black is really black.
The HV10's image is pretty poor comparatively. The lettering lacks detail and the picture's contrast is flat where blacks aren't really black. There is also more noise.
So in super lowlight (chosen to exaggerate conditions to pull the worse out of the cameras), the 3CCD FX1 does much better than the HV10 CMOS, in almost a reverse of the daylight results. The bigger sensors and lower pixel count does have an advantage lowlight, but to be honest, who shoots in that sort of conditions?
Conclusion
With these screen grabs, we can see that the Canon CMOS has made significant resolution gains over the CCD predecessors. I'd venture even the XLH1 would have difficulty matching it resolutionwise. But will we see these imperfections in real world situations? On a big screen, yes, you will notice the leaves rustling look like leaves and not green blobs. Details will be crisper. For u/w, it could mean species identification based on spots on the fish vs "some silver baitfish". Motion will look better esp slow motion.
What about the lowlight performance? Well the performance of the camera isn't bad given the circumstances and I'm sure it'd be better with more light. It may look ugly and a bad form factor, but the HV10 makes the FX1 look pedestrian resolutionwise. Which is incredible for a camera just 1.5 years older than the FX1. CMOS may have just announced its arrival.
Here is the translated link for the test. You can download test clips for each scene.
