Sony 900

Quick question, was the Sony 900 able to shoot in the 16x9 aspect ratio? I know the Sony 2000 and 2100 was capable of letterboxing footage but not if the 900 was as capable. If it could shoot in 16x9, was there any loss of resolution when doing so?

Steve B)

my 950 does, but its not true 16x9 but rather a crop. I would think the 900 would do same but not sure.

Thanks Mike for the quick reply.

Steve B)

Steve, the TRV-900 shoots non-native 16:9 video. It was always recommended to shoot in 4:3 and convert to 16:9 in post for better quality, rather than in camera. Below is a quote from http://www.adamwilt.com/DV-FAQ-etc.html#widescreen Note: Sony did it the "wrong way".

Dan

The "wrong way" is wrong because the resultant image only uses 360 lines (525/59.94) or 432 lines (625/50) of the CCD instead of the entire 480 or 576. When this is displayed anamorphically on your monitor, the camera has digitally rescaled the lines to fit the entire raster, but 1/4 of the vertical resolution has been irretrievably lost, and the in-camera algorithms used to stretch the image often create ugly sampling artifacts. This is not too terrible for SDTV playback (still, it isn't great), but it's asking for disaster if the image is upconverted to HDTV or film (Soderburgh's "Full Frontal" is prime example of the perils of in-camera vertical stretch).

 

The bad news is that most inexpensive DV cameras (including the VX2000 and XL-1s) do 16:9 the wrong way.

 

[Note that there are two "wrong ways," the vertical-pixel-shift method used by Canon and Panasonic, which isn't quite as bad as I make it sound; and the field-doubled/interpolated method employed by Sony (I don't know what JVC does). The Canon/Panasonic method yields images softer than true 16:9, but cleaner and sharper than the Sony method. I discuss the differences in more detail a bit further on.]

Thanks all, I will pass this info on to someone who was interested in a used 900

Steve B)

Steve for a test I put our TRV900 on pretend 16.9 mode for a day vid once.

I never did it again as it did not look very nice.