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A buddy of mine bought the HMC70 and we did some tests today comparing the camera with my HD1000.

The great news was that the AVCHD footage came in perfectly. I just pulled the card out of the HMC70 and popped it into my S4KP and imported the footage. No issues.

As for the HMC70, I was surprised that the camera is really an auto only type camera. There is no ring and very little manual options.

But the key selling issue here is the SD card recording with AVCHD. Now, is it as good as HDV? Or is it better?

Jonathan,
please tell us more about the HD quality the of the AVCHD cam

Did you notice the grain is very visiible under low light?

ShadowVision wrote:A buddy of mine bought the HMC70 and we did some tests today comparing the camera with my HD1000.

The great news was that the AVCHD footage came in perfectly. I just pulled the card out of the HMC70 and popped it into my S4KP and imported the footage. No issues.

As for the HMC70, I was surprised that the camera is really an auto only type camera. There is no ring and very little manual options.

But the key selling issue here is the SD card recording with AVCHD. Now, is it as good as HDV? Or is it better?

I'm wondering how these $100 Aiptech HD cameras rate as B,C or even D cameras for a multiple camera shoot. Heck for a little over few hundred bucks, you can do an 8 camera shoot with these very portable babies:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... +High&pn=2

Anyone tried these yet?

FORGET IT! I have the Aiptek. It is a progressive look with the worse audio I have ever heard. It is good for web and travelling with a laptop only. None of these cameras intergrate well with regular video.
I recently sold my 1000U and stepped into the Canon HF S10. The HF S10 is an excellent camera like the HV-30 albeit much sharper-if you can believe that.

erictom wrote:I'm wondering how these $100 Aiptech HD cameras rate as B,C or even D cameras for a multiple camera shoot. Heck for a little over few hundred bucks, you can do an 8 camera shoot with these very portable babies:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... +High&pn=2

Anyone tried these yet?

Sorry I did not get to this earlier. The HMC70 produced a very clear and very sharp image. But I could not figure out how to soften it in the manual settings. My HD1000 is set up to cut down on edge sharpness and white artifacting. And I control the auto gain with the ring set on exposure. You can't do this easily (or maybe at all with the Panni).

I put both images side by side on the S4KP in PIP and the Panni was brighter and sharper. But the color looked deeper on the Sony. My HD1000 is my B-camera, but I'm using it all the time for my TV show. I use it for walking and talking all the time. I think I could do that same thing with the HMC70, but I would probably get frustrated by not being able to control basic stuff.

If you personalize the HD1000's touch screen, it is a very manual camera. Other than gain control, you can control most everything. The HMC70 is almost adverse to manual. But it is odd, it has focus assist (like my FX1000's expanded focus) but you have to use the damned buttons to focus. This is a pain and there's no numeric readout for the focus that I could see. It made little sense and was just a foreign unknown.

The viewfinder and eye cup on the HMC70 is more professional than the Sony HD1000 and the HMC70 is a much studier camera. It felt like a real tough machine but a little like something you'd find in a factory recording an assembly line or something.

I think that we need a camera that is a combination of both of these: the manual settings of the Sony, the SD card of the Panni, and the XLR of the Panni. When are they gonna give us a reasonably priced camera like that in a shoulder mount? And hey, throw in 24 and 30 progressive scan too.

As an aside, I interviewed a US Marine and filmmaker at a festival last month who is shooting a feature in Iraq on the consumer version of the HMC70. He uses the MKE400 mic, by the way. Anyway, the footage from his latest feature doc look wonderful. He already shot a feature using consumer technology. There would be no other way for him to do it given the fact that he's got to carry a gun and gear in the field. I was extremely impressed with his first movie "The Triangle of Death."

Lou, is the Canon really good? Doesn't it do progressive?