Hottest New Cameras

This page does not always get timely updated - so be sure to check out DV.COM - there is a Camera Forum that you can join that has the latest discussion on all video cameras and browsing it you can get a good idea of what's hot and why..

December 2009  -  It looks like the hot cameras of the next couple of years are going to be the AVCHD cameras with High Density SD cards - like 32 gig cards that hold 3 hours of fairly good quality HD video.

The issue right now is editing AVCHD footage - and there are several solutions. Panasonic has a program that converts AHCHD into
 Some of the major programs like Vegas and CS4, and low ends, like Pinnacle Studio, Correl Draw,  also allow editing of AVCHD straightout- although there is a hefty requiement for hardware to do multi layers/effects.

One thing you want to understand is what the various HD identifications formats are.
 

HDV  - tape format- limited to 1440x 080  (basically 720p), firewire pipeline
HD - upper limit is 1920x1080, uses mpeg2  - .mov,  jpg2000, HD-SDI pipeline
AVCHD  - 1920x1080  - known as mpeg4  or H.264, hdSD card peipeline

XDcamEx (Sony) - pro version, 1920x1080 or 1280x720 and color sampling of at least 4:2:2
DvcProHD  (Panasonic) - pro version, 1920x1080 or 1280x720 and color sampling of at least 4:2:2
  
Interesting notes - HDV (1440x1080) format has same data rate as 720x480 DV (25 megabits per second), that's why you can use the same tape for either formats. When captured from tape by a computer's capture program, it could be encoded as a .mpeg file, a quicktime .Mov file, an .m2t, a  m2v - I think that is about it.  These are called mpeg2 wrappers - and one program may not read another program's wrapper.   So once you get an mpeg2 file - you may have to run it through a
 

AVCHD1920x1080 cameras (newest on the top)"

Some people are saying that the Canon AVCHD sis better than Panasonic.

Pansonic HMC 40   31 Mbps  - The video codec itself, H264, is more or less the same.  It is the meta data and the way the audio and video are wrapped into their mts containers that makes them not compatible with each other.

HMC150, the HVX200a and the HPX170

• 3CMOS ClearVID Sensors
• 1080i
• 16:9
• 20x Carl Zeiss Zoom
• 3.5" LCD Display
• Focus Assist
• HDMI Output

http://www.dvxuser.com/articles/article.php/25
XDCAM-EX

• 1920 x 1080 full raster
• 4:2:0 color sampling
• long-Group of Pictures (GoP) encoding
• 8-bit quantization
• MPEG-2 encoding technology
• 35 megabits/sec average data rate

AVCCAM

• 1920 x 1080 full raster
• 4:2:0 color sampling
• long-Group of Pictures (GoP) encoding
• 8-bit quantization
• H.264 MPEG-4 Layer 10 encoding technology (recorded as AVCHD)
• 21 megabits/sec average data rate

1080i = 1920x1080