By Douglas Bankston, August 5, 2008
Editor's Note: This Web version of our HV30 review is longer than the print edition.
This past January, our very own Chuck Gloman reviewed the Canon HV20 HDV camcorder, lauding it with 3.5 out of 5 diamonds. Soon after, Canon followed up its widely praised HV20 with the HV30. I haven’t shot with the HV20, so the HV30 is my first experience with this line.
Comparing the HV20 to the HV30, really not much has changed, except that the HV30 is in a better-looking black and a 30p shooting mode has been added. Though 1920x1080 HD is claimed, HDV is stamped clearly on the side of the camera. HDV is a stunted 1440x1080 format so that recorded material can fit onto MiniDV tape. And the HV30 features 24- and 30-frame progressive shooting modes, but the HV30’s recording is based on interlaced (60i) architecture.
So what’s the deal?
Let’s start with the 1920 vs. 1440 issue. The HV30 has the same 1920x1080 progressive CMOS sensor as the HV20. The pixels are square. In order to put 1920 square pixels of a frame onto a MiniDV tape with limited bandwidth, those pixels are converted to 1440 rectangle pixels, which are actually bigger. That seems counterintuitive — putting bigger pixels onto a tiny tape. Upon output, the 1440 rectangle pixels are resized back to 1920 square pixels. Getting a square pixel out of a rectangle one will yield leftover pieces. These extra pieces are what form the additional pixels that flesh out 1440 to full 1920. Essentially, HDV is a wedging of 1920 material into 1440-pixel space. If you were to view this 1440 material at 1440x1080, it would look squeezed.
The FireWire output of the camera is 1440 HDV, but the HV30 does boast an HDMI jack. I connected the HV30 to my TV with an HDMI cable. Live viewing is full 1920 resolution, however, anything played back from tape goes through the 1920 to 1440 to 1920 HDV compromise. If there is a capture card that accepts HDMI (I don’t know of any offhand) and record to disk or laptop, then theoretically you could bypass the HDV conversion and get native 1920 HD images.
The HV30 is based on 60i recording to MiniDV tape, but features progressive recording modes. Is it true progressive? The chip is, but the recording once again does some finagling to get onto MiniDV tape. The 60i recording format is used to reduce bandwidth in order for material to fit onto that narrow tape. For the HV30’s new 30p format, 30p is really laid down as 30psf, or 30 progressive segmented frames. A progressive frame is split into two data-reduced frames to be recorded as interlace. The two frames are put back together upon output to form one progressive frame. Now these are frames, not typical interlace-originated fields, so the image quality is much better than field interlace but not entirely immune to interlace artifacts. In the case of 24p, or 24psf, to get to 30 frames — or rather 60i — for recording, six additional fake frames are created via an added pulldown.
I captured an hour’s worth of HDV 30psf footage in Adobe Premiere CS3 at 1080i 60 and 1080p 30. Interestingly, the footage played back in its entirety and could be edited just fine in both formats.
That’s how the HV30 functions, but how does it perform? I shot mostly 30p material in what is called “Neutral” tone and “Cine” exposure (which tamps down the highlights). Image quality-wise, this setting is actually the most unflattering in that it is low contrast and flat but bears a wider latitude
. This setting allows more room for adjustments in post. I reviewed the footage through Adobe Premiere CS3 on a LaCie 324 monitor connected via a Gefen DVI-HDMI adapter cable.
Outdoors and in bright, daylight interiors, the HV30’s images were solid. For darker scenes even with opening the lens up wider, the image started to noise up quickly, and this was readily apparent in the low-contrast Neutral setting. The noise was at its worst while shooting some oak barrels lit with a lone Lowel Rifa in a winery’s basement wine cellar. I say “worst,” but really the noise wasn’t that bad or unmanageable. Crushing the blacks in Premiere hid most of the noise in the shadow areas, a benefit of shooting this situation Neutral with no gain. The HV30 could be used as a B camera to some larger-chipped brethren, but due to its lower sensitivity, you could have trouble getting the “grain” to match in certain lighting situations.
I would prefer the 6.1-61mm lens to be wider, but its reach on the long end of the zoom was impressive. I just don’t like to be as far from the action as the HV30 requires. At its widest, distortion by the lens is most visible at the very top and bottom center of frame. The autofocus doesn’t focus well at times, particularly close-up where it was having trouble with objects from the unimpressive minimum 12” all the way to 2’. Also, the autofocus on my HV30 tended to hunt when shooting frame-filling things of a uniform color or extreme contrast. Manual focus isn’t easy via the unmarked finger wheel on the front side of the camera. The 2.7” flip-out LCD screen crops the edges of the image, so you must be careful when using that for framing as I had to do in certain situations.
The built-in microphone suffers from the placement choice — directly above the zoom lens. It picked up zoom motor noise and every finger touch on the HV30’s unibody. I opted for an attached external mike, and you should, too. Another annoyance deals with headphone monitoring. I had to go into the menu to select “headphone out,” however this setting is never remembered. It always defaulted back to the “AV out” selection when the camera was powered down and up. This meant that when I donned the headphones, turned on the camera and was ready to shoot again, a loud buzzing grated my eardrums until I went back into the menu to select “headphones out” again.
Another odd thing occurred when I powered down the camera, then seeing another snippet of footage to grab, quickly turned it on again — the image in the viewfinder or on the LCD screen became extremely high-contrast black and white, or virtually black and white, and almost pointilistic, as though some Photoshop effect had been applied. Footage actually recorded like that, and the “effect” wouldn’t go away until I shut off the camera for a couple minutes.
The HV30 is a consumer camera, not a professional one. Looking at it from a consumer perspective, the HV30 is quite good for $999. It’s HD — well, HDV — and in old-fashioned MPEG-2, which means your footage can be edited with any application these days without fancy codecs, patches or updates.
Canon HV30
$999
DV Score:
Pros:
Compact, attractive price-to-performance ratio, universal digital editing format.
Cons:
Lower sensitivity, built-in microphone placement, autofocus can be fooled at times.
Bottom Line:
From a consumer perspective, the HV30 is quite good for the price.
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