Sony Z1

MarkG · May 3, 2005

BTW, I have a Z1 on my lap right now, so if anyone wants some hands-on opinion I can try to answer any questions

.

So far I've only had a chance to film the dog in the back garden, but generally it's produced a great picture with decent sound: unfortunately I don't have an HDTV to view footage on, but everything I've tried looks good when downconverted to a normal TV and -- other than apparent interlacing artifacts -- on my PC monitor. No sign of dropouts so far.

The only two issues I've really noticed are lousy placement of the Firewire socket, and stuttering in some pans: fast pans are fine, slow pans are fine, pans in the middle look a bit stuttery on my PC but generally OK on the LCD panel and a standard PAL TV: which seems consistent with the 'dead zone' mentioned in this thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=38924&highlight=pan

I'm guessing (OK, hoping

) that the deinterlacing of the video footage on the PC is causing the apparent 'stutter'.

Kev T · May 21, 2005

Deinterlacing artifacts

Deinterlacing artifacts

I'm guessing (OK, hoping

) that the deinterlacing of the video footage on the PC is causing the apparent 'stutter'.[/quote]

Hi Mark,

Virtually all PCs' graphic cards has deinterlacing as all PC displays irregardless if they're CRT, LCD, or DLP projection devices are progressive scan, thus any interlaced signal fed to the PC is deinterlaced by its graphic card.

Having said that, deinterlacing motion video signals is quite a bit more complex than deinterlacing mostly static PC graphics, and not all PC graphic cards can do this well.

You may want to research for an upgrade graphic card that handles motion video better than the current card in your PC.

Kev

MarkG · Jun 22, 2005

Yeah, I eventually figured out that selecting 'bob' deinterlace mode in VLC removed most of the stutter. That appears to deinterlace the footage into seperate frames for each field, and then play it back at 50fps rather than 25fps: so you lose some vertical resolution in the individual frames, but still have the full temporal resolution.