GH1 vs Camcorders and other Stills Cameras

Started Mar 7, 2009 | Discussions thread
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GH1 vs Camcorders and other Stills Cameras
Mar 7, 2009

The previous thread hit the 150 max, and that stopped me from answering at least one person's question, so I'm responding here:

To my untrained eye, the HF10 takes as good or better video than anything
I have seen yet, including broadcast 1080i on my plasma 50 inch TV.

Sounds like a perfectly fine camcorder, and nothing you should be unhappy with.

but how would the video be better? Since they are both 1080i, wouldn't the
results be at least similar to my untrained eye on my HD TV? In what ways
would the GH1 be better?

Two fundamental advantages of the GH1, neither of which may be signfiicant to you and I'm certainly not saying you should get the GH1 when you already have a camcorder.

The advantages of the GH1 are: Depth of field-- the much larger sensor on the GH1 lets you have a shallower depth of field allowing you to focus on a subject and keep the background out of focus-- very cinematic. The second advantage is you have a lot more control over the look of video, exposure, etc. For cinema, you want 24fps and 1. 48th second shutter and to be able to desaturate the image to maximize dynamic range.

With your camcorder you probably get really bright vibrant and good looking colors-- which are great for a camcorder, but they may color correction in cinema much harder and result in less info to work with. So, this feature is very useful for us, but may not be something you want in your camcorder, or need. The problem is they don't provide you the option if oyu did wnat it.

Plus, interchangeable lenses, forgot about that-- -that's huge thing for me, gives ouy a lot of control and flexibility for getting the shots you want. Generally camcorder lenses are good, but they all have compromises that can be fixed by switching to the right lens for the image you want to capture.

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