It's here... Yay!

Gabor, the Hungarian IT guy here in the Cartoon Saloon Skyped my in his Hungarian IT guy way to tell me that An Post had delivered a box! My Canon HV20.

The first thing that hit me was the size. It's teenie... so cute!

The HV20 records 1080i HDV. It has a 3.1 MP still camera and a 1920x1080 CMOS sensor. The manual controls are a little hard to get used to, especially after been using full size cameras, HVX200s, DVX100s, and my XH-A1. The menu button, the all-in-one joystick/button for exposure, audio levels and shutter is right next to Menu button which is right next to the Record button... all a little too close for my awkward thumbs.

I shot a little footage around the house, got Daw making coffee and some exterior stuff, captured it into FCP and it looked deadly! Some of the settings I tried resulted in quite grainy footage, but it was dark enough on our landing of no-lightbulbs (!) so that's to be expected.

One thing I noticed was that Final Cut took longer to capture from the HV20 than it does from the XH-A1. Why? I-oun-o!

I have a shoot next week and I'm using both the XH-A1 and the HV20 so I'll post my comments on how the two compare then.