Canon HV30 v. high end JVC GY-HD250U comparison

I got my hands on a pro level 3 chip HDV camera JVC GY-HD250U and for fun (and a little for research) I decided to stack it against Canon HV30.

Below you have a few JPEG stills (compressed at 10 quality, meaning there is a tiny amount of recompression for the web involved as 12 is the highest/max quality) that show how closely those 2 cameras match.

(Canon on the left and JVC on the right)

The pic were pulled from Vegas 8 from 30p footage put together at 720p30 timeline. When using 1920p timeline the JVC’s footage looked more blurry then that from HV30, so i decided to use 720 timeline (JVC’s native) as a compromise. I noticed that JVC has a significant amount of sharpening so i added Sharpen filter (medium) to the HV30 footage (which because of the down converting from 1440 to 1280 looked more blurry then JVC footage).

(Some of the mess in the pics was on purpose to add some various colors to the image and some, well because i’m a messy person.)

Overexposure on my face test:

Motion blur test:

Mix of tungsten with daylight fluorescent test:

Sharpening very apparent here:

Dim overheads on:

This is not a comprehensive shoot out between those 2 cameras if anything it’s just to prove my theory that when it comes to HDV because so much of color information gets thrown out when compressing to MPEG2 then whether it’s 1 or 3 chip camera doesn’t really matter. Don’t get me wrong JVC is a superb camera so this is not to diss JVC but rather to prove that you can have pro-level quality for $700 of HV20/30/40 so if you ever though about making movies… Well there is no excuses available anymore!