I just purchased a Sony HRD-HC7 last week. I admitted that I haven't had a lot of time playing with it yet. But I did manage to tape 1.5 hours worth of footage on a school play. I have several questions on this camcorder and hope someone can answer them.
1) When I transferred the footage to my computer, the Sony video browser software claimed that the resolution is 1440x1080?! I thought this is a 1080i camcorder so I am expecting the resolution being 1920x1080x60i. 1440x1080 sounds like 4:3 but the footage I taped was at 16:9 and I confirmed the setting on the camcorder. I called Sony tech support this morning and the guy insisted that the camcorder can only support a maximum resolution of 1440x1080 and it is considered high-def. He even asked me where I read that the camcorder can support 1920x1080. I went to the sony site and searched the specification as well as downloadeded the user manual and searched. Sure enough, there is not a single mention of 1920x1080. But sales site such as pricegrabber does claim that it has a resolution of 1920x1080. Am I missing something? The reason I started paying attention to its resolution is because when I played the footage on my 1080p TV, the picture is clearer comparing to my old digital camcorder but the resolution is not even close to what I saw in 1080i TV shows such as CSI Miami or even 720p TV shows such as Lost. Am I expecting too much from a consumer grade Hi-Def camcorder?
2) Also, there are a few places in my footage where the video froze a half second before moving on (i.e. Stutter). Have anybody seen this? As I said, I haven't had much time playing with it yet, so I am not sure what I had done to caused this. At first, I thought I might have accidentally pressed the pause/continue button during my taping. But then I taped the school play and was conscious about not to touch the pause button. I still got some pauses close to the end of the tape. Now I thought may be the battery was low at the end which was true (I ran out of battery at the end). But the pauses happened at least 15 minutes prior to the battery running out. I need to play with it some more to "reproduce" the problem more reliably but I'd appreciate if anyone can tell me if they have seen this before. Note that the pauses happened both when playing on the LCD of the camcorder and when playing the transferred footage on the computer.
Thanks.
1) When I transferred the footage to my computer, the Sony video browser software claimed that the resolution is 1440x1080?! I thought this is a 1080i camcorder so I am expecting the resolution being 1920x1080x60i. 1440x1080 sounds like 4:3 but the footage I taped was at 16:9 and I confirmed the setting on the camcorder. I called Sony tech support this morning and the guy insisted that the camcorder can only support a maximum resolution of 1440x1080 and it is considered high-def. He even asked me where I read that the camcorder can support 1920x1080. I went to the sony site and searched the specification as well as downloadeded the user manual and searched. Sure enough, there is not a single mention of 1920x1080. But sales site such as pricegrabber does claim that it has a resolution of 1920x1080. Am I missing something? The reason I started paying attention to its resolution is because when I played the footage on my 1080p TV, the picture is clearer comparing to my old digital camcorder but the resolution is not even close to what I saw in 1080i TV shows such as CSI Miami or even 720p TV shows such as Lost. Am I expecting too much from a consumer grade Hi-Def camcorder?
2) Also, there are a few places in my footage where the video froze a half second before moving on (i.e. Stutter). Have anybody seen this? As I said, I haven't had much time playing with it yet, so I am not sure what I had done to caused this. At first, I thought I might have accidentally pressed the pause/continue button during my taping. But then I taped the school play and was conscious about not to touch the pause button. I still got some pauses close to the end of the tape. Now I thought may be the battery was low at the end which was true (I ran out of battery at the end). But the pauses happened at least 15 minutes prior to the battery running out. I need to play with it some more to "reproduce" the problem more reliably but I'd appreciate if anyone can tell me if they have seen this before. Note that the pauses happened both when playing on the LCD of the camcorder and when playing the transferred footage on the computer.
Thanks.
