For those of you who might be interested in the capture of high quality uncompressed video bypassing the hdv compression:
The HDMI port on HV20 allows for direct capture of uncompressed video to a (very fast) desktop using the Blackmagic Intensity board.
But what about laptops? There is no such solution for laptops, unless you use some tweaking.
If you have a laptop with an Expresscard slot, and an Intensity board, you can probably use an adapter made by a company called Catalyst Enterprises to connect a PCI express card like Intensity to a laptop Expresscard slot.
Also note that I have not tried this adapter myself but I think it should work.