White Paper 034 Addendum 37: Sony HDCAM, HDW-650

Alan Roberts

Abstract

Data for this section is taken from the handbook and a brief examination of a Sony HDW-650, serial number 40002. Superficial similarities to the PDW-700 are misleading, this is a different camera. This is a 1080- line HDCAM tape camcorder, physically smaller and lighter than the HDW750. It runs at 50Hz or 59.94Hz interlaced or psf, and the F version of the camcorder will also record at 23.98Hz. It has 3 1920x1080 sensors and records full 1920x1080 images with 3:1:1 sub-sampling down to 1440 luma samples, 480 chroma samples per line using the conventional HDCAM coder. In the expectation that the camera would perform rather better than the recording format would allow (it has 14-bit adcs and 20-bit processing), measurements were take both directly via HDSDI and from recorded tape.

The camera is housed in a conventional camcorder shell, and consumes about 35 watts. It has many internal menus for setting the performance, such that it can then be used without external controls. It is not ideally suited to multi-camera operation, although it can be controlled remotely. A standard feature is a 8-second picture cache, and it has two conventional filter wheels. There is a live down-converter to SD, so the camera can be used in mixed environments. The SD performance of the camera was not tested, and should be thought of as a monitoring output, not for programme use.

The menu settings result from one measurement session. In the reported measurements, the camera appears to able to capture up to about 1,000% overexposure (about 3.3 stops, using the full video range 109%) and is able to mimic a film camera and telecine, with “best light” transfer to tape (totalling about 11 stops of tonal range). It is rather noisy, and very sensitive, presumably due to increased head-amplifier gain, and should not be operated at high gain. Noise suppression helps, at the loss of some resolution. Assuming that a grading operation will be used in post-production, the settings give the colourist the same range of options as with film.

Detail enhancement produced some spatial aliasing, but the Aperture compensation produced a much smoother image with complete freedom from aliasing. For use in Sport or Light Entertainment, it would probably be beneficial to switch off the Black Gamma, and to set both Detail Enhancement and Aperture Correction on.

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