White Paper 034 Addendum 41: Tests and Settings on a Sony HSC-300 Studio camera

Alan Roberts

Abstract

Data for this section is taken from the handbook and a brief examination of a Sony HSC-300. The camera was an early model, which may or may not represent production models. Superficially, it is similar to the HDC-1500, but has a conventional Triax connection to its CCU, rather than optical fibre. This is a 1080-line studio camera which runs at 50Hz or 59.94Hz interlaced, but does not appear to have a psf option. It also runs at 720p progressive, at both frame rates.

The camera is housed in a conventional small studio-camera shell. It has many internal menus for setting the performance at the camera head, such that it can then be used without external controls. In this report, I shall list only the head controls and not those in the CCU, although the CCU can control most of the camera functions remotely.

It has two conventional filter wheels and 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 normally be thought of as only for monitoring output, and not for programme use, since an external down-converter will normally deliver a higher quality result.

The menu settings result from one measurement session. In the reported measurements, the camera appears to be able to capture up to about 600% overexposure (about 2.5 stops, using the full video range 109%) and is able to mimic a film camera and telecine reasonably well except for the motion portrayal of psf shooting, with “best light” transfer to tape totalling about 11 stops of tonal range.

The Triax connection carries digital, compressed video data. It proved very difficult to assess the performance of the compression system directly, and there are no clues in the camera or CCU manuals as to how it works. Separate tests have confirmed that performance is acceptable over long lengths of Triax.

The camera is normally used with the HSCU-300 CCU, and can be fitted to either the HDLA1500 or 1506 lens adaptors, or the HDLA1507 adaptor for small lens, and large viewfinder. It can also be controlled remotely via the MSU-900/950 Master Setup Unit, RCP-700/900 Remote Control Panel, or RMB-150/750 Remote Control.

The camera has chromatic aberration correction for ‘serial’ lenses. But it proved to be faulty on test; at one combination of focus, zoom and iris setting, very large errors were introduced by the camera. This is probably only the result of a single erroneous data point in the stored information for the lens, but it rendered the system unusable for these tests.

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