On the Bench

First, the lens falloff. At wide angle, the worst falloff is about 0.16 f/stops, seen in the bottom left and right corners. This is really excellent.

For telephoto, the most falloff was 0.08 f/stops, which is amazingly good.

Here is the gray scale/noise test. The top photo (below) shows the actual frame that I used for the measurements. The second figure illustrates the test results. The graph follows the First Order line most of the way, then follows the Second Order for the lightest two zones. This means that the Sony processing limits the output in the brightest areas so that they do not get blown out. Noise tops out at just below 0.6% in the blue channel, and mostly stays below about 0.5%. Noise performance in the dark zones is very good, since noise usually goes up in the dark areas. Here, it goes down, which means shadows won't have a lot of stray-colored pixels (noise).

Chromatic Aberration is 0.454 pixels, which is pretty good.

The industry standard color chart test result was very good. This camera has excellent auto white balance performance. The colors are very near to the original. You can see the white areas in the gray scale do not have a blue or yellow cast to them.

The color accuracy results are shown below. The whites being so accurate is a reflection of the superb white balance that this camera has. The other colors are off, but about the same as other cameras we have tested. The top left corner of each color is the color standard, and the color in the bottom right corner of each color is the way the Sony camera reproduced it.

The MTF50 resolution was 264.7 LW/PH, which is about 30% better than the last video camera we tested (the linked page also explains the MTF50 criterion).

Conclusions

The Sony HVR-A1U high definition video camera is top notch. It's proof that a one-chip camera can produce excellent quality videos. The camera is easy to use, and has every feature you could possibly want - including a condenser microphone. With its 24 FPS mode, budding directors on a limited budget will be able to make their movies for film festivals. All you need to add is talent, hard work, and a $100 video editor on your PC. But, if you just need a great HD video camera for your family vacations, this one would be a terrific choice.
 

- John E. Johnson, Jr. -