Technology and Innovation

Here is the ultimate in HD video and digital photo quality with advanced features for the knowledgeable and demanding videographer. The HV20’s 10X optical zoom lens, 2.96MP CMOS image sensor and Canon’s advanced DIGIC DVH image processor ensures meticulous detail and superior color reproduction. 24p Cinema Mode brings “film-look” options to the HV20 owner- as never before in this class. And, with its HD and Standard Definition recording modes, you can make the move to HD without making your SD equipment obsolete.

In what may be the most revolutionary machine that’s crossed our threshold in a long time, Sony has shipped the VGC-RM1 editing computer. It utilizes a radically different hardware design than we’ve seen before, but one whose time has come. It’s the first machine we’ve seen that ships with Windows Vista (though it’s certainly not the very first machine with Vista—the way that operating systems launch, it’s unlikely any single product can make that claim). It’s also the first Blu-ray Disc burner-equipped machine to come through.
Un-boxed
The first thing we noticed in setting up the RM1 were two boxes, along with a 6′ long cable. The cable allows the placement of the main CPU somewhere else—probably under your desk. (You still have to consider the machine’s airflow needs, though.) Inside this box is an Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 processor running at 2.4GHz, 2GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT video card and four 250GB Seagate SATA hard drives, set up as two stripe sets. The drives are easily accessible from the front panel, but are not hot-swappable (so you will still have to shut down the machine if you need to make changes to the drives, but you won’t have to move too much stuff around in your work area).
The smaller box (which Sony calls the Access Unit), contains both of the machine’s optical drives (our machine shipped with a Sony DDU-1615S DVD-ROM drive and a Panasonic SW-5582 Blu-ray Disc burner) and is scarcely taller than the drives it contains. The Access Unit also includes a reader for all of the major types of memory cards, 2 USB ports, a 4-pin FireWire port, Bluetooth and drive status indicators, mic and headphone jacks, and a power button with indicator. Other goodies in the box include a unique USB shuttle control with a joystick in the center and a set of Logitech X530 speakers. The array rounds out with a standard USB optical scroll mouse and a PS/2 keyboard.

Audio:
There are two locking XLR inputs well positioned on the right side of the HD200U. The audio is compressed in MPEG-1 Audio Layer II at 384kbps when recording in HDV mode. While recording in DV mode, the audio is recorded at 16-bit, 48kHz. We recorded audio in both modes using two different mics. We tested the on-camera mini-shotgun by speaking in a normal voice at three and six feet away.
With the Automatic Gain Control on, our peak levels were well below the -12dB level indicator. With AGC off, to get levels peaking at around -12dB at the three-foot distance, we needed to set levels to nine. At six feet, the levels predictably dropped about 20%. At these high level settings, we did notice a fair amount of amplification noise.
Our next test simulated a more common situation where we had the same person speaking into a handheld mic powered by the HD200U’s phantom supply. AGC worked well but still gave us what seemed like more headroom than necessary. In manual mode, a setting of six was all that was needed to get strong levels that produced a very clean signal. We left the audio limiter on in all cases and found that even the occasional overdriven input did not produce objectionable clipping.