Sony HDR XR 550 - housing choice. Need help!

[Big fish63]

i've seen a 550ve advertised. would i be right in thinking this accepts both pal and ntsc formats?

 

[diversteve]

the Sony HDR-XR550VE (V for GPS and E for Euope).

It gets more confusing...

I still think the v is NTSC though as the Model number: HDR-CX550V is sold on www.sonystyle.com which afaik is the U.S. site.

Technically I'm not sure you could have a dual-record camera. Wouldn't that require dual electronics also as the standards are different. NTSC is 525 lines/60HZ, PAL is 576 lines/50HZ - assuming I'm reading this correctly....

From Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTSC#Lines_and_refresh_rate:

NTSC color encoding is used with the system M television signal, which consists of 29.97 interlaced frames of video per second, or the nearly identical system J in Japan. Each frame consists of a total of 525 scanlines, of which 486 make up the visible raster. The remainder (the vertical blanking interval) are used for synchronization and vertical retrace. This blanking interval was originally designed to simply blank the receiver's CRT to allow for the simple analog circuits and slow vertical retrace of early TV receivers. However, some of these lines now can contain other data such as closed captioning and vertical interval timecode (VITC). In the complete raster (ignoring half-lines), the even-numbered or 'lower" scanlines (Every other line that would be even if counted in the video signal, e.g. {2,4,6,...,524}) are drawn in the first field, and the odd-numbered or "upper" (Every other line that would be odd if counted in the video signal, e.g. {1,3,5,...,525}) are drawn in the second field, to yield a flicker-free image at the field refresh frequency of approximately 59.94 Hertz (actually 60 Hz/1.001). For comparison, 576i systems such as PAL-B/G and SECAM uses 625 lines (576 visible), and so have a higher vertical resolution, but a lower temporal resolution of 25 frames or 50 fields per second.

 

[Misa]

I wish this camera had an Underwater Mode and i could swear its the best camera in the world for 1000usd price range. the steady shot is amazing!

 

[drbill]

I wish this camera had an Underwater Mode and i could swear its the best camera in the world for 1000usd price range. the steady shot is amazing!

The steady shot is indeed pretty amazing if you are shooting relatively static scenes, but I've noticed that when you have a moving subject and a stationary background it tends to try to compensate for the movement of the subject which creates some pretty shaky footage.

The video from the 550 is pretty awesome. Just wish I didn't have to buy a new housing since the reviews I read said that the 550 had LANC through the 10-pin port and according to Sony it does not. Too late now.

 

[NotYetBent]

I have the CX550V (US ed.). Great choice on camcorder. I likes it a lot!

Important things for your housing: manual white balance and internal color filter. I would also want a manual / auto focus setting too.

Not to spark a debate, but after doing the research, I went with a Light & Motion - Stingray G2+. Nothing else has the feature set and the size (you can remove the handles easily to make it manageable for travel - extremely important to me). This needs some better color correction but...

Alor 2010 on Vimeo

I have a ton more footage, still getting it together.