Video Accessories Misc

Canon HV20 One-Chip HDV High Definition Video Camera

On the Bench

For the Canon HV20, the telephoto lens test (second photo below) showed more falloff than the wide angle lens (first photo below). However, the maximum falloff was still only 0.7 f/stops.

The ChromaDuMonde looked very good, again indicating excellent automatic white balance.


The HV20 had an MTF50 resolution of 627 LW/PH, which is really excellent for such an inexpensive HD camera.





Chromatic aberration was 0.602 pixels.



In the gray levels test, the HV20 follows the first order, which means it does not attenuate the whites to avoid blowout. Noise maxed out in the blue channel at 0.95 in the bright whites, and then decreased into the shadows. That was evident in the video material, which had nice clean shadow regions.





The ColorChecker suggests a better than average color reproduction accuracy. The top left corner of each color patch is what that color is supposed to look like, and the bottom right corner is how the Canon HV20 reproduced that color.



Conclusions

The Canon HV20, for 2007, has the best performance-to-cost ratio of any HD camera we have tested. Canon corporation has been making cameras and lenses for many decades. Their digital SLRs are consistently rated at the top, and it looks like their HD video cameras will continue that tradition.