There seems to be a lot of interest in comparing the Scarlet with that old standby of no-budget Indie filmmaking, the HVX200. It’s a little screwy to compare a camera that’s already on the market with one that won’t be out for a year (or more; I love Red, but they don’t exactly have the greatest track record for delivery dates), but I suppose it’s useful to put things in perspective for folks who are familiar with the HVX.

Scarlet is clearly going to generate a better image than the HVX, which resolves, in testing, somewhat less than 600 vertical lines. If Scarlet’s measured resolution is around 75-80% of its sensor’s pixel dimensions (which is about what the Red One is; can’t think of why Scarlet should be different), it should resolve about twice that many vertical lines, meaning around four times as much detail overall.

Now add high-bitrate raw recording. Processing the Scarlet’s 3K raw recorded image down to 1080p is going to produce something hard to tell from a 4:4:4 image, vs. the HVX’s 4:2:2 recording. So, we’ve got super-sampled 4:4:4 1080p vs. subsampled 720p 4:2:2. (Yes, the HVX has a 1080p recording mode as well, but the chips resolve a bit less than 720p, so the only real benefit is fewer compression artifacts.) Plus, you get all the advantages of raw recording, that I’ve discussed extensively in the past.

Of course, Scarlet is single chip, and three chip cameras sometimes do better in low light. But keep in mind it has a 2/3″ sensor. That’s measured across the diagonal. If you double the diagonal, you quadruple the surface area, so Scarlet’s single sensor is larger than the HVX’s three sensors combined. And that nice large sensor gets you shallower depth of field as well.

The HVX will probably still have some advantages for workflow (though it’s not impossible that by the time Scarlet ships, working with 3K REDCODE RAW in FCP will be as easy as working with DVCPRO HD currently is). And it does have a more conventional form factor, which might make some folks more comfortable. But specifically for no-budget indie filmmakers, the Scarlet is clearly the better camera, hands down, no contest. And even if Panasonic does introduce an HVX replacement by then, it’ll probably still cost twice as much as the Scarlet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 04:55 PM and is filed under Red. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.