Detail
Another important part of Image Quality is how well the image carries detail information and under what conditions the image definition stars to break down with video artifacts.
I took the side-by-side shots and magnified the center section about 300 times to compare. Those images appear below.
Now initially, the HVX200 and the XH-A1 images look almost identical. But study them for a moment and let me point out what I see. Look at the branches of the trees to the right and the left of the steeple in both images. The HVX200’s branches are blurry on the left, whereas the XH-A1’s re sharp and well-defined. The small branches in the tree on the right start to disappear in the HVX200 detail. But in the XH-A1 the tree on the right retains lots of detal.
Now look at the lights immediately to the right of the steeple and also above the tree on the right. In the HVX200 image they are just shapeless blobs. In the XH-A1 image they retain definition.
What causes the difference? The lens? Focus? Codec? I have no idea. All I can tell you is the XH-A1 image has sharper definition based on this experiment, as you can see.
However … sharpness is not all that’s important to image quality.
The next set of images show the spire on top of the steeple magnified even more. Now I want you to notice two things. First, the XH-A1 spire and steeple top has a lot more structure and definition than the HVX200 version. But now look at the sky to the right of the spire. To the best of my recollection, the sky that day did not have this kind of moiré texture to it in real life. In fact, the sky looked a lot more like the HVX200 image on the left.
What’s going on here? Some digital artifacts. Is it caused by the sensors, by the codec, by the image processing? Again, I have no idea. I’m just reporting to you what I see. And that is, something is adding “artificial” detail into the image that really isn’t there in the scene. And now that I notice this artifact, when I look back up at the less magnified images, I can see that texture is displayed across the entire XH-A1 image – including in the dark areas of the steeple roof.
In the final image on the bottom right, I applied a 1.5 pixel blur in post. And as you can see the definition of the steeple is similar to the HVX200 image and the artifacts have been blurred away.
The Image Quality of the XH-A1, with respect to detail, is very good and comparable to other professional video cameras I’ve used.
I think what is neat about the XH-A1 is that there is some extra definition in the detail to start along with some artifacts. For a lot of my filmmaking work, the artifacts would be mistaken for film grain and would actually add to the quality of the image. And if eliminating the artifacts is more important than the additional detail, I can always blur it away in post.
I did not get to experiment with in-camera sharpening and blurring. The XH-A1 provides for image processing of the “raw” image before it is compressed and recorded to tape. And part of the image processing enables control over digital sharpening and digital blurring of the image. I am confident, however, that with some tinkering I could have developed a custom preset to apply the blur in the camera.
Bottom line: The Image Quality of the camera is superb and it affords some interesting options for slightly finer detail at the expense of slight digital artifacts.
