American Cinematographer - July 2007 - 86

New Products & Services JVC GY-HD250U by Jay Holben I was eager to try out the new GYHD250U professional 1280x720 HDV camera from JVC. This is no “prosumer” handycam boasting “HD,” this is a professional-grade camera utilizing the HDV format for cost-effective high definition. Right off the bat, the GY-HD250U is a breath of fresh air in the small digital-camcorder arena. The JVC designers have adopted many professional camcorder functions and incorporated them into this camera — what JVC calls “compact shoulder form” — while seamlessly integrating the common benefits of a small digital prosumer camera. Upon picking up the camera, I noted that the gain switches, whitebalance settings and power switch were exactly where I would expect to find them on a full-sized professional camera, easily accessible to the left hand and controlled through the same switches and buttons with which I am accustomed. This was wonderful to see. The 250 is designed for field operation as well as the studio — no fumbling for buttons at the back or top of the camera while shooting handheld. Everything you need on the fly is immediately and comfortably accessible to either hand in natural shooting positions. The camera has a 1⁄3" bayonet 86 July 2007 mount and can accept many available professional ENG lenses; adapters are available to accept 1⁄2" and 2⁄3" lens mounts. An additional benefit to this, beyond the flexibility of choosing the best lens for your application and price range, is that the iris control is actually a physical iris in the individual lenses, not an electronic dial or switch on the camera body. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is also a 250,000-pixel 3.5" color TFT LCD flip-out screen. This is not something you’d expect to find on a professional camera, but in the world of small-camera digital video such screens are invaluable. I was excited to see this low-end feature integrated into a highend camera. Other great features of the 250 are a padded speaker on the left side that enables the operator to casually monitor sound while shooting. It’s comfortably placed and quite functional. The “compact shoulder form” is exactly what the term implies: a camera that sits very comfortably on your shoulder and weighs a mere 10 pounds with viewfinder, microphone, Fujinon 16x lens, and Anton-Bauer Dionic90 battery. An additional feature is the viewfinder extension (with an adjustable range of over 2.5"!) that allows you to shoot from right or left eye, offering incredible flexibility. The physical design of the camera is the best of both worlds, prosumer and professional. Digging deeper, I found the menu control to be a bit clumsy. To access the camera’s main menu, you must press the menu button and the shutter control wheel. This is frustrating, and I can’t imagine any benefit that would outweigh the inconvenience of struggling to get to the menus, which I was rarely able to easily do with my left hand while holding the camera. Even when I put the camera down, turned it around and used my right hand, it often took two or three tries to get into the menu; I often went into the first page of the menu — one step too far — because I had inadvertently pressed the button too many times. I wanted to easily access the camera’s menu on the fly, but I was never really able to do that because of the two-button requirement. The GY-HD250U is a 1⁄3" 3-CCD native 16:9 HDV camera. The imager is 4.864mm x 2.739mm, giving it a diagonal of 5.5mm (for a lens equivalent of 2.3x to 16mm). I tested two Fujinon lenses with it, the Th16x5.5BRMU (5.5mm to 88mm, provided by Birns & Sawyer in Hollywood) — one of the standard lenses offered in available JVC packages — and the HTS18x4.2BRM (4.2mm to 76mm, provided by JVC). Both lenses had a considerable amount of breathing but had very clean, medium-contrast images. With ENG lenses, the right-hand grip is on the lens, including the zoom rocker, VTR start/stop button, and other controls (depending on the lens). This makes the camera very easy to hold, and with the handgrip at the front of the camera, the balance is distributed more evenly. JVC also manufactures its own film-lens adapter, the HZ-CA13U, which connects to the 1⁄3" bayonet mount and can accept any PL cine lens. This is not like many other adapters on the market; rather, it is more of a standard extension tube with only a single element to help refocus the cine lens’ image directly onto the camera’s imager. Such a simple adapter has exponentially fewer elements than even the standard ENG lens, and as a result, is actually a full 2 stops faster than standard lenses. With the Fujinon lenses, I tested the camera’s ISO and found a result between 200 and 320 in 24p mode and

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2007