" I much prefer my old Panasonic GS400 which had better manual controls and you didn’t have to jump through so many hoops to get a decent picture. I’ve just finished filming my daughter’s nativity and I wish I had used the GS400. " - petrol / flame

Lols - that made my day - wedded as i am by reasons of poverty and stubborness to SD DV.

DV still wins when the light is bad. The trick with any format is to exploit its good bits. The new is rarely the best, in spite of what Kevin in Dixons may say.

In answer to a point furhter back - HDV uses temporal compression, this means that it works in the same bandwidth as sd dv, but the sound is of a much pooer std - decent mp3 v uncompressed for DV. It works best on the sort of program in mmh's film - lots of lovely static landscape type shots. Film a flock of seagulls or falling leaves for example and the res soon drops to sd level as those bits get spread out across all those changing pixels.

They should have left dv alone and given us HD proper with 50 mbit when techically possible at consumer prices - alas.