Hi,

I have a Canon MV200i that I haven't had a change to play with fully yet. It's primary shooring aspect ratio is the traditional 4:3 however it has a 16:9 widescreen mode. I have however been told that this is not "true widescreen recording" so I was wondering if someone could clarify what it actually is, how the image gets to 16:9 and any associated issues with using it.

Ideally for me I want to shoot in 16:9 but not if the quality is going to suffer.

Thanks
Andy

When someone tells you that the camera's aren't 'true' widescreen they probably are reffering to the either:

The camera will record from the CCD, then slice a small line off the tope and bottom to make it widescreen.

The camera will record from the CCD, then shove black bars on the top and bottom to make it widescreen.

However, I'm pretty sure a lot of "Widescreen" camcorders have 4:3 CCDs anyway, as my HDR HCRE has a 4MP stills option, but when you set the aspect ratio to 16:9 in drops down to 3MP, suggesting it's just cropping the top and bottom off of a 4:3 CCD picture. :/

__________________
It's not about what camera you use or how much it cost.

It's about what you shoot,
how you shot it,
and how you edit it :P

Your camera doesn't not have a native 16:9 lens and probably letterboxes your image to get the 16:9 look. Therefore you will allways loose 25% resolution if the image is stretched to fit a widescreen, meaning image quality will suffer.
I have f.i. a Sony vx2100 with a 4:3 lens, the camera has letterbox capabilities to produce 16:9 look. On a bigger widescreen I can see that my 4:3 footage is sharper then my 4:3 footage filmed with letterbox and then stretched to fit the screen. On small widescreen tv the difference is not that noticable but the bigger the screen the more obvious it gets.

Hi,

Thanks for the replies.

I'll have to do some tests with it I suppose and see if it turns out to be acceptable. It's quite frustrating as the LCD screen on it is actually 16:9 and it letterboxes to 4:3 when viewing that size.

Thanks
Andy