HF100 purchase

bogart99 · 18-06-2008, 9:44 PM

Made my mind up to buy the HF100, only problem is where from. Best UK price I can get is £530.
Can get from USA for £350, max of £430 if I get nailed for duty, vat etc.
Is the PAL/NTSC thing such a big deal as I will only be viewing on PC or HD tv?
Im tempted by the potential saving of nearly £200.
Could wait till I visit the USA later on and definitely avoid taxes

but would really like to practice with it beforehand.
Comments gratefully received.

redsox_mark · 19-06-2008, 6:29 AM

If only viewing on PC or a HDTV, then no issue with NTSC.
If you might want to create PAL DVDs, or edit mixed with PAL footage, or play on some SD TVs, it can be an issue.

bogart99 · 19-06-2008, 9:24 AM

Will transfer some footage, if thats still the correct term, to DVDs at some stage. If I use my pc to write these dvds they will be NTSC correct? So if my player is ok with NTSC discs again okay?

Regards

redsox_mark · 19-06-2008, 9:30 AM

That can be a complex question, as it depends what you mean by DVD. If you mean a DVD which can play on an ordinary DVD player, that will be standard definition, so you will need to downcovnvert in software. If you downconvert to NTSC MPEG2 for DVD, then you will create a NTSC DVD.

You can also create various discs with high def format on a DVD disc, but these won't play in ordinary DVD players. Look for some posts by Senu which cover this in great detail. Your discs will have 60i rather than 50i (unless you convert), then it is a question of if your player (Blu-Ray player, PS3) can play 60i or not.

True Romance · 19-06-2008, 10:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bogart99

Will transfer some footage, if thats still the correct term, to DVDs at some stage. If I use my pc to write these dvds they will be NTSC correct? So if my player is ok with NTSC discs again okay?

Regards

If you can play USA (region 1) DVD's on your DVD player/TV then you will be fine. I would say most new DVD players and TV all do NTSC nowadays. Also you can recode from NTSC to PAL but not sure what issues that brings to PQ?

rhubarbe · 19-06-2008, 11:25 AM

I have an NTSC HDC-SD7, and this works fine with my HDTV. But may I suggest that rather than messing about with DVDs you buy yourself a Popcornhour?

www.popcornhour.com takes ain internal HDD (or you can stream from a NAS) and it plays the MTS files natively.

OK, if you want to play lots one after the other you do get a buffering pause, but you can use TSSplitter to join them all together...

PCH is only £145 delivered from China inc taxes.

rhubarbe · 19-06-2008, 11:26 AM

OTOH, a 2TB NAS might set you back a bit.