It has been a long time coming and looks like it is worth the wait. The Infinity Series Digital Media Camcorder DMC 1000 is delivering what it promised almost three years ago at its unveiling.
But, in the meantime, amid the wide range of new cameras available Infinity has been lost in the noise of other new product releases. It has some remarkable features but three years on and still not fully enabled, has the Infinity missed the boat?
At its unveiling Grass Valley promised a solid state camera with a price of under £25k with the ability to record 10 bit JPEG 2000, in a MXF wrapper, to removable and cheap hard drive media. At the time the price was lower than any other three chip CCD camera.
I suggested, at the time, that Grass Valley could only make a three chip camera if CMOS sensors were used. Not surprisingly the production model sports CMOS sensors, which cost less to manufacture. The protracted development of Infinity is said to have been caused by the desire to wait for the less expensive Xensium sensor. Hitting the right price point is essential in today’s market but the camera’s price point is less of a selling point now than it was three years ago.
Personally I still favour CCDs as the benchmark for image quality. CMOS has its advantages namely higher frame rates and lower power consumption. Grass Valley say their sensor has less noise than CCD, we will defer judgement on that claim for the time being. The sensor was designed in-house and in collaboration with Thomson Technology’s Silicon Components division. In 2006 it won the Jean-Pierre Noblanc Award for the most innovative product. (A full evaluation of the sensor will be undertaken in a future issue.)
The Infinity uses Compact Flash and Rev Pro media. Rev is available in 35GB and 70GB capacity. They are robust looking drives that are more durable than the early Iomega Zip media and of course much faster.
Considered by some to be a dying technology, removable hard drives, at this moment in time, offer far larger capacity than CF cards at a fraction of the price. It will be some time before compact flash cards reach the Rev hard drive price/performance.
Primarily designed for news in the USA, the media is cheap enough for corporate or production clients to take away, thus removing the need for in the field cloning of data.
The camera also sports two compact flash slots. Ejection of CF and Rev media is by depressing a small button under the flap that covers both drive slots. There is a delay while the media un-mounts and it is possible to close the flap before the Rev Pro media ejects where it then jams itself on the flap preventing it from opening. Fortunately there is room to push the media back into the slot with a pen. These teething issues are usually solved as more cameras are used in the field.
There is a wide choice of recording options. Frame rates for the early cameras are limited (no 24 or 25p) but the addition of 720 60p has its place for slow motion work. I’m sure the 720p is designed for US networks transmitting at 60p, but on this side of the pond we trade the drop in resolution for the benefits of slowing down 60fps to 25fps in post.
It also does 1080 60i as well as PAL and NTSC in DV25. Not forgetting JPEG 2000 in 50/75 and 100Mbs in 10 bit 4:2:2. An optional board enables MPEG 2 in 4:2:0 SD and HD 60-80 Mb/s ‘I’ frame. So this choice of data rates provides a means of trading recording quality for endurance. Viewfinder is a monochrome CRT and the connector type is HDMI.
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