Today I attended the 2005 DV Expo West and I must say I was quite impressed with all the new hardware. The show was clearly dominated by the two new cameras from Panasonic and Canon. The show was also packed with a number of smaller companies who where all pushing new HD compatible software and hardware. One notable absence from the show though, was Sony who was not where to be found. Read on for the full report.

The first booth I checked out was the Panasonic booth which was completely packed with people trying to get their hands on one of a number of  HVX's scattered throughout the area. Panasonic also had footage from the HVX200 playing off tape, through an HD deck directly to an HD monitor and the footage looked impressive. The first monitor I checked out was only about 17" and had to down convert all the 1080P footage to 720P but the footage still looked extemely sharp and clean. They had footage from various locations and in various formats and it all just popped of the screen. The basketball footage which I believe was 60i looked as good as any broadcast HD I've seen.

The second monitor I checked out looked to be a 42" plasma and had some different footage playing on it. The footage looked good but I did notice some noise throughout the picture,  though this footage was shot in auto mode and was much more point and shoot then the rest of the professionally shot scenes. There have been a couple comments already about the noise levels seen coming from the camera and it will be interesting to see how the camera performs once some independent tests are done. Panasonic was also showing off some footage that made use of the camera's variable frame rates which certainly grabbed my attention. The slow motion footage looked amazing and is certainly something most shooters with sub $10,000 cameras are not used to having acces to. Overall I was definitely impressed with the camera and for $6,000 (not including P2 cards which realistically put you up to atleast $8,000) it looks like a steal.

Next I headed over to the Canon both where they had a bunch of XL H1's laid out and also had footage showing on what looked like a 23" HD monitor. I must say that I was skeptical of a $9,000  camera that only shoots HDV but as soon as I saw the footage I quickly changed my mine. The HD footage looked incredible both 1080i and the 1080F, which the engineers at Canon must have worked extremely hard on because it looked no different than 1080P. The footage was also extremely sharp and clean, it was hard to believe it was HDV. Canon was also showing footage that was shot uncompressed through the camera's HD-SDI output, though I could not see much of an improvement. Over all the XL H1 was a pleasant surprise and certainly raises the bar for the HDV format.

Its hard to say how the cameras will do head to head in a real world test with both being so different, but judging by the footage it should certainly be close. As for availability the Canon XL H1 is just hitting the US market and the Panasonic HVX200 will be released on December 29, though according to one of the Panasonic reps quantity will be very limited, especially around the release date and will probably remain that way for some time because of the huge demand.