A friend of mine uses the HV20 and I was impressed enough by its performance to plan an upgrade to one myself in 2009. One thing I keep noticing in these camcorder posts are people always concerned with low-light performance. Why are so many of you concerned with shooting at dusk or night? I only do that when I have no choice; for 90% of my normal shooting situations, it's still day time. From what I've seen the HV20 does as well as any vidcam during diurnal conditions. I haven't seen any HV20 footage shot at night.
Since I'm a critic I'll bite. It's not a night/dusk thing with these. It comes well before that, and it's not a friendly noise....it's blocky compression worsened nasty noise. If it is evening and there's a storm...plan on noise way worse than you get on a SD cam in complete darkness. And if you bother with HD you'll probably want an HD TV to view it on. When I view my footage on mine, it just doesn't seem very HD'ish. Like the HD TV just shows off the noise a little better, lol. Day time non-storm shots, yeah, the footage rules from these. It goes down rapidly if it is after 5pm and you are shooting a storm.
I myself am "concerned" with the LOWER light, not even low light lol....because from what I've seen, 90% of the storm scenes I've bothered video taping have fallen in it with both my Sony HC1 and Canon HV20. I just feel a little dumb now having spent the money on what is largely worse quality.
Sure it has its moments with certain storms and lighting conditions where it looks really nice. If you get a flash of lightning, some nasty nasty noise jumps out at you. Almost looks like a plaid shirt or something, funky lines and just crap. Same if you pan inside your car for a second or some darker area. It's like, damn, this looks HORRIBLE. I've found pretty much zero help from slowing the shutter down too. It should help, but what I'm seeing it just doesn't look any better.
I feel most dumb for typing this all once again, lol, since it is on here in so many places now on these vid cams. I'd just go and buy one. I know if I read what I'm now typing from someone else before I got mine, I'd still have went and got one. So it's all the more pointless most likely anyway, lol. Just don't expect bad noise at times, expect what I'd label as "What-the-hell-noise". I still think that when I see it, ugly odd junk. The cmos sensor lightning issue, where it chops bolts in half and crap, well that's hardly a concern to me, since the noise during the fast light changes is so horrible anyway...that alone kills any CG activity, making the storm look worse.
As for infinity lock, I'd think the HV30 would be the same as the HV20. You can push and hold the focus button and an infinity icon will pop up. It stays there until you turn the cam off or bump the small wheel. Since learning how to do that push and hold the button for infinity thing, that's been a non-issue for me.
As for Canon vs Sony, with these cheaper HDV cams, I'd lean with Canon. I have both, and the Canon does better with the color. They are both the same with that horrid funoise(I added two letters for two words....it needs a new label on these).
A fun comparison would be hooking up a Sony VX2100 and one of these to the same HD tv with the same storm scene. This kind of noise rapidly chops away at any added resolution.
Oh yes, and never use city night scenes to gauge low light vid cam quality. If there is strong contrast with most areas black or bright, it's harder to get much noise. It's true with still images too. It's those lower contrast scenes way before it is anywhere near dark that are killers.
