John Jackman gives an extensive user-based review of the Sony HVR-Z1U (a HDV camcorder) in action. He shot a short historical drama in the Sony's 1080-50i and then converted to 24 fps for final output to film. The review has extensive notes about the ergonomics and performance of the Z1 and a critique of the final output by professional DPs. Interestingly, he didn't choose to use the Z1's 24F mode due to the image degradation and artifacting that Adam Wilt has written about, instead using the PAL 50i and converting to 24P.
It looks like Sony's CineFrame might be a dud due to bugs in the interpolating algorithm. If you haven't read Adam Wilt's CineFrame write-up, you really should since it has tons of information about frames, fields, and film.
Now, Canon is pretty mum about how they're getting 24F and 30F out of the XL-H1, but it looks like what they're doing is running the CCDs at 48 Hz for 24F (60 Hz for 30F) and integrating the two interlaced fields into a single frame. Since the CCDs are running at 48 Hz, it should be better than Sony's hybrid solution (the sensor continues to run at 60 Hz and the Sony is throwing away some field information).
Canon says in its marketing literature (in Japan) that the XL-H1 is capable of 800 lines of resolution, which would make it 10% higher than 720P. I'm not sure if this is just interlaced or if the frame modes have this resolution too. With HDV, the Canon XL-H1 uses a 3:2 pulldown for 24F, which will give the characteristic herky-jerkies if output directly to a standard television. I haven't tried to do any frame grabs yet of the footage I'm taking to see just how much interlaced motion artifacting there is.
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