Quality of video from Sony HDR-CX240

The quality of video from the Sony HDR CX240 is a little disappointing. We can get 1080p video but it's a little pixelated or has lots of artifacts. You can see it one a test stream from YouTube we recorded last night. Is this because it's zoomed in so far? Or are the artifacts caused by processing? We've never seen higher quality video from the camera but we've also never watched it without having been encoded or processed in some way. I suppose we should try recording to a mini SM card to see what quality the video is.

I should add that the camera is set to record at 1080i while we're streaming to YouTube at 720p.

The video is being encoded by a Teradek VidiU

Precisely what artifacts are you referring to? I watched your link at full screen and didn't notice what I'd call pixeling. What I saw was mushy color and some color noise. I'd say a combination of low lighting (typical of LDS chapels) and perhaps some aggressive JPEG compression.

A manual white balance would help, but to really get professional results, you need to add lighting by the kilowatt.

justincy wrote:Is this because it's zoomed in so far?

What kind of zoom? Some cameras have a combination of optical and digital zoom. If you've gone into digital zoom, then the resolution goes down. That's how it works. I've got a very old JVC and I have a settings for "optical zoom only" so I can't go into digital zoom.

But even full optical zoom can have issues, as it magnifies any camera motion and further cuts down on the amount of light reaching the sensor.

justincy wrote:I should add that the camera is set to record at 1080i while we're streaming to YouTube at 720p.

Just keep in mind that when you're running mixed mode, something somewhere is having to interpolate from one to another. Just because it can do it doesn't mean it can do it well.

russellhltn wrote:Precisely what artifacts are you referring to? I watched your link at full screen and didn't notice what I'd call pixeling. What I saw was mushy color and some color noise. I'd say a combination of low lighting (typical of LDS chapels) and perhaps some aggressive JPEG compression.

Thanks. I wasn't sure what the technical term for the distortion was.

russellhltn wrote:A manual white balance would help, but to really get professional results, you need to add lighting by the kilowatt.

I tried changing the white balance on the camera. It changed the colors a little but had no real effect on the color noise. But I was just using a few presets for white balance. I don't know if it has manual controls.

russellhltn wrote:

justincy wrote:Is this because it's zoomed in so far?

What kind of zoom? Some cameras have a combination of optical and digital zoom. If you've gone into digital zoom, then the resolution goes down. That's how it works. I've got a very old JVC and I have a settings for "optical zoom only" so I can't go into digital zoom.

But even full optical zoom can have issues, as it magnifies any camera motion and further cuts down on the amount of light reaching the sensor.

Optical zoom. The HDR-CX240 has 54x zoom. I had it zoomed about 2/3 as far as it could go.

What do you think would be the easiest solution? More light? Would a better camera make much of a difference?

The camera's a little misleading on the zoom. There's a label on the top of it that says 54x zoom but the technical specs say it's only 27x optical zoom. The other 27 is "Clear Image Zoom". Either way, the digital zoom was disabled.

See if there's any settings for "gain up" or low light. Another camera may do better. You could also try moving closer to minimize the zoom. For this one, I think the real solution is more light and a manual white balance. If you were to take it outside, I think you'd see a big difference.

Better lighting is one thing I'd really like to see.