video camera sony hdd

Why are my videos grainy lookin’& why does my video quality suck especially when filiming in the dark/night?

My videos that come out of my sony handycam DCR-sr300 hdd camcorder, has sort of grainy videos. Is it because i’m moving alot or does my camera suck or is it my lens or something?
actually no, the dcr-sr300 has good reviews on it and it has been only a few years it has been out. Its the only latest standard defintion camcorder before the hd camcorders!

The problem is light, simply put. All digital cameras and camcorders have a sensing device, either a CCD or a CMOS sensor, which responds to light. Each pixel on that sensor needs a certain amount of light hitting it before it will respond.

The amount of light needed is based on two factors — the size of each pixel, and the electronic gain used to boost the signal from each sensor. For the same light level, you can get a better signal by increasing the size of the sensor. Sensors are measured based on a standardized diagonal measurement. I have two fairly good HDV camcorders, which have 1/3″ and 1/2.7″ sensors, respectively. Some high end pro camcorders will have 2/3″ sensors, and thus, respond to light much better. Some consumer camcorders run 1/4″ or even 1/6″ sensors, and thus, offer less light sensitivity. Your Sony has a 1/2.9″ sensor, which is pretty good for a consumer camcorder.

Another factor is based on how you get color… CCD and CMOS sensors only react to light, not color. For cameras with a single sensor, there’s a color mask that sends green to some, red to some, blue to others.. basically tossing out 2/3 of the light at any given time. Most sensors have 2 green pixels for every red and blue… you Sony’s “ClearVid” sensor actually has six green for every blue and red.

Most professional camcorders, rather than mask light, use a dichroic prism to split it, sending it on to three different sensors. This process isn’t lossless, but the loss through the prism is fairly small… so with the same sized sensor, a so-called “3-chip” camera will collect almost three times as much light as a single-chip camera.

Light collecting is also based on pixel size, so for example, a plain old DV camcorder with a 1/3″ sensor will have better low light imaging than my HDV camcorder with its 1/3″ sensor… fewer pixels convering the same space, each pixel gets more light. 3-chip HDV camcorders typically use much lower resolution sensors to allow for larger pixels, rather than full 1920×1080 sensors.. they get the HD image by offsetting the sensors and interleaving the colors.

So now, the next issue is gain. The signal from each pixel in your camcorder is very small, so it gets amplified before it’s turned into a digital signal. At some point, the level of the signal is close enough to the natural level of electrical noise in the system, and so, as the amplification increases, you start to see noise in the image… that noise is the “grain” you see in your images at lower light levels.

One thing you can control here, which may help, is shutter speed. Many camcorders will default, in automatic mode, to 1/60th second or higher. But better units can go to 1/30th or even sometimes less, and naturally, if you open the shutter twice as long, you get twice as much light. So I recommend you read your manual and lean about manual settings… I believe your camcorder can be run at 1/30th second (assuming you’re not already doing this).

Bottom line, though: camcoders are not so great at lower light settings… even fairly high end professional units will offer poor results without a decent light source. Your camera is well above average for a single CCD consumer oriented unit. But you may still want to consider a light.

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