Sony AVCHD Video Quality

When I was searching for an HD video camera to purchase, I kept coming back to the Sony AVCHD brand. I had good luck with using one of their still cameras before and had decided it was time for an upgrade. I spent several months researching the different types of cameras that I could use. The one difficulty that I had when doing this research though, was the need to know what video quality a Sony AVCHD video camera would produce. After scouring the internet I ended up with no videos that showed what the camera had to offer. So I took a leap of faith and purchased the HDR-UX1 from their AVCHD lineup of cameras. It ended up being a very solid camera.

In my desire to fix the difficulties that I faced when buying an HD video camera, I have decided to create several (18 to be precise) test videos with my new camera. Each of these will showcase the various quality settings of the camera.

The Sony HDR-UX1 came with four quality settings:

-HDHQ+: 12 Megabits-per-second recording quality.

-HDHQ: 9 Megabits-per-second recording quality.

-HDSP: 7 Megabits-per-second recording quality.

-HDLP: 5 Megabits-per-second recording quality.

The camera records at a native 1080p 1440x1080i but with Sony Vegas it can be re-rendered to any quality that you prefer.

I recorded 8 clips outside my house, each of varying quality from the HDHQ+ to HDLP and rendered them in both AVI and WMV for quality and size purposes. There are also two clips that I resized to 720p and uploaded to Vimeo for HD streaming. (Link included after the break.)

All 18 of the video download links and descriptions are included in the link at the bottom!

Overall the shooting for the clips only took 30 minutes, but the editing itself took hours because it required constant rendering of each video. Its finally finished though, I hope you like it!

To see the quality of AVCHD simply go here:

This is where you will find all of the download links for the AVCHD test videos!