Sony HD AVCHD Handycam HDR-CX440 - Extreme low light shutter speed testing and my thoughts on the camcorder for general low light conditions.

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Testing shooting in the dark with the Sony Handycam HDR-CX440 camcorder using different manual shutter speeds. The video was post-processed by handbrake to convert it to MP4 in HQ 1080p mode as the raw video file is not recognized by Firefox as a playable file. (*.mts). No surprise there. No filtering or other adjustments were performed during the re-encoding process.

Camcorder is set to 60p, low lux on, max quality, AVHCD output format.

It does not shoot as well as I was expecting or hoping for in low light conditions. This particular test was mainly to see how the solar powered yard lights looked at the different shutter speeds. When shooting videos in the dungeon - the low light recording performance is less than ideal to put it mildly. Considering it is advertised for having a special low lux setting this is rather disappointing. Red lighting badly screws up the focus as well. This really makes me unhappy as I really like red lighting in the dungeon for shoots. I give it 2 out of 5 stars considering the cost. Lower light conditions reveal lots of what looks like thermal noise from the CCD receiver plate which requires processing the video through denoise filters (which is time consuming and causes loss of detail!). I have two of these and they both behave identical in all respects. Almost all of the videos posted by my Sir @PupMisfit and myself are shot with these two camcorders. Why two? We sometimes setup two to record multiple angles of a single scene then pick the best angle or angles for the video edit/production cycle.

I'll be recording a lighting and settings test in the dungeon hopefully soon and will post it with comments when done.

The camcorder: (Amazon link: https://amzn.to/2ACKVh9)