FEATURES
DVW-790/790WSP Digital Betacam
Camcorder User Guide
Neil Thompson
Image Creation Group
Sony Broadcast & Professional UK
July 1999
1 Introduction
This guide aims to provide some of the information not covered in the user manual relating to the set-up menus
in the new ‘700 series Digital Betacam camcorders. Some recommended menu settings are included for the
camcorder, which can hopefully be regarded as ‘sensible’ alternatives to the Sony factory setting.
The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) used in the camera sections allows the use of set-up cards to become a
viable way of aligning a camera. Processes such as detail correction, gamma, matrix, knee, and clipping are all
performed entirely within the digital domain, and can therefore be set and transferred accurately and repeatably
from a memory card.
The new generation of camcorders, i.e. the ‘709 and the ‘790 now have 12 bit A/D converters and a new DSP
chipset, which, combined with the latest PowerHAD widescreen CCDs, gives improved noise performance and
dynamic range. Many new features are also incorporated, such as a built in secondary colour corrector (multi-
matrix), true-eye knee saturation processing and auto white balance offset.
The CCDs however, are still analogue devices, and should any drift occur features such as auto black balance
and auto shading are provided to correct this. It should also be noted that for cameras to be matched they will still
need to be white balanced on the same target from the same point of view after being loaded with the same set-
up card.
2 Menu Controls.
2.1 User Menu
The camcorder has two levels of menu control. The user menu is accessed simply by the menu switches on the
side of the camera. As delivered from the factory this contains a limited number of pages of functions considered
