Absolutely Chris S. - I do appreciate the attempt at comparing these two camera's but truly you're comparing apples to oranges here. The HV20's optics is multiple years ahead of the Sony's, and as far as consumer cameras go one could argue is the best HD consumer optics available at its price-point.

No, the motor noise is not less. :P
Actually, its louder on the HV20...
Something messed up in the compression process, maybe the format mixing is to blame.

Nope, I was wrong.
The HV20 IS quieter!

That's not important which one is a bit quiter - HV20 is very, very loud camcorder in fact. I have one, so you can be suprised why did I react so on your movie. Just as I wrote before, I like the truth :P Your comparison is unfair.

Yea it is louder, but I don't know why it was so quiet in the video...
If you turn your sound up all the way you can hear a little noise.

its called blue ray

No, it's called 2K, or 4K
This is immensely big picture. 2 times bigger or so than HD.
Now it mostly is used for timelapses, because photocamera's can shoot at this resolution. But you do have some pro cam's which shoot 2K...

thats frigen amazing

Yes, you might want to take a look at red.com and check out the 4k digital cinema cameras. They do 4 times the resolution of HD!

Because it isn't so huge, especially in such format. SD video in vimeo window looks exactly the same as HD. SD video doesn't look so compressed like here.

so... this comparison test is bogus?

No, its not.
The video from the SD camera looks like that non-compressed. (Well, I should say compressed for the internet because all video is compressed in the camera.)
But its not that different from the actual file. Vimeo is good at keeping the quality high.

And worldidol, if your statement is true, the both would look the same. Keep in mind this is a low end SD cam.

I believe it's Vimeo issue. Maybe it always compress in some ratio and that's why SD looks so bad. I had worse SD camcorder from Samsung and video didnt' look so garbage. My photo camera takes better video than this "HC38". Once again: In Vimeo window, SD video should be THE SAME as HD. Only difference can be in crispness, sharpness, overall feeling, but it's not HD SD issue, but camcorder's. I'm not SD's advocate, just want some things to be clear :) Only small part of us is able to get a full quality of HD, for others (especially for these who watch movies on computer monitor) - HD is only a small step further.

The only thing about this test that is dubious is the fact that the SD video has to be upscaled to be compared. SD cameras do not shoot at HD resolution (obviously), but this is an HD formatted movie so the SD video has been stretched. I wouldn't exactly call that a Vimeo issue, it's more like a choice of comparison. A more honest comparison might be to show the SD at its relative resolution. It would look a lot sharper, but be a lot smaller. dalas actually posted a video that does exactly this: vimeo.com/335558.

I wouldn't call this a bogus comparison though. It really does illustrate how much more data is in an HD video.

nice...

No, the HD is video.
The HV20 is more stable than the DCR-HC38.

Nope.
Single CMOS. Same as the HV20.