Comparison: SDI vs analog component

With the announcement of TriCaster 40 v2 and it's new features a lot of people are looking at it with renewed interest but are hesitant because of the lack of SDI inputs. So I thought I'd do a little comparison between the two. I expected to see a little more noise in the analog signal but not much other difference.

Methodology: 

• Played NewTek's standard demo clips (mov format) in a DDR on the TriCaster 8000.
• Output both SDI and component analog signals at 1080i.
• Ran those two signals into inputs on the same TC8000
• Used an M/E to setup a split screen.
• Recorded the main out, the SDI input, the component input and the split screen from the m/e

This way I could compare everything with exactly the same number of compression cycles.

Results:

Any difference in noise in the images is completely overwhelmed by the mpeg compression artifacts.
My particular TriCaster's analog out has slightly more contrast than the SDI. I pretty much fixed it with a couple of clicks in the proc-amp.

Conclusion:

Don't sweat the SDI/component difference for quality reasons. To my eye the analog picture didn't look worse than the SDI just a little different. I suspect you'd actually see more of a difference between any two individual cameras then I was seeing between analog and digital.

I could detect a tiny bit of noise using static test signals but not with real world video. If you were coming in from a good quality camera and looking at the uncompressed video you might be able to see the difference but by the time it's compressed using even a very high quality codec you are going to be hard pressed to notice a difference.

See for yourself:
update: download a full res video sample

The first image is enlarged 200% the video was not proc-amped at all in these images.

 

Just so you know the SDI is on the left