This is a shot of a standard lens resolution chart.  It measures the resolution of lenses in lines per millimeter on the film plane.

This is from the XDcam on board Codec. ISO800, with a Cooke iPanchro 50mm @ T5.6, 180 degree shutter. Cine like 1 Gamma.

The formula of Lens millimeters x 60 = Focal plane distance was used.   Which came out to 9’10” and 1/4 inch from the chart to the sensor.

As you can see, the camera will alias at hyper fine detail.  However, we are talking line pairs that start reaching the resolving power of the 1080p format.  This camera is sharp.  It resolves cleanly 31 lines per millimeter on the sensor itself. This is good for an HD camera.  This chart is used to test lens sharpness, but since we know the lens will out resolve the sensor, its nice to see where the sensor hits its peak, and what happened when we go beyond.  This isn’t measuring numerically what the camera resolves, but what happens to the fine detail its pointed at.

It will however alias blue, as you can see.  None of this is disappointing as its happening at a difficult to encounter frequency.  Perhaps only in the widest deep focus shots of city scape will you encounter straight lines that have such a tight frequency.

I DID NOT EMBED THE VIDEO FOR A REASON!!!!
Download the source file on the Vimeo page.  Its uncompressed QT 1080p straight from the timeline, about 1.5 seconds worth that you can loop to see whats really going on on your home NLE. The link to the Video file.

Click Here: http://vimeo.com/20314787

I shot the test chat with some flags to create shadows, so you can see what the shadows look like on the XD cam.

More detialed tests coming.