What does 4:2:0 mean when refering to video recording format?

Question

This particular "ratio" (or whatever it is) is for a 3 CCD JVC DV Camcorder.

Answer 1

It's a ratio of the color to picture (luminance) information. This a pretty technical area. The most common ratio is 4:1:1, for DV. This means for every 4 pixels of luminance information, there is only 1 horizontal pixel of color information. The vertical pixels are the same for color and luminance. 4:2:0 means that for every 4 pixels of luminance information, there are two pixels horizontal and vertical for color. This might make no sense at all, but reading this will make it a lot easier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4:2:0#Sampling_systems_and_ratios

What does this mean for you? Not much. Don't worry, you wont notice one difference in picture quality. However, 4:2:0 is usually used in PAL systems, so if your living in an NTSC area, then you might want to get the NTSC version of that camera. Hope this helps!