Here is a non-scientific test i did of the RED one versus my old Sony Z1 HDV camera. The Z1's have been pretty good cameras for us but obviously this is not a very fair comparison. The Z1 footage is being recorded by subsampled CCD chips that aren't even true HD. Then the footage is being compressed heavily by the HDV coded. As RED has touted since the beginning 'Pixel shifting and up-rezzing not spoken here.' Nevertheless these types of studies help us to explain why something we know to be true actually is. Case in point: I know the RED footage looks markedly better than the Z1 footage. But Why? In this example there are obvious difference between depth of field, sharpness/resolution, compression artifacts (which are exacerbated by the h.264 encoding) and basic frame rate issues and interlace versus progressive reasons. It's interesting to note that even though I compressed these equally in compressor, the RED footage is barely affected but the HDV footage looks blockier. Check back frequently for more tests and updates.

Red VS HDV - Red Movie
Red VS HDV - HDV Movie