Sony HDR-FX1 Camcorder Review

by Tom Hardwick

The high definition day begins ? Tom Hardwick takes a look at the Sony HDR-FX1 and asks ? is it for you?

Suddenly and quite unexpectedly the world of filmmaking has changed once again. Last time this happened was in 1995 when Sony introduced the Mini DV VX700 and VX1000, just beating Panasonic to the post. That day 10 years ago signalled the death knell for all the analogue formats, though I must say I?ve been pretty surprised to see that even today Sony still list one Hi-8 model in their line-up. With the size and weight and performance advantages of even the cheapest Mini DV models ? one wonders who?s buying Hi-8? The new HDV format is a "consumer high-definition video format" proposed by a consortium, the core of which is composed of JVC, Sony, Canon and Sharp.

The VX1000 was followed by the VX2000 and Sony Professional started to see these being used in vast quantities by the broadcasting organisations around the world. So they set to work to produce a professional version which shot in DVCAM and into which you could plug proper XLR (rather than 1/8? mini jack) microphones. They called this the PD150 and sales soared. The FX1 we?re looking at here has a Z1U DVCAM version that has XLR inputs, is able to shoot in HDV NTSC or PAL and sells for about ?1000 more. I?m sure the BBC will be buying skip loads of them for the simple reason that the PD170 has been so successful and because cameras are cheap and people are expensive.

I spent many a day with the Sony FX1 cradled in my hands at the Video Forum back in January, and I'd say this - if you're about to buy a VX2100, PD170, DVX100A, XL2 and so on ? hold on. Not that I?m advocating early adoption as a way of life, it?s just that this FX1 has been priced to attract and catch those in the ?prosumer? class, and not simply those that must have the latest and newest kit. I also suspect that Sony have priced the FX1 at just over ?2000 so as to get the format well and truly established before Panasonic arrive with their high definition product. Panasonic are not part of the HVD consortium, which means that in all probability they will come along with a hi-def camcorder that doesn?t record out to Mini DV as the FX1 does, but records to solid-state media. We shall see; I?ll bet that before the end of this year we?ll know more.

First impressions
This new Sony is a delight. It is bathed in good ideas and has actual (rather than menu) buttons and switches scattered all over it, and my labelled photos will pinpoint a lot of them. It?s a handsome beast in its deep metallic charcoal colour, and the description of it being a VX2100 on steroids is a pretty good one. The camera has a wonderful 12x Zeiss lens (f1.6 to f2.8, 4.5mm to 54mm) feeding big 1/3" native 16:9 chips. It has an excellent top mounted 16:9 LCD screen that doesn't obstruct any of the controls and which can be flipped any which way. I love the balance, the weight, the price, the facilities, the way so many aspects can be configured to suit you and the way you film. You can even switch the Steadyshot (not the vari-angle prism method as on the VX21000, but vibrating internal elements as pioneered by the TRV900) into 4 different modes - one designed for wide-angle converter use. You can set zoom speeds with gentle acceleration/deceleration curves built in. You have an aperture control wheel that's machined knurled from a solid lump of alloy and is beautifully damped. This control is light years better than the silly wonky wheel fitted to all of the competition.

Oh I love this beast. I simply can't imagine why (when they have no competition) Sony is selling it so cheaply - it's currently selling for less than the price of a new PD170. The pictures on a HD CRT JVC studio monitor are breath-taking and those gathered round expressed the view that on static shots it was just as if we were looking through an open window. The superb lens is Zeiss T* coated, and this is justifiably acknowledged to be the very finest lens coating in the world. Sony is not buying this technology cheaply and it gives confidence that this lens is able to push the DV envelope to bursting.

The good points
The FX1 is a typical Sony, and anyone coming to this camera from a TRV, VX or PD model will feel right at home. It runs off normal NP-F batteries and the new 970 battery will power it for well over 4 hours with the screen open and using all the controls as much as you like. It records onto absolutely standard Sony Premium Mini DV tape, though Sony will market a HDV tape to ensure you don?t see dropouts. The tapes record for 62 minutes in either SD (standard definition) or HD (high definition) mode. This means you can use the camera as a normal Mini DV and never use the HD mode. Or you can shoot HD and let the camera down convert the signal to SD and send this signal down the Firewire. The resulting EDL can be used when you?re up and running with a HD edit system to re-edit in HD.

The camera?s fitted with two switchable neutral density filters (excellent). It records in MPEG2, the same compression as is used for DVD, which is how it can fit so much information onto a normal tape. It has shutter speeds from 1/3rd sec up to 1/10000th. You can apply gain up to +18dB independently of the aperture. There are two zebra settings, 70% and 100%. You can plug in LANC controllers, headphones, microphones, mains power, Firewire in / out, analogue in out and component out. It has Cinetone / Cineframe modes, 6 Picture Profiles and optical image stabilization. The lens is still a 12x zoom, but Sony have followed the Panasonic lead, and made it much more wide-angle. In 35 mm terms it now goes from a respectably wide 32.5 mm to 390 mm.

There?s a neat trick up the viewfinder?s sleeve. At any time and at whatever focal length you?re using you can push a button up near the zoom rocker and the viewfinder jumps into enlarged mode. This 4x enlargement of the screen (without any apparent pixellation of the high quality image) allows you to do critical focus checks, but the great pity is that this mode is disabled when recording. I fitted a conventional 4:3 Hoodman to the screen, but this was hardly necessary as even with a 100 watt spot light beaming right down onto the screen it was still perfectly useable. This is without a doubt the best side-screen I?ve ever seen.

The camera offers a whole host of options in the menu system. A Picture Profile button allows you to instantly recall six groups of image tweaks for various shooting conditions and artistic preferences. Another feature is the P-Menu, which allows you to put your most used menu items on a little one-push shortcut menu. There are also three buttons that you can assign to any one of six functions, so that, for instance, you could have one button set to switch the Steadyshot on and off. The shot transition button records a macro of sorts to automatically carry out a series of camera settings between two points. So, for example, you could set up to film from extreme close-up to distant wide shot, focus-pull-and-zoom and also effect an exposure change, all at the touch of a button.

The bad points
Ready to go it weighs 2kg. People are surprised how light it is when they pick it up, but this really is a reflection on the camera size suggesting greater weight. The viewfinder is a long way back, and using it rather than the top screen forces you to hold the fairly heavy camera out in front of you. As it?s a swivelling LCD finder fed via a ribbon cable many have expressed the thought that it would be nice to have it interchangeable with the top screen, so that your shoulder could carry some of the weight for extended shoots. Sony does sell an accessory shoulder support by the way, along with a mild 0.8x wide-angle converter.

The camera is not as good in low light as the VX2100 it will no doubt replace, and this is due to a variety of reasons. First off the lens is f2.8, half a stop slower than the VX at full telephoto. Then to enable higher definition the CCDs are covered in much smaller sensors, and smaller CCD sensors mean less light gathering power. On the plus side the video amplifiers are the very latest and very quiet, so clawing back some of this light loss is very feasible by simply upping the gain.

HDV is a chicken and egg scenario at the moment. We can happily shoot away all day in HD, but when we come to show or edit or distribute the footage it will present one or two problems. Things will change, but at the moment very few people have HD capable TVs that will take full advantage of the huge 1440 x 1080 resolution. Compare that with DV?s 720 x 576 and you?ll see that there?s four times the picture information within each and every frame, and this is strikingly obvious to all who see the results. So at the moment we can?t burn HDV to DVD or VHS, but we can edit in full HDV mode and record the edited masterpiece back to the camera. Duplicating this tape is Firewire easy, and the camera can make SD copies by down converting in real time.

The FX1 has no memory stick facility. This may come as a surprise to many given the amazing 1.12 mega pixel frame, but in reality it confirms Sony?s commitment to make this an excellent movie camera rather than a compromise movie / still camera. There is also the problem of dropout. When you shoot an hour in Mini DV you might experience a frame or two that have ?sparklies?, tiny dropouts where individual pixels have become misplaced. These frames are easily corrected in Photoshop should that be necessary, though I notice the broadcasters often don?t bother. MPEG2 (HDV) is a different proposition altogether, and dropouts can have a severely damaging effect on the film, causing (in the worst case) the picture to freeze for up to half a second. I have yet to see this happen, but the possibility exists. Use the best tape you can afford.

Another point. If you wish to film in 4:3 rather than 16:9 then you have to film in the SD mode. But if you film 16:9 in HDV, you can of course crop the image and you can get the computer to down-scale the HD to SD.

Picture quality
Demonstrating the HDR-FX1 is a salesman?s delight as far as subjective image quality is concerned. Using the camera?s menu you can perform very fine adjustments on the image, from sharpness to colour phase, and get exactly the look you want. A cinematographer with an eye and time to experiment with the Cineframe and Cinematone modes can fine-tune the Sony to give a certain look and feel to the image, at the same time gaining more exposure latitude than is possible with SD. Finding a TV screen that is capable of displaying the full 1440x1080 resolution is not easy or cheap, but they?ll be along in great numbers from now on.

At the Video Forum the FX1 was working alongside a Panasonic DVX100A, both images being fed into identical and adjacent Sony LCD TVs. Both cameras are the same size, weight and price, yet the A/B test was dramatic and ruthless, bringing gasps from the audience. The SD Panasonic looked just like S-VHS in this comparison test, yet we all know how good that Leica lensed camera actually is.

The 12x Zeiss zoom fitted to the Sony does suffer slightly from barrel distortion at the wide-angle end, but the lack of flare and CCD smear make this a fine lens to work with. My Bolex Aspheron extends the wide-angle end down to a pretty impressive 16 mm in SLR terms, and this ? combined with the lack of distortion ? makes for very dramatic footage. The zoom ring can be operated by either of two rockers or manually with a protruding lever and has end stops and focal length markings. It?s still servo controlled such that crash zooms are not really possible, but the servo means that battery consumption is kept very low.

Audio
If you plan to record using an external microphone such as a radio or shotgun for instance, you'll need an XLR to 1/8-inch adapter to get your microphone into the camera. You can switch between mic and line levels and also between the automatic gain control and manual. A single dial sets the gain for both channels in manual mode. A see-through cover snaps back into place to protect the auto/manual switch from accidental changes. Of course the camera mates beautifully with an XLR box such as the BeachTek DXA-4 or 8, and with this in place many audio constraints are lifted. There is a simple 2-channel level meter on the LCD and in the viewfinder, and this can be enlarged via menu access.

DV audio is carried as PCM data while HDV audio is carried as MPEG-1 Layer 2 data (MP2). This precursor to MP3 is, like MP3, a ?perceptual? encoding system that discards audio information that DSP computations indicate will be masked by other audio information. In short, it is a lossy encoding system.

Editing and distribution
Canopus has the Edius Pro 3 system; Sony has Vegas and Matrox has Axio. There?s Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6, and Premiere Pro and Avid Xpress Pro will be along shortly. HDV is by its very nature MPEG2, and for frame accurate editing will have to be uncompressed and subsequently recompressed for storing back onto tape. The real time editing we?ve become used to will be some time in returning, but the relentless power increases of computers will ensure that this will happen sometime in the future. You?ll also need a lot more hard disc space on your computer. This may sound strange when you can record in HD for an hour onto the camera tape, but editing the transcoded footage will generally mean a 3 to 5x storage increase. Distribution for the short term will be in SD of course, as manufacturers of computer programs, DVD burners, blanc disc and DVD player manufacturers rush to catch up. Even after Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs reach the market sometime next year, standard definition DVDs will still be dominant for a long while, I suspect.

Conclusions
There are almost limitless image tweaks which let you get the picture you want in almost any situation, though in low-light situations, the Sony VX2100 is claimed by Sony to be a slightly better performer, but only by a stop or so. Of course the VX2100 has very slightly bigger chips and a faster maximum aperture at full telephoto, so differential focus effects are easier to obtain. It?s also ?550 cheaper than the FX1, so there?s still good reason to keep the famous VX2100 camcorder on your shortlist.

An important point: on an SD television, whether by S-video or by component video outputs, the advantages of HDV and higher resolution will not be apparent. The image of the HDR-FX1 ? even allowing for the advanced chip design and beautiful lens ? could appear very slightly soft on an SD set, but only when compared with the incredible sharpness of the VX2100. This is really a warning that if your TV is not one of the very few that are able to display the HD image then you won?t see any improvement in exchanging your VX/PD, XL2, DVX and so on for an FX1. What you will have of course is the potential to future protect, where you shoot in HD but edit and distribute in SD. Come the day when Blu-Ray HD DVD is here and you?re editing and viewing in HD, then you can re-load the tapes and output HD versions of the edit, using the original EDL. In the meantime of course you?ll be enjoying the ergonomic beauty of the FX1, and shooting native 16:9. I feel this last point is of much greater importance in mid 2005 than the HD capability is, as far more TVs are 16:9 than they are HD capable.

There are advantages for some purposes to originating on HDV, but I certainly don't think that it means that standard definition DV is suddenly obsolete. HDV is just another format to consider. Without doubt though, the HDR-FX1 will be the camcorder of the year, and Sony will sell every one they can manufacture. These are exciting times.