Sony HDR FX7 camera or Canon XH A1 camera?
by John Frey
on
Dec 20, 2006 at 2:49:05 am
Haven't been able to find a real evaluation of Sony's new HVR FX7 camera, brother to the HVR V1U. For the listed price of $2,885.00 (in stock) from trusted seller B&H Photo Video, the cam is hard to beat. For this purchase, I don't need 24P and can live without XLR audio and some of the advanced settings of the V1U. I like the large 3.5" LCD, the HDMI out, the SloMo setting(with some loss of rez), and the new 20:1 len's, however, the Canon has larger 1/3" chips (users report very good low light capability), an excellent picture, and this camera has XLR audio with separate channel control and an abundance of settings to tweak. However, is is selling for about $3,700 from most legit sellers. Anyone out there used the FX7 yet? My first concern is maximum resolution in good lighting and if it is close to the Canon, then the $2,885.00 price is just too good to pass up. Anyone?
John D. Frey
25 Year owner/operator of two California-based production studios.
Digital West Video Productions of San Luis Obispo and Inland Images of Lake Elsinore
Re: Sony HDR FX7 camera or Canon XH A1 camera? by accelv on Jan 5, 2007 at 4:50:04 pm
I had a Canon A1 HDV camcorder to eval for a week. I like the native 1440 chips, same as XL H1. Canon publishes no low-light spec for the camcorder. It is about 2 stops less sensitive than my JVC DV500 at 0 db. At wide angle the f-stop is 1.6 but closes to 3.4 at telephoto! Detail blowout in bright areas can be a problem. The 20x lens is wide and powerful, and the auto-focus and image stabilizing features are fantastic.
The images in good lighting are gorgeous, even stunning, with massive detail and pleasing, natural colors, when viewed on an HD LCD with component input. I posted some quais-HD clips at www.accelvideo.com/msg6.htm. I also captured to a Firstore simultaneously and transfered the .m2t files to my Mac, then used MPG Streamclip to convert to .mov then to Flash or .wmv, so you're not really seeing the full 1920 HD glory. I have FCP 4.5, so I cannot capture HDV directly, but did capture downconverted DV and it looks great compared to my DV500 footage of the same event.
