Our first impression of the Sony PMW-EX1

Wayne Carey on Mon, 12/10/2007 - 3:10pm.

Cameras

There are lots of impressions of this camera out there right now, so I won't go into detail like the others have. But here's my impression of this offering from Sony.

We at Schazam Productions got a chance to look at the new Sony PMW-EX1 camera that recent was released to the market. As some of you may know, we have been an XDCAM house for the last three years, with the last year changing over the XDCAM HD. We use as out primary camera the Sony F350 with Sony HVR-Z1Us as secondary. The use of HDV is used because of the nature of the programming that we shoot. We produce outdoor programming and as many of you know situations can be tough and cramped when shooting in a hunting blind. Thus we’ve had to result to using the Z1Us in these conditions, or at least until now...

We’ve followed the progression of the EX1 since its debut at NAB this past year. We were really excited about this offering from Sony but I will say we were a little skeptical about its record medium. Oh no... Another solid state recording camera. We have noting against recording on solid state but its the archival method that concerns us and in our business using a camera of this type can be difficult at best. We are praying that Sony will come out with a field deck for this camera.

Ok... Enough of that. Now, on the the camera.

When we first unpacked the camera, we notice right off the bat that the camera was heavier that we thought. This is great, because its easier to hold steady than the Z1U. Looking over the small frame, we took notice of button placement and menu settings. Very nice design. The focus ring is really cool and easy to use. We set the camera to 1080p30 mode, set the shutter to 1/60th and shot some video inside my edit bay with ONLY available light. Now, let me tell you that I like my edit suite to be on the dark side so that I can see my monitors very well for editing and color correction. Ever since the camera was introduced, everybody started talking about the 3 1/2” CMOS chips and how they would react in low light. In the past, CMOS chips did have very poor low light capabilities, but Sony has worked their magic on this camera. We were absolutely amazed at how good the picture looked in the natural light. The image was almost exactly as your eye could see. This is totally remarkable for a camera. I’ve been in this field for quite some time and have never seen anything like this. I shot several minutes of footage like this, even trying to get some fluorescent lights in the frame to see how it effects the overall image. WOW! It was amazing. I can’t say this enough.

Now, it was time to see if Final Cut Pro can handle this footage. I connected the camera to my Mac Pro via the USB port on the front and told the camera to connect to my Mac. I opened the XDCAM import software thru Final Cut Pro and up popped all the images that I shot, including some images that another demo had shot at 1080p24. I imported all of the images flawlessly as I had expected. I placed them into a timeline that was set for XDCAM EX 1080p30, and viewed the images though our AJA Kona 3 card. The images were absolutely stunning. The sharpness and detail were as good, if not better than the images shot with our F350 camera. We were blown away with the quality that the Sony PMW-EX1 shot. WOW!

We drooled over it and give it a lot of consideration. If it weren’t for not having a field deck, we would have purchased two of these cameras on the spot. But, I think we are going to wait for NAB this year to see if Sony has fixed this small but major issue. I’m sure they will. So, in conclusion, if its a small camera that you need that has big camera qualities, the Sony PMW-EX1 is definitely the camera for you. And hopefully, next week, we can get some more time to play with this camera.