Yang Wen
December 2nd, 2007, 01:36 AM
Rented two XL H1s for today wedding. Came away very dissapointed.
1) The camera was waaayy too heavy. I use the tripod as little as possible so for my style, the extra weight and the ENG/shoulder mount shooting style was a hinder.
2) The viewfinder sucked! I had the eyecup flipped so the VF was small and didn't have enough resolution. Image in the viewfinder was very smeary, even with shutter at 1/48. As a result, while shooting outdoor dance activities, it was diffcult to judge focus on a fast moving subject. I know peaking is suppose to make it easier to focus but it seemed to me everything had peaked edges, I couldn't tell which edges were in focus. <- I think this also had to do with the low res VF..
3) The ND filter design is poor. When zooming & manual focusing with the lens barrel rings at the same time, I found myself inadverdently engaging ND on many occasions. Also why do we need to turn the ring so much to engage the various ND levels? A simple lever with small range of movement would be best.
4) The lens is not wide enough. This coming from a person who usually shoot weddings with the DVX.
5) Servo-only zoom felt very awkward. Having gotten used to the manual zoom on the DVX(which I use 99.9% of the time), the servo zoom on the XL H1 felt like molases - even on the highest speed. As a result, I couldn't do any snap zooms as a shooting style or for focus check.
So it seemed to me the XLH1 is not very "event coverage" friendly. I want to upgrade to HD next year so the XLH1 will defintely not be considered. Does the XHA1 have big improvements over the XLH1 on the aforementioned points?
1) The camera was waaayy too heavy. I use the tripod as little as possible so for my style, the extra weight and the ENG/shoulder mount shooting style was a hinder.
2) The viewfinder sucked! I had the eyecup flipped so the VF was small and didn't have enough resolution. Image in the viewfinder was very smeary, even with shutter at 1/48. As a result, while shooting outdoor dance activities, it was diffcult to judge focus on a fast moving subject. I know peaking is suppose to make it easier to focus but it seemed to me everything had peaked edges, I couldn't tell which edges were in focus. <- I think this also had to do with the low res VF..
3) The ND filter design is poor. When zooming & manual focusing with the lens barrel rings at the same time, I found myself inadverdently engaging ND on many occasions. Also why do we need to turn the ring so much to engage the various ND levels? A simple lever with small range of movement would be best.
4) The lens is not wide enough. This coming from a person who usually shoot weddings with the DVX.
5) Servo-only zoom felt very awkward. Having gotten used to the manual zoom on the DVX(which I use 99.9% of the time), the servo zoom on the XL H1 felt like molases - even on the highest speed. As a result, I couldn't do any snap zooms as a shooting style or for focus check.
So it seemed to me the XLH1 is not very "event coverage" friendly. I want to upgrade to HD next year so the XLH1 will defintely not be considered. Does the XHA1 have big improvements over the XLH1 on the aforementioned points?