My FX1E arrived today at last and was I glad to see it!
On went the Beachtek XLR box straight away, so I feel that having saved myself 1.000GBP, I'm now legit for shooting for broadcast...
..until I came to switch in the colour bars.
No EBU bars which are "de rigeur" for us in PAL land, just the NTSC bars.
Now, I'm sure they're very good at calibrating setup in many countries, but I don't know how some editors I know are going to feel when I turn up with tapes with non-standard (to us) bars on the front of the tape. I've read that the Z1 has both bars options, but I really would have thought that Sony should have provided EBU bars as a default for its PAL camera.

Oh well, I'm going to see if our local Sony-Broadcast dealer and workshop has a workaround...

Robin

Interesting, Robin... please keep us in the loop and let us know what Sony tells you!

Which are the EBU bars and which are the SMPTE bars in the Z1 (type 1 or type 2) please?

EBU bars have just the vertical colour bars.
NTSC have the blacklevel "pluge" bars at the bottom.

Robin

So neither of the bars on the Z1 are EBU?

For HD, there is no difference between "ntsc" and "ebu" simply because they are the same colour space. (ITU709) But if they're not there for standard def, I'd be curious what Sony says. I'm not where I can look at mine, but that would be odd.

I just checked my FX1E in SD mode to see if there were indeed EBU bars there - there was not...

Robin

Is there supposed to be a Software Development Kit for the Sony similar to the SDK for the XL-2? If so, even if Sony doesn't have EBU bars in there now, it seems like that would be something an SDK and a good programmer could fix.