Hi all,

Just borrowed a FX1 for the weekend for a quick trial courtesy of my local Sony Pro Store so I thought i'd contribute to the board with my opinions as I know many people want to know "Hands on" experience with the FX1.

As stated by others before, its a great camera with great features. Has some excellent manual controls, great images, handles well & a bargain for what you get. Rather than go on about its good qualities, which would take forever! I'd tell you some opinions of the things that I didn't like too much.....

1- Cineframe 25 seems to stutter on the LCD when doing pans, even reasonably slow pans. I haven't connected it to a TV yet which i'll do tonight but does this stuttering occur on a TV?

2- Heads shutdown after about 3 mins (obviously to save batteries) but it takes too long to start up again, about 5-6 secs which sucks for my style of shooting. My PDX10P seemed to start up much quicker when it went into battery save mode.

3- Zoom on handle is too fast. I set the "L" zoom setting on the handle to 1 in the menu & it still is too fast when doing slow zoom shots.

4- Zoom ring on lens is a bit too tight. You cant get fast "crash zooms" which I love doing for certain styles of shooting.

5- Peaking for focus is waaaayyyy too low to see on the VF & LCD screen. I can bearly even tell the difference when its on or off. This bit really sucks & if i only had one choice of making a change on the FX1e it would be this. I use shoulder cams a fair bit & have become used to using peaking. Hopefully some techie hacker person may be able to do something about this.


Now these above opinions is me just being picky. Some of these features i'm complaining about aren't even features at all on other prosumer cameras! If I was to make a list of its good things, i'd be writing for hours! This is truly a great video camera! Well worth its price tag!

PS: if anyone can give advice on workarounds or how to overcome my minor problems with the FX1 please do so!

"- Zoom ring on lens is a bit too tight. You cant get fast "crash zooms" which I love doing for certain styles of shooting."

You can get a fast crash zoom by put it in ring and zoom in, then put it back on level and whenever you want a crash zoom just switch it to ring and it will give you a pretty fast zoom.

With the HVR-Z1U you can set the peaking levels and change the color. And it also has something called "Quick Record" which I presume deals with the delay to start recordng that you mention. I think even though what you are experiencing may save some power it is actually there to keep the tape and heads from being damaged.

The bummer is that these and several other important Z1 features are actually software differences. Sony has "dumbed down" the FX1 so they can charge so much more for the Z1, in a similar way as the TRV950 has an inferior 16:9 mode compared to the PDX10.

For about US$1k more you get multisystem compatibility and XLR inputs, as well as all those little software differences.

"Peaking for focus is waaaayyyy too low to see on the VF & LCD screen. I can bearly even tell the difference when its on or off. This bit really sucks & if i only had one choice of making a change on the FX1e it would be this. I use shoulder cams a fair bit & have become used to using peaking. Hopefully some techie hacker person may be able to do something about this."

Did you try using the expanded focus button - works like a charm.

i can bearly even see the peaking, i mean its virtually non existant even in the expanded focus mode & in some situations there is absoloutely no difference between peaking being on or off.....& whenever i can see it its sooooo hard to see...

i'm beginning to wonder whether theres a fault with this camera in regards to the peaking.....

I shot my first rugby game with the FX1E today - usually I use my XM2 or XL1s.
Having just watched the tapes back at home, I'm really pleased with the results.
I decided to stay in autofocus, which was a dream and far more responsive than the Canon's.
The camera was set to "manual" for all other funtions, though I tend in situations like these to use the auto exposure to set it and then lock it.
I also used my Canon LANC zoom control unit which interfaces a dream with the Sony.
I shot everything in HD and will be downrezzing to SD for editing and distribution.
To all those people who were worrying about motion artifacts on fast-moving subjects, I would tell them not to worry - the images are excellent, with none of the expected (?) artifacts.
I would have wished for a bit more on the tight end of the lens however. The XM2 has a very useful 20:1 facility which is great for sports shooting.

Robin