I heard that Sony posted online some programming code of NX5 and other camcorders. There's no one you know that could have a look and maybe ... improve some of the characteristics? It is a crazy thought, but if some photo cameras (like Canon or Panasonic) can be tweaked maybe we can have some luck too. I think about the missing features that exist on Z5 like Shot transition, Interval recording, histogram etc. Who knows, maybe it can be done with a simple copy-paste operation from the code of Sony Z5... wake me up, I'm dreamin':)

I downloaded the source code for the NX5U. It turns out the it's source code for the embedded Linux operating system. I didn't find any code for the camera.

If you don't have a Linux system (I don't currently), you can do as I did, and extract the RPM using 7-Zip.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they'll keep the program code for the camera--at least the part that really matters!--to themselves. Sony likes to draw some pretty clear lines between their products. Giving developers the ability to add features to the camera would be the marketing department's worst nightmare.

(But, as a software developer, *I* certainly wouldn't mind! :-))

Best,
Aaron

So is there any hope in adding some features the camera? I would really like to be able to have 2:35:1 crop marks and to be able to work in ISO rather than Gain...It just seems that DSLR's such as the Canon 550D are able to have features that we do not have. Especially with the Magic Lantern firmware.

It would be cool, but it won't happen. Really. It would be, from a marketing standpoint "crazy," as it would undermine their ability to maintain the price points of their cameras (if people just started adding their own features). It would also be a total nightmare from a support standpoint to have people throwing homegrown firmware onto their NX5's and rendering them completely inoperable.

It Sony ever allowed a camera to become "open source," it would not be a camera like the NX5. Not IMO, anyway. Rather, I suspect it would be a new kind of camera targeting an unproven market segment and officially sanctioned as a an experiment, as Sony marketing is concerned (i.e., maybe a revolution, maybe a total dud). And I just don't see such a camera coming from a company like Sony. They're too opaque and conservative for that, I think!

Best,
Aaron

Sony, particularly on their higher end models, has very complex code designed to make it very difficult for hackers to modify the camera. We're not talking about a consumer camera like the GH1 here, we're talking about an expensive piece of kit.

2.35:1 is easy enough to figure out and mask off yourself, but why do you want to work in ISO instead of gain? They're pretty much the same thing. Just displayed in a different way. Even if you did get it to display as ISO on the camera's screen there would be absolutely nothing different about the way it fundamentally works compared to the current gain settings. It kinda reminds me of the scene in "Spinal Tap" where he has the speakers that go up to volume level 11, and the other guy asks why doesn't he just make it go to 10, but make 10 louder? It's the same thing, just measuring it differently - one way which is industry standard and one which is not.