Mark Goodsell
July 21st, 2015, 02:12 PM
Pretty much as the title says. Used as primary cam for on-the-go travel footage. I waffled between which cam to order before the trip, so by the time I decided, I only had a week to fiddle with the cam. More would have been better. Did not have the 4k update. Shot everything in highest 1080p resolution (not 4k).
Reflections:
Size/Compactness - Great. You can't get too small for a travel cam. My day pack was the cam bag and it worked great. Just pull the cam out when needed. Kept everything clandestine. To shoot 10 bit with a small outfit is nice.
Lens Hood - Sure it's cheap, and we'd all like a closeable door, but the upside is it keeps the camera short as possible. Worked as needed to reduce glare. I never used the lens cap. Just stored the camcorder nose-down in my backpack when not in use. Also the camera doesn't look 'too' expensive with the Sony shade installed. A lot of times when shooting video of locals where good audio wasn't required, I'd shoot w/o the lens shade which made for a pretty basic, almost super 8 -ish look that didn't draw too many stares. (I mean, I'm a foreigner so I get starred at all the time anyway!). But in summary, the lens shade wasn't an issue and there's enough room to keep the lens protected.
Buttons/Hand holding - Getting a new cam is like getting a new car, ya have to get used to where the new switches and dials are. Eventually I got used to the button placement EXCEPT the manual focus button which is hidden when the LCD is open and really hard to find for sure. I probably should have changed it to one of the assignable buttons, but never did. The roller dial in front, which is nice and smooth in action, is really tough to get placement on sometimes. The cam is pretty light, nice hand strap, comfortable feel in the hand. Really missed an easy way to change the mini-mic volume. There should be a limiter for the audio too to prevent audio blow-out.
LCD - To me, Sony really missed an opportunity to make this cam a whole lot more user-friendly by not allowing a touch menu system. I can use both kinds of menus (touch/Joystick), but they could take a page from the Canon XA** series cams and incorporate more touch menu items. It would make using the cam a whole lot easier and add extra features that you presently have to needlessly dig through the menus to make adjustments. But the brightness of the LCD wasn't usually an issue and used the viewfinder when it was.
Usability - What I truely appreciated is the quick start-up time of this cam .... and the feature that once you flip open the lcd, the camera is basically 'on'. It's just a couple seconds to start shooting, if even that. That's important when stuff happens spontaneously and you need to 'bam', capture the action. That was the whole reason for choosing the X70 over using a DSLR. One of the more disappointing and frustrating issues to me was the whole way reviewing and deleting shots. Its sort of retarded how it's done. If you are trying to comb through a 128G card at the end of the day to eliminate unnecessry shots, it's a real chore to do it. The tagging or information on the shots if you review them is not shown in the multi-shot-delete menu. In fact its a whole nuther menu you have to go into to delete multiple shots. So, if you used the regular 'scene review' to review and evaluate shots, when you go to the delete scenes menu to delete multiple scenes ....you have no shared info in which to determine which shots to delete other than to re-play each scene and dedice if you want to delete. This was a major pain so much so, that it pretty much makes it worth it to just buy an extra card or two and forget about deleting shots all-together.
Another major issue I ran into is this: The cam tops out at 600 files and will read 'card full' even if you know on file 599 that there were 100 minutes left!And 600 files is pretty easy to achieve with a 128G card if you do a lot 10 second shots. Furthermore, what I recall happened to me is that it wouldn't relay record to the "B" card until I removed the 'full' that had the 600 files. At the time, I didn't know if there was a card issue, camcorder issue, or what, because I knew for a fact there was plenty of 'munites' left of the card before it went to 'full'. But I happened to see it stated in very small print in the manual that night. Due to the # of files issue, I wasnt able to get nearly the amount of shots per card that I was hoping. It caused me to underestimate the number of cards I took and I was not able to find anything larger than a 32G SDXC in major camera stores in several Chinese cities and those cards were like $80-$90 each. Fortunately we had some spare 64G DSLR cards, and between those and my changed shooting practices we made it work ...but not w/o some sweat. In addition, using 128G cards really makes the process of reviewing files slow and laborious as it takes a long time to load the thumbnails when the card gets closer to full. It's probably just better to use a bunch of 64G cards.
Battery life - I was actually impressed with the efficiency of the camcorder and it used less battery life than I had anticipated, even with about 90% LCD usage. I took (2) 70-series batteries and (1) 100-series battery with me. I found that for my type of shooting, I gravitated to just using a 70-series battery and keeping a spare 70-series in the backpack and left the 100-series at the hotel. One 70-series wasn't generally enough for a whole day, but the backup (spare) 70-series battery never ran out. But again, I wasn't doing long, continuous shooting either.
Results - Picture quality seems fantastic, and the active steady shot worked really well. I needed to warm up the outdoor white balance a little for my tastes and that feature worked nice. The large sensor allowed for some nice DOF shots. Low light was good. Focus for the most part heald steady, but I put it in maual when I knew I as into a situation where it might hunt. The interval recording (S&Q) worked great and I got some nice sped up time lapse video that doesn't chew up card space. I haven't gotten footage into the PC yet, but looks good on the monitor. Audio is good too.
Overall - Nice cam. Great to have so much technology in a compact package. Worked great for my needs. If you could blend this cam with some of the features of a Canon XA** series cam, you'd have an even greater package.
EXTRA:
Tripod: I spent a good deal of time and read about and looked at everything I could get my eyes on. I needed a tripod that was small and compact to carry. Hiking up litterally thousands of steps in hot, humid and sticky weather when you are dripping wet with your own sweat ....it's incentive to carry light gear. The legs needed to go down quick and it needed to have a quick release mount. I ended up settling on the Silk Video Sprint II. I think it comes in at about 3 lbs. It supports the x70 nicely. The head isn't strickly a 'fluid' head, but it's action is fluid enough, but might be a turn-off for pro shooters used to much sturdier legs and metal fluid heads, but would be impractical for this jouney. I think for my next tripod I'm going to find (or modify one to suit) which is about 12" long but has a better fluid head. I can usually find a wall, table other area to set up on.
Radian Time Lapse Motorized Panning Unit - These are great!
Reflections:
Size/Compactness - Great. You can't get too small for a travel cam. My day pack was the cam bag and it worked great. Just pull the cam out when needed. Kept everything clandestine. To shoot 10 bit with a small outfit is nice.
Lens Hood - Sure it's cheap, and we'd all like a closeable door, but the upside is it keeps the camera short as possible. Worked as needed to reduce glare. I never used the lens cap. Just stored the camcorder nose-down in my backpack when not in use. Also the camera doesn't look 'too' expensive with the Sony shade installed. A lot of times when shooting video of locals where good audio wasn't required, I'd shoot w/o the lens shade which made for a pretty basic, almost super 8 -ish look that didn't draw too many stares. (I mean, I'm a foreigner so I get starred at all the time anyway!). But in summary, the lens shade wasn't an issue and there's enough room to keep the lens protected.
Buttons/Hand holding - Getting a new cam is like getting a new car, ya have to get used to where the new switches and dials are. Eventually I got used to the button placement EXCEPT the manual focus button which is hidden when the LCD is open and really hard to find for sure. I probably should have changed it to one of the assignable buttons, but never did. The roller dial in front, which is nice and smooth in action, is really tough to get placement on sometimes. The cam is pretty light, nice hand strap, comfortable feel in the hand. Really missed an easy way to change the mini-mic volume. There should be a limiter for the audio too to prevent audio blow-out.
LCD - To me, Sony really missed an opportunity to make this cam a whole lot more user-friendly by not allowing a touch menu system. I can use both kinds of menus (touch/Joystick), but they could take a page from the Canon XA** series cams and incorporate more touch menu items. It would make using the cam a whole lot easier and add extra features that you presently have to needlessly dig through the menus to make adjustments. But the brightness of the LCD wasn't usually an issue and used the viewfinder when it was.
Usability - What I truely appreciated is the quick start-up time of this cam .... and the feature that once you flip open the lcd, the camera is basically 'on'. It's just a couple seconds to start shooting, if even that. That's important when stuff happens spontaneously and you need to 'bam', capture the action. That was the whole reason for choosing the X70 over using a DSLR. One of the more disappointing and frustrating issues to me was the whole way reviewing and deleting shots. Its sort of retarded how it's done. If you are trying to comb through a 128G card at the end of the day to eliminate unnecessry shots, it's a real chore to do it. The tagging or information on the shots if you review them is not shown in the multi-shot-delete menu. In fact its a whole nuther menu you have to go into to delete multiple shots. So, if you used the regular 'scene review' to review and evaluate shots, when you go to the delete scenes menu to delete multiple scenes ....you have no shared info in which to determine which shots to delete other than to re-play each scene and dedice if you want to delete. This was a major pain so much so, that it pretty much makes it worth it to just buy an extra card or two and forget about deleting shots all-together.
Another major issue I ran into is this: The cam tops out at 600 files and will read 'card full' even if you know on file 599 that there were 100 minutes left!And 600 files is pretty easy to achieve with a 128G card if you do a lot 10 second shots. Furthermore, what I recall happened to me is that it wouldn't relay record to the "B" card until I removed the 'full' that had the 600 files. At the time, I didn't know if there was a card issue, camcorder issue, or what, because I knew for a fact there was plenty of 'munites' left of the card before it went to 'full'. But I happened to see it stated in very small print in the manual that night. Due to the # of files issue, I wasnt able to get nearly the amount of shots per card that I was hoping. It caused me to underestimate the number of cards I took and I was not able to find anything larger than a 32G SDXC in major camera stores in several Chinese cities and those cards were like $80-$90 each. Fortunately we had some spare 64G DSLR cards, and between those and my changed shooting practices we made it work ...but not w/o some sweat. In addition, using 128G cards really makes the process of reviewing files slow and laborious as it takes a long time to load the thumbnails when the card gets closer to full. It's probably just better to use a bunch of 64G cards.
Battery life - I was actually impressed with the efficiency of the camcorder and it used less battery life than I had anticipated, even with about 90% LCD usage. I took (2) 70-series batteries and (1) 100-series battery with me. I found that for my type of shooting, I gravitated to just using a 70-series battery and keeping a spare 70-series in the backpack and left the 100-series at the hotel. One 70-series wasn't generally enough for a whole day, but the backup (spare) 70-series battery never ran out. But again, I wasn't doing long, continuous shooting either.
Results - Picture quality seems fantastic, and the active steady shot worked really well. I needed to warm up the outdoor white balance a little for my tastes and that feature worked nice. The large sensor allowed for some nice DOF shots. Low light was good. Focus for the most part heald steady, but I put it in maual when I knew I as into a situation where it might hunt. The interval recording (S&Q) worked great and I got some nice sped up time lapse video that doesn't chew up card space. I haven't gotten footage into the PC yet, but looks good on the monitor. Audio is good too.
Overall - Nice cam. Great to have so much technology in a compact package. Worked great for my needs. If you could blend this cam with some of the features of a Canon XA** series cam, you'd have an even greater package.
EXTRA:
Tripod: I spent a good deal of time and read about and looked at everything I could get my eyes on. I needed a tripod that was small and compact to carry. Hiking up litterally thousands of steps in hot, humid and sticky weather when you are dripping wet with your own sweat ....it's incentive to carry light gear. The legs needed to go down quick and it needed to have a quick release mount. I ended up settling on the Silk Video Sprint II. I think it comes in at about 3 lbs. It supports the x70 nicely. The head isn't strickly a 'fluid' head, but it's action is fluid enough, but might be a turn-off for pro shooters used to much sturdier legs and metal fluid heads, but would be impractical for this jouney. I think for my next tripod I'm going to find (or modify one to suit) which is about 12" long but has a better fluid head. I can usually find a wall, table other area to set up on.
Radian Time Lapse Motorized Panning Unit - These are great!