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MillimeterNAB 2008
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Perspective on this year’s show.
The Sony PDW-700, an affordable 2/3in. XDCAM camcorder, was announced at IBC in September.
By D. W. Leitner
Marketing summits such as CES and NAB have their charms. They organize the calendar year for press and public alike, eliciting, at “that” time of year, Pavlovian responses to splashy product debuts. Those who attend get to kick the tires in person; those who can't get to read about it immediately on the Internet. But do mega, eggs-in-one-basket tradeshows make sense to manufacturers brimming with product innovations throughout the year?
Avid and Apple are not exhibiting at this year's NAB for various reasons, and it's not hard to notice that Apple has been introducing major products throughout the year — sometimes in sync with its own yearly MacWorld event, sometimes not.
Similarly, Sony peppered 2007 with introductions of remarkable new professional camera and camcorder products. At last year's NAB, a prototype PMW-EX1 XDCAM EX was passed around at a press conference and shown under glass, but it was not until September's IBC show that working models appeared and not until November did they become available in the United States.
Those of us who had attended NAB last year and paid close attention to the EX1 prototypes knew this would be a breakthrough product line. There were simply too many innovations gathered together into one product. Chief among them were the 1/2in. sensors providing full 1920×1080 progressive scans. Sony wouldn't say at the time whether CCD or CMOS was used, but heat-giving CCDs at full throttle — 1080p/60 — would have melted the little EX1, which has no fan (I checked at last year's NAB).
What we couldn't know, however, is that these CMOS wonders would prove to be the new Exmor design used in Sony's Alpha digital SLR line. Exmor boasts lightning-fast parallel read-out of pixel columns, which virtually eliminates rolling shutter and noise. So I'm going to quote myself from a previous review (of Sony's HVR-Z7U/HVR-S270U): “If you're into cars, think of Exmor as a turbocharger on a Dodge Hemi.”
In fact, a better term than “breakthrough” for Sony's pioneering implementation of high-performance CMOS is “breakaway.” The EX1's small size and outsized performance simply wouldn't be possible otherwise, and this makes Sony's introduction of cutting-edge CMOS camcorders an epochal act, much like Sony's introduction of the BVW-105 at the 1986 NAB, memorable as the first Betacam to use a 3CCD imager instead of bulky, fragile, high-voltage Saticon tubes. (Resolution was 510×492 and, yep, horizontal pixel shifting was part of the package.)
If you're old enough to remember avuncular Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on TV, you're old enough to remember that CCD camcorders were thought to be inferior in resolution, sensitivity, and je ne sais quoi to fine-grain Saticons and soulful Plumbicons. Sony has certainly had the last laugh on that one (much as the company is now laughing all the way to the bank with Blu-ray). Will a day come when CCD imaging has to be explained in a Wikipedia entry to those not old enough to remember CCD camcorders firsthand?
Other firsts embodied in the EX1: Sony's first use of flash RAM cards; the first use by anyone of faster PCI Express and ExpressCard/34 standards; the first use of 35Mbps long-GOP MPEG-2 to capture full 1920×1080 (only the second camcorder ever to record 1920×1080, after Panasonic's AJ-HPX3000, $48,000, also introduced at last year's NAB); a flip-out LCD with a record count of 921,600 pixels; the first use of a pro-caliber Fujinon 14X zoom in a Handycam form factor, the first-ever dual-mechanism auto/manual focus ring; the first Handycam with true iris ring; the first dynamic display of active depth-of-field in viewfinder; and the first 90-degree rotating handgrip. There's more, but you get the point.
With a jaw-dropping $6,500 street price, EX1s were unsurprisingly back-ordered from day one of sales — Sony obviously struck a deep vein in the marketplace. That was November, so new users and owners are still in the honeymoon phase of getting to know their EX1s, and it takes no special wizardry to predict that NAB 2008 will see a flood of third-party EX1 accessories — particularly wide-angle adapters, matte boxes, follow-focus rigs, and body braces.
