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MillimeterLeitner's Cinematography Corner, No. 3
Oct 21, 2009 12:00 PM, By D.W. Leitner
A squeaky wheel oiled (me), and one from Sony I didn't see coming.
Leitner at play
You may have already heard the announcements.
No, not Canon's announcement this week of the new 1D Mark IV EOS HDSLR with 1080p/24 and an eyebrow-raising ISO of 12,800. Not the announcement of an upcoming firmware upgrade to enable 1080p/24 in current Canon EOS 5D Mark IIs. Nor Carl Zeiss' first T* Distagons for Canon's EOS EF bayonet mount, shipping by the time you read this. Not even Apple's new 21.5in. iMac with a full 1920x1080 LED backlit display and better specs than MacBook Pro, now a lean, mean one-piece HD editing machine.
These are all true. But I'm talking about Monday's announcements from Sony—which you might have missed—one of which shuts me up.
Rear of new Sony PMW-EX1R with orange-highlighted switches, HDMI port, and flatter handgrip.
Exhibit A: the new PMW-EX1R. A refresh or revision or reboot (you decide what R stands for) of Sony's popular two-year-old XDCAM PMW-EX1 palm-held camcorder.
Exhibit B: the new PMW-350, a groundbreaking 2/3in. shoulder-mount EX-series camcorder that records to solid-state SxS cards.
(Since this is a column and not a product review, I'm only going to dive into the shallow end of the pool here. Full-on reviews will follow later.)
At a distance, the EX1R appears unchanged. But as Mies van der Rohe would have put it, God is in the details here. In a nutshell, Sony has addressed every single inadequacy of the original EX1.
For those benighted souls still plying their trade in standard definition, the EX1R now records SD directly. SxS cards can even hold clips of both SD and HD shots at the same time.
A full-size HDMI connector now accompanies the existing uncompressed HD-SDI output.
But the true bugaboos of the EX1 were:
- Lousy ergonomics due to a cantilevered handgrip that placed all weight on the wrist
- A breathtakingly bad on/off switch design that resulted in EX1s often inadvertently left on, resulting in drained batteries
- A badly placed manual/auto-iris switch, awkward to use
- Inadequate infrared filtration, rendering black clothing in subdued lighting various shades of brown. (Tiffen just released an IR filter to address IR contamination in the EX1. Thank you, Art Adams, for your perseverance on this issue.)
Well, as Gomer Pyle channeling Captain Marvel might have said, "Shazam!"
The handgrip is now flatter and thus closer to the EX1R's center of gravity. Day-Glo orange has been painted underneath the sliding on/off switch to make its position easily apparent (the black-on-black of the EX1 was impossible to see, even in bright circumstances). A positive locking mechanism now stops the switch in the off position when moved from either camera or media.
I, for one, hammered Sony pretty hard on that last one, in print and in private, because it was inexcusable coming from a premier camcorder designer. But it was nothing compared to the inexplicable placement of the iris auto/manual sliding switch on the operator's side of the lens barrel. And how, exactly, is one to finger this switch when handholding?
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
