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Sony PDW-F800 Review

Nov 2, 2009 12:00 PM, By D.W. Leitner

The tapeless CineAlta.

Take a top-shelf 2/3in. Sony CineAlta HDW-F900R ($69,900 list, no viewfinder), swap its HDCAM tape transport for an optical disc drive, drop the results into the smaller body of a Sony PDW-700 XDCAM broadcast camcorder ($30,900 list, no viewfinder), and what do you have?

Sony announced its latest CineAlta shoulder-mounted 2/3in. camcorder, the PDW-F800 ($42,700, no viewfinder), last April at NAB, little more than a year after the PDW-700 was introduced, and production models are now available.

You can buy into my rough description of the F800 above, or you can think of the F800 as an 700 on steroids. (Outwardly, they're identical; their specs are nearly a match.) In either case, the fact that the F700 and F900R are, by now, known quantities facilitates this review.

Like the 700, the new F800 records long-GOP MPEG 422 (1920x1080, 4:2:2, 50Mbps, constant bit rate) and MPEG HD (1440x1080, 4:2:0, 35Mbps, variable bit rate) to Sony's six-year-old Professional Disc format.

To enable very long takes (a 23GB Professional Disc recording 1080/24p MPEG422 will max out at 43 minutes), the F800 offers an impressive 30-second flash-memory cache for continuous recording even during disc changes—a trick borrowed from the F700. (Cache recording also enables time-lapse a.k.a. interval recording.)

The F800 ups the ante, however, with 24p (23.98) and standard SD (MPEG IMX and DVCAM), both costly options on the F700. It further adds Sony's Slow and Quick Motion for overcranking and undercranking, from 1fps to 48fps in 24p and 1fps to 60fps in 30p (MPEG HD mode only).

From the F900R, the F800 borrows dual optical filters with color-temperature correction (3200K, 4300K, and 6300K), user gamma settings—in addition to the four Hyper Gamma settings available in all three camcorders—plus Slow Shutter and image inversion for 2/3in. PL-mount adapters (works only for 1080p, not 1080i, 720p, SD). Slow Shutter and image inversion, incidentally, are options on the F900R.

Novel in the F800 is Focus Assist in the viewfinder, which places a white bar along one of the viewfinder's four black edges (your choice). This focus device changes length and slides back and forth to indicate best focus within a center-weighted zone.

An indication of the F800's intended purpose—field production as opposed to newsgathering—is the fact that F800's Detail Level factory-default setting of "0" yields a noticeably softer result than the same "0" on the F700 (per Sony).

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
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