There will always be "ultimate" cameras that would be your first choice in any situation. But often you can't take bulky, expensive gear with you - and yet you still need to get fantastic-looking pictures. That's where the PXW-X70 comes in...
The PXW-X70 is a great little camera. It's got a 1" type twenty megapixel sensor and this year will be upgradable to shoot 4K. It shoots to XAVC - an efficient and high quality codec, and it downsamples from the entire twenty megapixels, largely avoiding aliasing and moire.
Mark McCarthy of Sparky Film LTD has just bought one and has taken it on a shoot to India. His main camera is a Sony F5, but he's full of praise for its little relative.
SPARKY FILM LTD are currently out on a shoot in Chandigarh, Northen India this week. We have taken out our Sony F5 as the main camera but also grabbed our recently acquired Sony X70 in the bag as well. I popped outside the hotel for an hour this evening shortly after we arrived to grab some shots with it, as we haven’t had much time to play with it so far. These are the results (see VIMEO clip below) , and we are pretty happy with them.
A camera at this price point is always going to have some shortcomings, but I believe these are easily outweighed by the many advantages the camera brings. Light, portable, good zoom range, discreet and fun to work with! See what you think about the images in this 90 second clip – we were pleasantly surprised. There are lots of cameras out there as you know, but it’s great to be able to have a second unit this small and light that can produce pictures you can happily cut into your main feature.
I just used picture profile 6 for this clip. The great thing was it was shot in AVCHD 1080/25p (I can't edit with the 50mbps MXF files until they sort them out) and the pictures still look lovely.
I pretty much set all the camera's settings manually - I set DB to zero - shutter speed to 1/50 (you have to be careful using the camera on AUTO as it moves this around, and always wants to up the gain too). I often ask the camera what iris it wants to use for a scene, then stick with this if I am happy, but more often than not I have to open it up a little more - esp if you are shooting outside as the camera wants to expose for the sky. The big thing with the camera to get the best results make sure you manually focus so it is spot on. I am going to try to shoot some more on the X70 when I am out here and will share the results. I am really pleased I added this camera to our kit, and with results like this, and with 4k to come soon, it's a no brainer.
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