Sony PMW 200
September/01/12 12:44 Filed in: Video Cameras
Some pros and cons on the new Sony camera
$7,800 list price. The EX-1 listed for around that but sold for $6,500. I think the earlier numbers were guesstimates of the street price.
Yeah - not exactly cheap. B&H is listing it for $6,300. Plus cards and batts and etc. But it's the same price as the EX-1 was back when I bought it, so not terrible. And you don't have to buy a lens, and can likely get by without an external recorder.
The only thing that's a bit of a bummer (for me, if I was to consider it as a replacement for my EX-1) is that it is essentially the same chips and lens as the EX-1 with some added features and better on-board recording. So it's not like I would be getting better quality from the main guts of the thing. Yes, the recordings going to the cards would be better, but with the Samurai, I am already getting 4:2:2 AND even higher-bitrate ProRes, so I can technically make better recordings with my existing camera.
If I didn't already own the EX-1, though, I would definitely put it high on the consideration list.
The integration with 'pro' XDCAM stuff will be big for a lot of folks. It should make it easier to do dailies and archives to BD, which I would really like. I'm finding myself wishing I had an easy way to burn discs of the raw footage I shoot on the thing. I have already lost some original footage by mistakenly erasing the wrong hard drive (the one with the ONLY backup on it - AFTER I had re-used the cards).
So just having it on hard drives still makes me nervous, even if I have two copies. After a year or so, you start looking back through the HDs and going, "hey there's a bunch of space on this one, what if I moved this over here, blah blah…" and pretty soon you don't know what you've got or where it is. Clearly I need better data management skills. If it's burned to a shiny disc though, it's locked down for at least a decade - it's more like having a tape master backup. I think a lot of pro environments are still using DLT tape, but unless that has changed significantly, it takes forever. I guess you just leave it running overnight.
$7,800 list price. The EX-1 listed for around that but sold for $6,500. I think the earlier numbers were guesstimates of the street price.
Yeah - not exactly cheap. B&H is listing it for $6,300. Plus cards and batts and etc. But it's the same price as the EX-1 was back when I bought it, so not terrible. And you don't have to buy a lens, and can likely get by without an external recorder.
The only thing that's a bit of a bummer (for me, if I was to consider it as a replacement for my EX-1) is that it is essentially the same chips and lens as the EX-1 with some added features and better on-board recording. So it's not like I would be getting better quality from the main guts of the thing. Yes, the recordings going to the cards would be better, but with the Samurai, I am already getting 4:2:2 AND even higher-bitrate ProRes, so I can technically make better recordings with my existing camera.
If I didn't already own the EX-1, though, I would definitely put it high on the consideration list.
The integration with 'pro' XDCAM stuff will be big for a lot of folks. It should make it easier to do dailies and archives to BD, which I would really like. I'm finding myself wishing I had an easy way to burn discs of the raw footage I shoot on the thing. I have already lost some original footage by mistakenly erasing the wrong hard drive (the one with the ONLY backup on it - AFTER I had re-used the cards).
So just having it on hard drives still makes me nervous, even if I have two copies. After a year or so, you start looking back through the HDs and going, "hey there's a bunch of space on this one, what if I moved this over here, blah blah…" and pretty soon you don't know what you've got or where it is. Clearly I need better data management skills. If it's burned to a shiny disc though, it's locked down for at least a decade - it's more like having a tape master backup. I think a lot of pro environments are still using DLT tape, but unless that has changed significantly, it takes forever. I guess you just leave it running overnight.
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