The Cheapest Lens
It has to be the cheapest way to buy a 2/3″ HD lens. You can buy a camera or you can buy a camera with a zoom for NZ$2,142 more. For camera owners used to paying upwards of NZ $20k for lenses this takes some getting used to.
But this is the deal on the new 2/3″ Sony EX camera. The PMW350K with a Fujinon XA 16×8 zoom lens included comes in at a little over $25k. Sans lens the PMW350L version is $2k cheaper.
If the lens is only worth two grand it might make you begin to wonder about the quality.
After all quality and price usually dance pretty closely together when it comes to lenses, largely because of the complex designs and quality of glass required to minimise chromatic aberration – colour fringing.
But new technology has dramatically changed things, and you can see the effect in the pricing of PWM350 camera and lens combination.
Sony call it ALAC. Panasonic has a system that does the same thing and call it CAC, (Oh why could they get not together a decide an open standard?) Both are acronyms built around automatically correcting lens chromatic aberration.
The idea is to take lenses that are cheaper to build but suffer chromatic aberrations and get the camera to electronically correct the image through the zoom range. In the Sony system it gets the data to perform this trick from a chip in the lens.
According to Clive Cannon, one of Sony’s Auckland engineers, pretty hefty processing power is needed to do the correction on the fly, so in practice they restricted to processing the horizontal lines. These are the most critical because they are what give colour fringes to contrasty verticals in frame, say for example a pole or a building against sky.
It works, and in most of the cameras that are fitted with it you can turn it on and off and observe the difference.
And why worry if it is team work that gets the image to acceptability instead of just the lens alone?
Colour viewfinder, B&W status screen.
“Bang for buck this is a very good deal,” says cameraman Paul Richards, who also runs Nutshell Rentals hiring out XDCAM and EX3 camera gear. He has been trying out the new camera this week.
He says for wide angle shots he tested his existing HD wide angle zoom on the camera – a lens that normally goes with his PDW700 XDCAM HD. It looked fine, as it should, being a considerably more expensive lens.
It’s not just the lens, Richards is enthusiastic about the bang for buck that the camera offers, sitting between the EX3 and the higher spec’d XDCAM cameras.
“The EX3 camera has been heralded around the world as being a brilliant option, but it is a pain to hand hold,” he says.
“On the PWM350 EX the centre of gravity over the top of your shoulder means you have the ability to stand around all day comfortably with something that has got a decent long lens, plus they have built into this camera most of the capabilities of the traditional shoulder mounted broadcast camera – you have proper audio connectors with decent switches, HDMI and HD-SDI BNC connectors.”
PMW350: The first Sony 2/3" CMOS chips
According to Richards the 2/3″ XMOR chips in the PWM350 also gives a dollop more sensitivity compared to the 1/2″ chips of the EX3 camera – pretty handy when often you don’t know exactly what situation you will be walking into.
But despite the aura of a high end broadcast camera, the PWM350, like the EX3, records a 4:2:0 EX long GOP 35Mb/s codec. On paper it looks like a big difference to the XDCAM codec, even if it is not always obvious unless you are in ideal viewing conditions with a good monitor.
But does all this mean it a threat to his PDW700 XDCAM HD camera?
No, says Richards, holding up a box of XDCAM discs.
“When they are deciding to shoot, the question I ask clients is about archiving. These are a dollar a minute and they last 50 years.”
Good to know a little more about why this is a cheaper camera. After looking at the new XF series and the 350 at A2Z its frustrating that companies are developing areas of technology that, when combined, would make a pretty decent workflow and package for a lower cost. CF cards on the 350…