Dear all,

I just received yesterday my FDR-AX100 from amazon.fr, where it was on sale last week for 1200 EUR.

The camera seems to be OK except that the EVF stutters when I do any panning, it is not smooth at all.

More precisely, any vertical line or edge stutters when I pan horizontally and viceversa (horizontal edges stutter when I pan vertically). The effect of course is that the whole display seems to stutter.

It happens more severely when I pan faster, evidently, but it is visible even when I do it slowly. The fact that it is recording or not does not seem to affect. The camera is as received from the factory, the firmware is 3.10 (the most recent one). I have not checked if there is Active SteadyShot on but I do not see how can that change anything. I have tried changing shutter speed to no avail.

There is no effect on the resulting video (at least as far I can see on the LCD itself), and the LCD does not show the same phenomenon, or it is reduced.

Are your AX100's showing the same behaviour? If not, should I better send it back or have it repaired? Can I request Amazon to get a new one or I can only send it back and get a refund, with the risk of not finding it again at the same price?

Thanks for your help,

JA

Check your menu setting. Most likely, your setting is 24p or 30p which would give the appearance of stuttering in your viewfinder. If so, be careful of fast pans, The other reason, though doubtful, may be your shutter speed.

That seems to be it, thanks!

I tried with 50 p on XAVC and the problem is gone.

How can I avoid it without having to revert to HD? My HDR-HC1 (whose expensive battery is still alive after 5 years of no use at all, by the way) does not do that on 1080i. Both are PAL.

I know I have to pan slowly and I have a Manfrotto 504HD but I am surprised to have this effect 12 years later... Is it the Progressive scan? The definition?

JA

4K is going to be 24 or 30p (25p in the EU?), and at that frame rate, if you are shooting a fast shutter speed, you will have some issues with motion through the frame - effectively it will be like viewing a flip book because of the series of sharp stills (fast exposure of each frame).

You may find you have a less jarring effect by running the camera in shutter priority, and keeping shutter speeds low - 60/90/120, those should allow some motion blur in each frame, countering the "shimmer/stutter" effect. My first results letting the camera run "auto" were very ugly, I've run in shutter priority ever since, with good results, I do the same with my RX's.

Keep in mind that due to bandwidth limitations, in order to squeeze in the extra pixel data for 4K, they had to reduce the number of frames of data, so something has to give. It's similar to the compromises involved with shooting film - I've heard that because of the expense, they limited the number of frames/second to the lowest number that wouldn't be overly noticeable.

Of course we are now used to very high resolutions and frame rates more in line with 60p (2x the number of frames of data of 30p), TV's that refresh at 120 and 240 are common, and so the temporal motion of 30p can be very difficult for some people to watch (some people are more sensitive to it than others).

Hope that helps you get a handle on what you're seeing!