Boyd,
That's the first I've heard about the VX shutter/iris interaction
in manual mode. Is that described in the owners' manual?
One thing that's not in the owners' manual that is also rarely mentioned is that the VX can be brought out of standby mode by pressing on the photo button. No need to power down/power
up. No need to press the record button. Can't take credit for
"discovering" this; I saw a post once about it. But that original
poster mentioned that the photo button must be pressed twice.
My "contribution to science" is that even one press will do the trick.
A. Einstein

Boyd is right. in the beginning I couldn't figure what everyone was complaining about. I always set my shutter speed and then my aperture, that's the way i've always done it.

Me, too, Bryan. Always shutter first. This goes back to some years ago when the first auto exposure SLRs first came around.
You chose your cam manufacturer by picking whether you wanted to work either "aperture priority" or "shutter priority". Most of the manufacturers were offering the aperture priority. Because I was shooting a lot of sporting events at the time I went with shutter priority. And, to this day, I still set shutter first. I have a VX myself and am surprised to hear from Boyd that, even set in manual, the cam will change iris from how you
set it. Wonder why Sony'd even make 'em that way. Doesn't seem right.

<<<-- Originally posted by Basem Elsokary : will the vx2100 have a manual gain and shutter controls like the pd150? as far as I know, they are combined for the vx2000 (or something like that), just wondering if they made the manual controls a bit more like the pd150, or if they will essentially be the same...

I would love to get a vx2100 as a second camera, but need to be able to manually control gain and shutter speed... -->>>

I stand corrected as it relates to exposure. The 170 and the 2100 now have 24 steps instead of 19. However, the gain is not seperate in the 2100.

<<<-- Originally posted by Dave Largent : I have a VX myself and am surprised to hear from Boyd that, even set in manual, the cam will change iris -->>>

Did you try yourself to confirm? This has always baffled me also, and it took awhile for me to figure it out myself. I thought I must be neglecting to push some button or something. In fact I *still* wonder about that. But I have posted this in a number of threads over the past few years, and nobody has suggested a work-around, so I guess that's just the way it is. As a consumer camera, perhaps the Sony "rocket scientists" were trying to "protect" us average Joes? But it bewilders me further to see that the PDX-10, a camera from the pro line, exhibits the same behavior. But as a practical matter I don't really care all that much. There are very few times I can imagine wanting to film and continuously vary the shutter speed while keeping the iris locked. It's just a minor annoyance to have to reset it after changing shutter speed.

However in a somewhat parallel example, on the PDX-10's consumer cousin TRV-950, Sony has deliberately dumbed down the 16:9 mode to use less pixels and a narrower field of view. Same CCD's, same lens. Both of these seem like examples of camera firmware intentionally crippled in order to differentiate the consumer and pro lines of cameras.

But on all these cameras the layout of the various buttons and wheels seems very random and awkward. It's true that you can control everything, but the ergonomics leave a lot to be desired and seem to be driven more by some sort of visual design concept than funtionality. I can't tell you how many times I've hit the white balance button by accident in the dark, creating a glitch on the tape, thinking it was the audio level or shutter speed. Very bad design there! But I guess that's yet another intentional thing which separates the prosumer cams from the ENG units with more dedicated controls.

Boyd,
No, I haven't tried to confirm it myself.
Have you figured out what the VX is doing as far as its choice of aperture. Does it go into some kind of shutter-priority AE?
Random?

Looks like shutter priority AE to me, but I have not compared to see if the settings match. Certainly isn't random, it's setting the iris where it "thinks" it should...