After experimenting with foam windscreens for my Sony HX1 and getting poor results, I tried a little "dead-cat" furpiece instead. It works very well, as in moderate wind that would ordinarily have caused bad noise on the soundtracks, I could hear none at all. The low roar you hear in the background on the sample I posted on Vimeo and on Flickr, is from heavy traffic on nearby streets.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22121562@N00/4520141738/ You'll have to go to my Vimeo album and find the audio/video clip on the first page, as they won't let me embed a specific video here. The link is in my Signature.
I bought a little stuffed poodle for 49 cents at St. Vincent's and cut out a 3 cm. X 7 cm. piece of its long, black fur. I used shoe goo (goop) on its outer margins to attach it, being careful not to get any into the tiny mike holes on each side.
The HX1 has poorly-placed mikes, right on top of the camera. On a Canon S5 and an SX1 I've used, the mikes are placed in front, tucked down below the flash and allowed much less wind noise to be recorded.
This seems to be the only solution to the wind noise problem with the HX1. I imagine that some other video-shooting photo cameras also have this same situation, with no mike inputs to bypass the difficulty.
April 14th, 2010, 12:13 AM
