The price of Z1

[Heath McKnight]

It's not the camera, it's the skill of the filmmakers.

heath

[Charles Papert]

Agreed.

I shot a short film with the DVX100a this summer; it just got into Sundance, where it will be digitally projected. I've seen some of it on a not-even-great projector already, and I was satisfied.

One of the best things I've ever shot was on Digi-Beta, which was filmed-out and looked great.

Waiting to make a film based on the technology means something might come up and you don't get around to making the film at all. And it's better to have made it in SD than not make it in HD.

If the folks who made that film with the XL2 were happy with what they did, they should still be happy regardless of the announcement of the Sonys. If the film is solid, a few hundred less lines of resolution won't hurt it.

[John Jay]

2300 is a lot more over the basic model price

for that you could get a decent hire on a mini35, or a week or so on a Lustre suite and either will give you a lot more than a Z1 could ever give you

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OR you could get AJA HD10A High Definition Converter (Encoder) at BHphoto and ski your stuff uncompressed into your computer at 600 gig/hr - (just squash it between the beachtek and the base of the FX1- it would look very horny :)
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[Simon Wyndham]

Charles I agree wholeheartedly.

I'm just not sure why people are expecting truly pro features on such a camera anyway. HDV gives a better picture quality but not a story.

From what I am seeing now you might as well just buy an FX1 and live with the limitations if you must get one of these cameras.

In any case, why be disheartened if it's not what you expect? NAB2005 is very soon :-)

[Carlos E. Martinez]

Wow, just now did I get to know that the Z1's price was raised, apparently!

But is that info for real?

If it is then Sony is really stupid. What they will get is more people going for the FX1, because one thing is a $1500 difference; but if we are talking $2500 more then things don't get so interesting. There are not that much more in the Z1 to pay that kind of money.

In any case, if my info was right, the original planned price for the Z1 had been $6000. But remember that the market rules: the DVC80 was to be priced just $500 less than the DVX100, but the market forced them to go down $1500. Unfortunately then Panasonic realized the 80 was taking customers from the 100 and took it out of the market. Perhaps Sony does that with the FX1.

The only thing that really interested me in the Z1 is it being 60i and 50i. It would be great if someone got to hack the FX1 on that.




Carlos

[Barry Green]

The MSRP of the Z1 is indeed $5946. The MSRP of the FX1 is $3700. So, on the surface, that's a $2246 difference. Which is an awful lot.

Street price remains to be seen -- apparently the $4900 that's been tossed around may actually be the "minimum advertised price", and may be a good reflection of street price, depending on demand. If there's incredible demand, the price will be more around MSRP, if there's more supply than demand, the price may move more towards the MAP.

It all remains to be seen when the camera is released. Interestingly the XL2 stayed stuck at full MSRP at B&H for months, whereas the FX1 has already come down from MSRP after only a few weeks, so perhaps the pent-up/overwhelming demand situation won't keep the Z1 price too high for too long. But we shall see.

[Heath McKnight]

Don't forget the Z1 has nice audio controls (no two track recording, to boot) and black and cinegama controls. But $2300 more?!

heath

[Aaron Koolen]

OK, sorry to jump in here as I've been away from the forums for a little while, but how has the demo footage been lately with this new Sony? I have yet to see any fast moving footage from the camera, but I am keen to see some, so see how the MPG2 holds up undermovement at the DV bandwidth.

Also, Panasonic didn't jump into the HDV consortium, but are they going to offer something better?

Ta
Aaron

[Ignacio Rodriguez]

> I can't see spending that much money on something that
> doesn't even have uncompressed audio

What's all the fuss about compressed audio? From my experience MPEG layer II at 384 Kbps should be virtually indistinguishable from linear 16 bit audio, and depending on the AD converter used, it might be even better. Psychoacoustic band masking based audio representations have the potential of handling a wider dynamic range than 16-bit linear audio.

Also, when recording sound that does not have significant spectral content (i.e.: human voices) this kind of codec does a great job because the unused frequency band's bandwidth is "borrowed" to the significant bands. So compressed audio that at a certain bandwidth gives you certain quality for full spectrum content (i.e. rock music) will give you much better quality with simpler sound.

[Davi Dortas]

Stereo DVDs are compressed at 160-192 Kbps and I haven't heard of anyone complaining about that.

Those people who complain about compressed audio on the FX1 are the same people who mysteriously don't complain about the video compression on their DV25 camcorders. And this DV compression is not very efficient verses MPEG2 to boot.