That's good news Paulo. That's more than $1,000 less than the price was when it was introduced. I wonder if Sony got a lot of push-back from their major dealers and customers. Whatever the reason, it's back on my wish list.

That's actually very common with a lot of professional cameras in which the release price is much lower. The Panasonic HMC40 for example was supposed to be at least 3 grand but Panasonic ended up releasing it for just under 2 grand.

Maybe it's oversimplifying it, but I suppose if the HMC40 with 1/4" sensors and a 12X lens is $2,000, the NXCAM should be $1,000 more with its 1/3" sensors and a 20X lens. Granted, AVCHD is getting better but it's still a boat anchor to drag in the PRO video market. The NXCAM should be priced meaningfully under the Z5.

I also wonder if Sony will announce a sub-model without the XLR connections as they did with the FX1 and FX1000. That's a good way for Sony to increase the market footprint for the NXCAM.

A more fair comparison would be to include the XLR adapter for the HMC40 for a total of $2260.

This NXCAM does have HD-SDI and since it's a much, much better camera than the Z5, there is no reason for it to be less than the Z5. The good news is that with the prospect of seeing other cameras being announced before April, Sony may think twice like I said earlier. If they do give a good price than I expect the Z5 be be lowered by a big amount.

What I do know is that with the release of the Canon XH-A1, Sony never felt the need to lower the price of the Z1u that much. Sony even got away with selling the V1u for over 4 grand when it first came out and it still sold very well.

Knowing Sony, I think you can pretty much guarantee that they release a prosumer version of the NXCAM which is almost identical. The main difference will most likely be no XLR audio and you won't have the ability to attach the 160GB hard drive to the camera, like you can with the NXCAM. This would fall pretty much in line with what Sony did with the Z5 and the FX1000. The price would most likely be about $1,000 less than the NXCAM.

I agree Michael, probably will not have the HD-SDI or time code interface either which would make it a lot cheaper and may even come down to compete with the HMC40.

Ron Evans

How do you know that it is "much, much better"?

Cheers

Hans

Why shouldn't it be?

For one thing it's already tape-less and you don't have to purchase anything extra. It has 720p modes which is missing in the Z5. Even though the HMC150 has low res chips it still puts up a good fight against professional HDV cameras like the Z1 for example, although the Z5 is said to be a little bit sharper than the HMC150. Combine the Z5 with a similar codec to the HMC150 and the difference should be even greater. On top of all that it has HD-SDI output.

Unless you just have to have a tape drive and your computer is not powerful enough if you prefer to edit it nativity, I really do see this NXCAM as a much better camera.

I agree with Paulo that it looks to be a much better camera. Full raster 1920x1080, 1280x720P60, HS-SDI are all more than the Z5. However it is likely to be cheaper to produce so it's a question of whether Sony will actually price this below the current Z5 price or what product packages there will be to spread over the current FX1000 and Z5 range.

The HMC150 and HMC40 are clearly the competition so the pricing has to be competitive with them.

Ron Evans

After dealing with AVCHD over the weekend I would say never again. First of all- the time: it takes almost as much time to capture from the tape as it takes to transcode into format my machine can edit. Yes, maybe the quality is a bit better, but honestly XDCAM from my HM100 looked better (then the footage HMC150), but the transcoding is a real time waster.

Trust me, I really like Sony cameras, but this format is a deal breaker for me. I just don't understand, why they wouldn't make a 1/3 inch chip camera with XDCAM codec? With a body size of HMC150 and real manual control I would buy it without hesitation.

I'm with you on this Robert, the "big" benefit of going from tape to digital media was the omission of the time needed to capture (from tape) and using AVCHD hasn't really improved the time needed to begin editing. The few "true" native AVCHD editing NLE's are few and none on the Mac (natively) and if the Sony had included mjpeg, while space intensive would have given the option to edit natively on both PC's and Mac's using most any modern NLE without needing to transcode.

I have far too much time invested in Apple's FCP and hardware to switch to an AVCHD native NLE on a PC...if only Apple would update FCP for native AVCHD or Sony include mjpeg.

I'm either going to bite the bullet on a video DSLR or wait til RED releases the Scarlet- either way I'm budgeting up to $5G and it wont be on a "AVCHD" only camera!

As I mentioned above, AVCHD is going to be a "boat anchor" in the PRO market. I wish Sony had positioned this new camera as the entry level product in the EX series instead. A 1/3" XDCAM camera that is priced appropriately would be nice. I suspect that product management within Sony is less straightforward. They don't have just one camera business unit; they have several, each with its own product territory. There are company "rules" that prevent one business unit from stepping on the others turf. Sure these different business units are sometimes forced to hold hands in public but behind the scenes, its more "competitive."

I can't really agree on the time issue. For my Sony XR500 I transfered 2 hours and 35 mins to the PC in 12 mins. I then converted to Canopus HQ in just less than half realtime. A lot quicker than tape and then easy editing on the PC. I backup my original AVCHD to a LTo3 Data tape using a Quantum LTo3 HH deck. I now have a backup that is more realiable than video tape, no dropouts all in full 1920x1080, in less time than it would take to capture tape of the same time which would be on three tapes. In addition the LTo3 tape is just a little bigger than the three HDV tapes and will hold about 50 hours of AVCHD video!!!! Record and restore from the LTo3 tape is as fast as the hard drives can manage on my system around 64MBps.
I have held off changing my FX1 waiting for a camera like the NXcam. Just hope SOny have included the features that are on the consumer models such as touch spot focus and exposure etc.

Ron Evans

Well it could be "company rules" that prevented them from using XDCAM, but it could also be that H.264 at 25Mbit/s has an image quality that rivals MPEG-2 at 35Mbit/s, (at least that's what they'll argue, YMMV) and with flash memory being the medium of choice, smaller is better.

Copying AVCHD off the card via card-reader, and then transcoding to Cineform via HDLink, is way faster than real-time with an i7-920.

I was reminding myself this weekend how big an improvement the workflow is!

Except that NXCAM still only has a native 960x1080 sensor, meaning the interpolated upscaled image quality is not likely to be much different at 1920x1080 than HDV at 1440x1080, either one will max out at around 800-850 lines. So while I agree the NXCAM is a more capable improvement, with more efficient compression, the final image quality isn't going to challenge the mpeg-2 35/mbps XDCAM-EX which has 1/2 inch full raster sensors in spite of the older mpeg-2 codec.

So is that rivaling XDCAM, 35 mbps mpeg-2? I think so, yes, although the XDCAM-EX is over 1000 lines resolved, with better low light sensitivity. No question h.264 is more efficient, ultimate image quality can be had from the more wasteful codec with full raster sensors. I think the older Z5 image quality will still rival the newer NXCAM, but the new cam is a major advance in features, usability, and potentially workflow.

Steve, I would say save another $1300 and buy EX1. I know ergonomics are so-so, but it is a true pro-camera with great picture quality and codec which is easy to edit. LCD is by far the best on the market. I don't buy into the whole jello effect on CMOS on these cams. You can watch a ton of footage shot with EX1 and unless you are a pixel peeper you won't notice it even with high speed action.

It's important to realise that specifying a codec and bitrate does not uniquely define the image quality. Different MPEG2 coders (at the same bitrate) can give widely differing qualities, and the same holds true for AVC-HD. That's why MPEG2 bitrates have dropped dramatically for broadcast digital TV in the last ten years, for roughly the same quality of picture - better technology has meant better coders. (Hardly surprisingly, expensive ones are much better than cheap ones, and new ones tend to be better than old ones.)

Hence any attempt to define AVC-HD (24Mbs) as being better or worse than MPEG2 at 35Mbs is totally meaningless without talking of specific hardware. Compare a cheap 24Mbs AVC-HD camera to a good 35 Mbs MPEG2 coder and the codec may be far worse. Compare an expensive broadcast AVC-HD coder to a cheap MPEG2 coder and it may well be better for the same bitrates.

The more you get into the subject, the more complicated it becomes. For example, it's possible to trade off still frame accuracy for motion rendition. Hence, for a given codec and bitrate, you can trade off detail and artifacting in fairly still images against how fast moving objects get recorded.

My own experience is that the codec used in the HMC150 is roughly equivalent to HDV, and nowhere near as good as 35Mbs XDCAM (as in the EX). That said, it's motion handling seems better than HDV, but with worse artifacting on detailed still images. It remains to be seen how the AVC-HD coder in the Sony NXCAM cameras will compare.

I also think that an EX1 looks a far better buy at present than the announced NXCAM model. But I suspect the EX1 will be the bottom of the XDCAM-HD range, the current NXCAM the top of a forthcoming NXCAM range.

Then again, the HMC150's chips has far less pixels than something like the Z5 so it should prove that it's AVCHD codec is really much better than HDV.
In broad daylight, I don't think there's any HDV camcorder that's nearly as sharp as the HMC40. I can only guess at this stage but I really do think that this NXCAM will be much sharper than the Z5.


Now that we have some fresh prices on the Scarlet, a fully working 2/3", interchangeable lens version wont be anywhere near as cheep as this NXCAM. Even a fully working fixed lens version wont be as cheep. Now compare it to cameras that are much more expansive, then theirs some competition, but one thing is certain, it's not as ENG friendly. I still want one badly.

David, I also think a big role here plays glass quality. HMC150 has the same chip as HPX 170, however 170 lens seems to be better. Another example was JVC's HD series with Fujinon 16x lens. Now fit the same camera like HD100 with Fujinon 17 or wide 13x lens and we are talking different picture quality all together.
I think EX1 and NXCAM will have 2 different applications, with NXCAM destined for corporate/event video, EX1 for broadcast/documentaries.
Personally for me (as a Mac user) this is a non starter, since it would force me to either transcode all the footage (large files for storage, inability to preview footage on the computer, quality and time loss on transcoding) or get a PC- which I simply will not do. If they just put XDCAM codec into HMC150 body I would be the first one to buy it.

What about the face detection (FD) that the little 3 chip Panasonic HMC41 has, Ron? I was mightily impressed by that when I used it, as it's faces I'm filming, not the contrasty, well lit brickwork of the church behind them. Only snag as implemented on this particular camera is that you can only have FD operating if the whole camcorder is in the auto mode - so as good as useless in my view.

Oh well, shows those designers don't use the cameras much themselves.

tom.

On my XR500 the face controls still work with AE shift on for example. Smile shutter works too. The Sony MBS software is really good for logging files. I just assembled the annual video of my grandsons combining all the shots from my daughters SR7 and my SR11 and XR500. It was interesting to see the MBS highlight all the faces in a selected clip along the bottom of the preview window especially when there were about 20 kids in a classroom video my daughter shot on the SR7. The SR7 does not have the GPS location that the XR500 has which would have also given the GPS coordinates as well as the faces. Sorting by face is real easy not that I am expecting Edius ( my main NLE) to do this!!!!
I am looking forward to see what Sony will actual announce as products. My FX1 will certainly be replaced as most of the time now the XR500 has a much better picture.

Ron Evans

Very true.

I would disagree very much with that, having put the codecs to the same test. I used the HMR10 external SDI recorder, connected to an EX1, and shot XDCAM-EX HQ on the SxS cards and ran the SDI out to the AVC-HD external recorder. And I tried very hard to put the camera into situations that would "break" the codec. And on normal scenes they were practically identical, and in codec-breaking circumstances the h.264 was better every single time.

This was the first time I've been able to single out the codec away from the camera head for a true comparison, and I came away with the certainty that yes, h.264/AVCHD at 21mbps (average) is certainly the equal to, and in fact superior to, XDCAM-EX at 35mbps.

I would certainly expect that the NXCAM's 24mbps should perform comparably, but that will of course have to be put to the test to see.

Ah, but I did say my experiences were specifically with AVC-HD as output by the HMC150 - it's quite conceivable the coder in the HMR10 is better than that in the HMC150, even if the same codec, same bitrate, etc. It's also conceivable that AVC-HD performs well with a "clean" input, badly in the presence of noise.
To be more specific, the problems I found were artifacting around edges, especially such as right angles, the sort of thing you may expect on a too highly compressed JPEG still photo of something like a page of newsprint. This was in 1080 mode, and displayed on a Panasonic 42" 1920x1080 plasma, the original recording replaying directly via the TV SD slot.

The artifacting was quite low level, but made much worse subjectively by it's nature, flickering a couple of times every second (likely at every I-frame) - it would have been barely visible if it changed on a frame or field basis. It was also exacerbated by being present on still images - motion artifacts are often masked by the motion blur in normal replay. (My impressions were the codec handled high motion quite well, which makes me think bits are being weighed towards coding the difference frames at the expense of I-frames.)

So my first test to try and break the codec would be a scene with a lot of fine detail, something like filming the front page of a newspaper, and see what happens around the edges of letters.

I'll freely admit that I can't say whether what I saw was due to the codec, the coder as used in the HMC150, or the front end of the camera giving the coder a hard time, maybe due to noise. (Visible, though it was at 0dB.)

Are you 100% sure you didn't have DRS on? Depending on the contrast difference of that right-angle edge, that's the kind of thing DRS can do, it can exhibit some oddness at harsh transitions of contrast...

Anyone noticed the new Panasonic AG-HMC151
 

I see several references here to the Panasonic AG-HMC40 and the Panasonic AG-HPX150, but I just stumbled onto a description of the Panasonic AG-HMC151. That’s a new one to me. See it at

Holdan Limited - Panasonic AG-HMC151 Professional 3-CCD Handheld AVCCAM camcorder


It may increase the price pressure a little on the new SONY. I am anxious to see what the cost in the US will be for both the Panasonic AG-HMC151 and the new SONY XDCAM. Was struggling between Panasonic AG-HMC40 and HMC150 for Christmas, but decided to wait and see how the new Sony fit in cost-wise. Now I need to add the AG-HMC151 to the equation. I worry that neither the HMC151 nor the new XDCAM will be available for “Santa” to wrap this year. Thoughts?

HMC151 is the same as the HMC150, with the exception that it can switch between pal and ntsc systems.

hmc151
 

Sorry Randy but you are right only on the first part. HMC151 is the same to the HMC150 because it is the PAL version of the HMC150 but it doesn't have a pal/ntsc switch. I noticed there are HMC152 and HMC153, the numbers represent a specific zone of the market.

What wildly different cameras to have up against each other Richard. (BTW, it the HMC41 here in PAL-land).

The 150 is a full manual control camera with far bigger chips that the HMC40's ¼" variety. The latter has auto ND filters (ug!), a wide-angle (Ha!) of 41 mm (as against 28 mm) and CMOS (which I dislike for various reasons).

And my beautifully produced 12 page brochure on the HMC41 is very coy about how you add gain up and (crucially) how you lock the iris and then make controlled adjustments of same.

Face detection is all very well, but to have it working only in the full auto mode makes it good as useless in my view.

Not much camera for a lot of money it looks like. But the results are good, that's for sure.

tom.

Face detection uses exposure, white balance and focus to optimize for faces in the scene. If all these are locked off in manual there is nothing for the camera to control! In AE shift it still works since all controls are available to the face detection but with the selected bias ( lighter or darker). Don't know whether HMC40 has AE shift as the face detection may work in this mode.

Ron Evans

Its concievable the coders are different but extremely unlikely. The codecs are a mathematical based model standard. They should behave exactly the same if they are the same standard.

I think it's safe to say the simpler and less complex an overall image is the easier it is for any codec to compress the image.

Hovever, small pixel level image elements are not an issue for MPG-2 or 4 codecs.

The HMC is certainly capable of producing lots of very fine grain noise in comparison to other cameras which produce a larger appearing noise grain. The AVCHD codec uses a smallest luma predicition block size of 4X4 (MPG-2 is 8X8). During the luma intra mode predicion decision to determine luma direction, the 9 modes of the 16X16 overall block motion are evaluated by the codec and unlikely modes are filtered out (it's no wonder CPUs have a hard time decoding). Non-contiguous pixels or smaller than 4X4 blocks of pixels are filtered and have no effect whatsoever on the codec in the direction prediction.

The bottom line is noise is too small, and being fully random rather than directional, is filtered from the intra direction predicion. So there is no effect on the codecs performance (especially MPG-2) and the codecs take advantage of this.

Have a good read of this paper on intra prediction (the basis of compression) and you can easily understand how the H264 codec works and why it's not some vodoo. But it is far advanced from MPG-2.
http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v13/v13-9.pdf

Don´t ask me.
I don´t know anything about this cam since I have not seen what this cam can produce

That is why I asked you.
I was under the impression that you had some inside info since you made that statement, that it was "much much better".


Cheers

Hans

Not so - the codec specifies a number of features which any given coder *MAY* employ, but doesn't insist that any given feature is used. (For a full list of all the possible features, see H.264/MPEG-4 AVC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia , "Features") Leaving out any feature(s) obviously makes the coder cheaper and simpler - but less efficient at lowering bitrate (for the same quality) than MPEG2.

See the EBU report at http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/...3-schaefer.pdf . Ignoring the technicalities, the key section relevant here is on page 10 - "Implementation Reports", and in particular:
In other words, all H264 coders are not equal, and it is unrealistic to expect the coder in a cheap camcorder to equal that of a broadcast encoder costing many times more. As the EBU report makes clear, the oft quoted figure that "AVC-HD is about 2x as efficient as MPEG2" is only true when all the features are enabled.

That is not currently going to be the case in a real time encoder in an inexpensive camera.
Yes, but different codecs can struggle with different things. High levels of motion, fine detail, smooth coloured gradients, noise - the list goes on. And one codec may handle one of those factors well, another badly. That's why it becomes so difficult to make blanket comparisons between them, and that's ignoring differences between individual coders of the same codec!

No, Randy had it right the first time. The 151 is NTSC/PAL switchable, and sold only in Europe. The 152 is PAL-only, sold in southeast Asia and Australia/NZ.

You sure Barry? I'm in PAL land and the 151 brochure in front of me makes no mention of NTSC capabilities.

I'm virtually certain that what I saw was codec related for a variety of reasons. For example, I managed to arrange to step through frame by frame and it was odd - you could see a "grain" type effect (more like JPEG artifacting), but which didn't change frame by frame until it suddenly jumped to a different pattern. The number of frames between "jumps" was what I'd expect the GOP-length to be.

Since this was happening on pictures with little motion, hence the conclusion that it was related to the way I-frames were being compressed. The codec was being "broken" not by high movement or gradients, but by fine detail. Hence my wondering how you felt it compared with 35Mbs XDCAM on still, detailed images.

As said before, it's quite possible it was a combination of the codec and a camera front end feature.
It will do 60Hz and 50Hz frame rates, both 720p and 1080i standards, though strictly speaking neither PAL or NTSC. (It won't do SD.)

http://www.resource.holdan.eu/specs/..._AG-HMC151.pdf Page 11, under "Recording Format".

I totally agree on this point. A lesser camera with lesser processing power can use a manipulation of the codec within the standard to reduce the required processing power and compression effectiveness.

I would hope Panasonic would use the same AVCHD compression in two products advertised in the same Pro line and produced in the same time period with the same intended market.

Also when you step through frame by frame and see differences in sensor noise; it's not the noise affects the codec, it's the codec affects the noise, there is a difference.

That's not what I saw - stepping through there was a "pattern" which remained constant frame to frame, then suddenly became a different "pattern" which remained constant for a number more frames, then changed again. My memory is that the number of frames between "jumps" was what would be expected for GOP-length.

The "pattern" looked like compression on a still JPEG, especially around edges, and was separate to "normal" noise. (Which did change frame by frame.)

Check out the footage of the nxcam...
 

Amazing quality!!!
Sony | Product Catalog - Sub-Category Landing Page

the specs
Sony Product Detail Page - HXRNX5U

b and h listing
Sony | HXR-NX5U NXCAM Professional Camcorder | HXR-NX5U | B&H

Having checked out the footage...
 

One observation - bee and dog sequences show auto focus problems.
I have found Sony's focusing algorithm surprisingly weak with furry animals, pumping constantly even when they are in the middle of the frame. This has been the weakest point in V1/FX7, which otherwise is a great camera for wildlife filming in difficult conditions. With animals, there is often no time to focus manually.