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!