NX5U In Action
 

A pic of my new toy in action

Adam, I sincerely hope this all works out for you.

What kind of battery life is expected from the supplied battery? I am really looking at this camera, and this is one concern that I have, how much will I have to invest in batteries?

Thanks

Ryan

Battery life is phenominal
 

I bought 3 Batteries for this camera. I found the F970 Battery for $99 each at Frys Electronics and the F570 for $40. It came with the F770
I am getting waaaay more life out of these batteries than I did with the same F970 batteries on my Sony Z1U. The absence of the Tape mechanism really improves battery life. (Less moving parts) I get about 400 min per 970 battery. (real life) with GPS on and LCD open
The Supplied F770 battery gets me about 300 minutes.
One thing Sony cut costs on is the battery charger. this model does not come with the same as my other cams. No LCD display with charging status indicator. Just a simple red light or no light to let you know the charge status. eh.

Thanks Benny, that is amazing battery life, and really helps me in deciding what I need. Since you have used this camera a little, let me ask you if you think it might work well for what I am doing. I video cheerleading competitions, in stadiums, so the lighting is decent, I am currently using a canon GL-2 and it works well, but I would really like to get away from tapes, and step up to HD, so this camera really has my interest.

Thanks

Ryan

Sure Ryan, It would fit well in that situation. The 20x zoom will really come in handy with those large stadiums as well as the tapeless workflow. No more changing tapes when it falls in the middle of a performance. It should prove well for you. Be prepared though. If your machine is not up to par, you may run into some serious bottleneck on the HD editing side of things.

Or when the tape head messes up, and the tracking on each tape for the event is different, that was fun. Thanks for the insight, I am going to download some of the clips that were already posted and see what I can do with them, but I am already expecting to do some computer upgrades. Thanks so much for the help.

Ryan

How good is the lens.
 

Benny, can you tell me how good is the lens on this camera? I seen some clips, and the edges of the lens looks to be soft especially at the wide angle.

Cheers
Tom

I haven't noticed anything different than my other Sonys yet. It might have been my bad footage you looked at. It was rushed and who knows what settings I was using. Lol!!

I shot my first real job on it this past Saturday and I was really happy with the results. I shot in an OLD Dark historic Church in Pasadena. The low light was on par with what I had hoped from this camera. More shoots and more tests are needed for my definitive approval though.
I did have a formatting issue on the cards this weekend and it required me to use Toast 10 to convert to Pro Res. Final Cut and AVCHD have a love/hate relationship sometimes. Not a huge deal, but a pain nonetheless. Updates will fix it am sure.