I was very pleased; it's a very nicely designed camera for handheld work. It's well balanced, it sits nicely in the hand. It's not one of these off-center grips like on the Sony EX1 or the Panasonic HVX200. It's not quite as perfect as the Sony V1, which is so small and compact that it really rests on your wrist. But for a proper 1/3in chip camera with interchangeable lenses, it really is very nice.
So I shot in the car on the way up there, with the sun streaming in through the front windshield, panning around, trying to get telephoto shots of other cars on the road and test the steadyshot. We got there mid-evening and we shot on the skyscraper till about 1am, shooting beauty shots off the skyscraper and shots of people in the data wrangling area and pictures of the film crew at work.
They happened to be shooting with an XDCAM F335 and an EX1 on a Steadicam, so I was shooting an XDCAM production with HDV. It wasn't planned and we were there as guests, so I was doing things like standing on the shelf behind the bath tub, shooting over the director's shoulder as Stacey Keach came in and went through his routine. And the camera didn't let me down, apart from the fact that it tends to lose resolution when you increase the gain too much. But it was easy to focus: in fact all my shots were in focus, even in low light. And it was easy to handhold for 25 to 30 minutes at a time, so it was a very comfortable camera to operate and made it very easy to shoot documentary footage.
A good low-light performance, with very good resolution. It's a diagonal Clearvid CMOS sensor, with 1440x810 or 960x1080 pixels (depending how you count them), and for the most part it looked like full resolution 1920x1080, except in extreme high contrast. I saw some slight stepping along the edges, which I attributed to the slightly courser pixel grip of the sensor.
It had pretty good latitude for a Rec709 camera; it still tended to blow-out the sky if it was too intense, but no more so then any other traditional type of video camera. It's HDV recording, which has its pluses and minuses, but for what we were doing it was just fine; and as long as I didn't push the gain up beyond 6 or 9dB, the pictures were good. Above that the picture softened out a bit: it seemed to use pixel averaging for noise reduction.
The way Rob lights his films is with existing light or not much light at all, so there are a couple of Litepanel Minis in addition to the ambient lights in a bathroom on the 34th floor of the unfinished skyscraper at night, and we still had very good pictures, very usable. I cut together a ten-minute documentary of the show, put it up on my website for Rob to look at, and as a result ended up shooting his next film with an EX1. So, clearly the quality of the Z7 was good enough to convince Rob that I wasn't a complete idiot with a camera and was able to make good looking pictures.
Features: from front to back
It starts off with Sony's trademark built-in lens hood, with a lever to flick open and closed what is essentially a set of barn doors. That's the best lens cap in world as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure they have a patent on that, otherwise everyone would do it. Then there's a Zeiss interchangeable lens. You can push the focus ring forward and have a have a fully automatic servo lens, the way all the Handycams tend to have, or you can pop it back and engage the focus tail and have a fully manual lens. Then there's the zoom ring, which is a standard mechanical zoom with a traditional zoom rocker on the side. It has a fairly decent range, although it doesn't move very fast. So while it's slow enough to do slow creeps in and out, you can't really zoom in to pick up focus. It takes four or five seconds to zoom from one extreme to the other at the highest speeds, so I ended up putting it in manual zoom for the most part, and racked it by hand.
Then there's the free-spinning iris ring. Like the one on the newer Canons, it doesn't have any witness marks or any calibrations, but it's better than the little thumbwheel on the Z1 for dialing in iris. I didn't have any lenses apart from the stock lenses to work with, but I'm assured that it will take any of the 1/3in chip lenses. Fujinon makes seven or eight that can be used with, for example, the JVC HDV cameras. Some of them are quite nice and should work very well on the Z7.
The stock lenses are pretty decent, they're not perfect, their biggest flaw being chromatic abberration at the wide angle end, which seems to be a problem with a lot of low-cost cameras. I've been spoilt because I've been using the EX1 a lot, and the lens on that is much better than it should be for the price.
The camera has same the flip-out viewfinder or LCD design as on the Z1, so it's orientable up, down, left and right. Fairly streamlined control buttons appear where you want them. Most of the operation buttons are on the side, rather than being split between the side and the back, as in the EX1, so you're not continuously looking for the controls. And then that marvelous EVF on the back: the color sequential EVF that has more sharpness than just about anything else out there. It doesn't really measure up that sharp when you read it on the charts, but the fact is that it's a monochrome panel means you don't see color pixellisation on a pixel by pixel basis. It gives an impression of much higher sharpness, so you can see much more detail in it than with comparable viewfinders. So it really makes it a lot easier to focus.
Recording system
It does record onto CF cards, as well as on to HDV tape, and this does a number things for you, either in the old school world of shooting on tape or in the new world of shooting on memory cards – or you can work on both. You can do a pinpoint operation, where you are recording on tape and when you hit the end of the tape you can switch over and start dumping data to the the card, allowing you to change the tape. You can then switch back tape, so if you have a four-hour show you can record it with one CF card and four tapes, and you will get the intervening portions back onto the CF card and be able to reconstruct the entire show. You can also set up the card to record simultaneously with the tape, and it will record instead of the tape or it will record a variety of other operations.
The battery docks in the back and latches down, and the CF card fits on top of that and forms a continuous back panel for the camera, so it does mean if you have to do a battery change you will have to pop the CF card off and then get the battery out. But with a big battery you are running between four to six hours, so that's not a problem, and it's well balance, even with the CF card and the big battery on the back.
Because it's HDV recording, it's recording at 25Mbit/s, so you are going to get about an hour (and 13Gb) on the card. Sony of course makes the cards, and a number of others do too. There's a listing in the manual for the requirements for the card: 133x speed or 300x if you want to do loop record on the card. You can set up the card on constant loop recording, where it will record continuously until you hit the stop button, or pre-record and you have that many seconds on the tape, so you can tell it to start recording a few seconds before you hit the button, which is really quite useful.
One thing it won't let you do is true single frame. Just like on tape, if you are going to record, it has to be done in DV mode, not in HDV. I was hoping for single frames so I could do animation, but they don't quite have that there yet. In terms of the control system and the UI, it's much more like the Z1 and V1 than it is the EX1. It has a fairly standard multi-level Sony layered menu, with a fair amount of control over color options, and traditional saturation options, a better color corrector and an interesting color depth control that allows you to take any of six colors and change the lumar value without changing the saturaition. I'm not sure exactly how I would use that, but if you need for example to take a skintone down a level, but not change the saturation, you might want you it for that, or to perhaps do the same for a distracting sign in the background.
Sony S270
The S270 shares a lot of features with the Z7, but it can take the full-sized cassettes and record for four-and-a-half hours. It's a big shoulder-mount, and anyone who has used the DSR300 or DSR500 will feel instantly comfortable with it: it has that same bulk facility to it. It has four channels of audio instead of two, so it's recording two in the wrapper and two in the elementary stream. The 270 also has a lot more real-world connectors. So BNCs for genlock for composite, and an S-video connector: you don't have to use this horrible little cable that you have to use on the Z7 to break out the analog audio or video. More operator controls are out on the surface, rather than being buried deep in the menus. And of course, it has the stability of a shoulder-mounted camera.
The S270 and the Z7 have really thrown down the gauntlet to Canon and its interchangeable lens, semi-shoulder-mount cameras. A lot of people I talk to are looking at getting the combination of both of them, because the Z7s are very nice inconspicuous cameras, very good for running around and getting shots at events, and the S270 can be at the back of the room shooting your telephoto shots and cover shots. The pictures will intercut perfectly. If you're shooting in HDV, the pair are very compelling and well worth looking at.
As an upgrade form a Z1 or a V1, the Z7 is a very strong contender. It's faster than both of the cameras: considerably faster than the V1 and noticeably faster than the Z1. It's sharper than both of them. And it's much more flexible. The V1 goes a long way to putting the controls in right places, and the Z7 takes this even further.
The Z7 is my favorite Handicam right now from an operator standpoint. The EVF is astonishingly good. It's a color sequential EVF, like the EVF on the Red, so there's a bit of kinship there if you will. It's a Marcom PAL backlit sequentially red green and blue LEDs. So it's much sharper than a traditional EVF Sharp enough to focus with. One of the drawbacks of the V7 like to V1 and the Z1 is that it's expabded focus button can only be used when the tape isn't rolling. So you really have to have and very crisp veiwfinder if you are going to have to change focus on the fly while you are shooting. On teh EX1 you can use the standard focus while the cards are recording it was a life-saver, between that and the lens. I was really able to keep focus better than I expected with that camera. It's a difficult call trying to pick between the Z7 and the EX1, they are a similar price, it really comes down to are you looking for a camera that very easy to operate and will will therefore give you better pictures because you are in control of it or are you looking for a camera that has better technical specifications but makes you work a lot harder to run it. On a tri-pod they are both about the same. They both turn out very nice pictures The EX1 has greater dynamic range, it has the hyper gammas and the cine gamma modes that allow it a broader dynamic range with a a more gradual blow out of the lights, I use that all the time, some people don't like it as much as the video gamma as . The video gammas on he EX1 have a problem with the knee, the knee tends to blow out doing a bit of compression let's the highlights blow out again but if you run the EX1 in cine gammas and can work around the awkward handgrip and the somewhat less than ideal controls, you can get a technically superior picture out of it. But the Z7 is much easier to use especially handheld. And will probably give you more stable pictures if you are running and gunning. So it's really that trade off it really depends on what you need out of the camera.