Dave Austin takes a first look at Sony's upgrade to the ubiquitous Sony Z1 HDV camera, the HVR-Z5, which features extended zoom range and CF card recording capability.

Article first published: February 2009

I’ve been playing with the Sony HVR-Z5 this week, very much with its predecessor, the Z1, in mind, considering it as a replacement camera. There has been a major improvement with the placing of the controls. I’d say that it’s got quite a few advantages, and just a couple of little niggles.

There has been a major improvement with the placing of the controls. There isn’t too much around the back of the camera now. I used to have to put gaffer tape on my Z1 so that I didn’t hit the menu button or the little wheel accidentally. They’re all on the side now, and you’re no longer hitting them with your shoulder.

One thing about a budget camera such as this is that they’re often owned by production companies who will send out less experienced people to shoot with them. What this can mean is that they mess up the sound. The Z5 has improved matters over the Z1, because they’ve taken some of the options out the menu and put them on switches. And as well as moving them around to the side of the camera, they’ve put a little cover over them, so there’s less chance of knocking them. It’s also easier to set up the audio in the first place, and I’m crossing my fingers that this is going to mean less overcooked sound coming in.

When you turn on the Z5, you immediately notice that it’s wider without the adapter, which is really nice. You can often get a whole room in circumstances where you'd normally be reaching for a wideangle adaptor. Using the standard lens without the adaptor, I found I could get a really nice wideangle look.

On the other end of the lens, it has a 20x zoom as opposed to the 12x of the Z1, so that’s really nice. You can get in and do some arty close-ups. And you now have the iris control as a proper ring on the lens, so it feels a lot more professional. When reaching for the exposure on the Z1, I often struggled to find the iris control, so that’s a great improvement.

One tiny niggle with the three camera rings is that the zoom ring is now continuous, whereas the Z1 had a little knob on it so you knew where it was on the range. That confused me slightly and I found myself going the wrong way, but I think I’ll get used to that over time.

After playing with the camera and familiarising myself with it, the first thing I did was shoot a short profile with a local musician. I love shots where just one tiny part of the frame is in focus and the rest is totally blow out, and the new 20x lens helps you to achieve that, because the longer the lens, the shorter the depth of field you can achieve. It makes it very hard to keep your focus, but for some arty cutaways it’s really nice.

In the end, I switched the peaking on, which a lot of people hate because you get these little red dots all over the screen, but for HD filming you really need to know if you’re in focus or not, so the peaking really helped me.

The first thing I was really exited about was progressive recording. Everything that looks cool these days is filmed progressively, and we’ve done a lot of work lately where we’ve had to apply film effects to Z1 material, and you’re throwing away half your resolution when you do that because you’re throwing away the second fields. So to be able to record progressive on a cheap handheld camera is great. Everyone’s after that look these days.

The Z5 and its interchangeable lens sibling the Z7 share the same compact flash card recorder, which neatly clicks on to the back of the camera. It doesn’t feel like an add-on; it feels like part of the camera. The great thing about this is that if you’re doing any long continuous recording, you can use the card recorder and tape to get a continuous recording. Some people might not use the tape side of it at all, and just record straight to memory cards. You have all the advantages of much quicker transfer times in post-production, you’re not tied to real-time digitizing, and there’s the potential for making multiple backups, which you can do really quickly to a hard drive that costs less than £100.

One more significant thing to mention about the CF card reader on the Z5 is that it uses standard CF cards, which are readily available off the shelf and are significantly cheaper than P2 cards or SxS cards. So you have all the advantages of solid-state recording, but on a budget.

One of the other things I’d heard about the Z5 was that it performs better in low light. I did a quick test in a room at night, with tungsten lights. I cranked up the gain to about 18dB and at first sight it looked better, not quite as grainy. I work with a lot of Z1 footage and it can often be really grainy, especially compared to the old PD150. You can see a bit of grain from the gain on the Z5, but it’s a definite improvement.

I plugged a Neumann condenser mic into the camera and that worked perfectly, because the camera has built-in phantom power. It produced a really nice sound and gave us some quite cool looking shots.

The Z5 really does represent a good upgrade to the Z1. If you really don’t need to step up to the likes of the EX1 and XDCAM recording with the increased bit rate, then you could still get great high definition images out of this camera, but for a lot less money. It’s a really good entry camera into high definition.

Dave Austin Dave is a production and post specialist who runs The Edit (www.theedit.co.uk) in Brighton, England.