500 over 300?

I will put together a few clips, but cannot publish it until the show has aired later this week.

Did get to see a 30sec trailer from the freeride skiing contest which aired last night, the Hpx500 chopper shots mixed with Hvx200 all in shot in 720p50 and broadcasted in SD, looked pretty good.

The 500 has the advantage of being a 2/3" in low light and even though smaller chips are getting more and more acceptance the established clients are not huge fans of 1/3" chips. That alone might pay the difference it self in one job. And it has 4 P2 slots.....changing P2 cards while sitting in the wind, facing out of the heli would have been a nightmare as there was very little space.

And for some reason you don't think about the P2 card cost when the time in the air costs about the same as a 64Gb P2 card(not the Eseries..)...per hour..
 
Same dilemma

Same dilemma

I'm in the same boat. With limited budget this year, we are in the market for 2 new cameras. The HPX300 looks so promising and we were anxiously waiting for the release but now I'm hesitating because of the apparent issues. We're a small production company and only can spend around 15k each this year on new camera gear. There are no pro dealers in my area so I can't get my hands on a HPX300 to see if the issues are as bad as I'm hearing. We've got a couple of HVX's that have been absolute workhorses for us but it's time to slowly upgrade. Does anyone know if Panasonic is going to phase out the HPX500? I'd hate to migrate to the 500's only to find out they are on the way out.
Joe
 
Joe,

I've got the 170, 200, 500 and 3000 of the HPX range of panasonic cameras. I've seen the 300 and from what I've seen it's a great camera. The 300 has the detail over the 500 but the 500 is far far better in low light situations. The 500 has been a workhorse for us, and has paid for itself twice over in just over a year. The only thing I switched out was the viewfinder... I went with the upgraded viewfinder, which helps a lot.

I was just talking to my panasonic rep about the 300 and 500 cameras and from what he's heard the 500 is still going to be part of the product line. What area do you live in that don't have any panasonic reps? I'm up in Canada and Panasonic Canada have been great at shipping demo cameras out for me directly. I'm going to a demo on Thursday that's supposed to have the 300 there.
 
The first reason for going with 500 was that the 300 won't be delivered until next week. Second Cmos for a lot of actionsport and possible some typical news footage might be a bit risky, the firmware update might fix a lot of the issues but it's still cmos. And cmos without any firmware fix would have been a bad idea with some wind and quite agressive flying.

The lowlight also is in a different leuage. If i will need a slot in wireless transmitter Anton Bauer makes and adapter that sits between the battery and camera. Thus resolution and avc-i are, pluss price, are what will sell the 300.(and probably a better vf...)

The difference looks like it pays for itself with a local company doing a commercial for the local council and they wanted some heli shots from the weekend. So thats the difference in price taken out of the equation for me.

Not sure if NRK allows viewers from abroad, but some shots from the heli was in this promo:
http://www1.nrk.no/nett-tv/sport/spill/verdi/98051
Horrible compression though...
 
I've got a low use HPX 500 kit for sale in the Marketplace section of the website. Located in LA. It's a full shooting kit with cases, batteries, lens, p2 cards. We are letting it go to finance some RED camera accessories, although it is a great camera and miles above our older hvx-200's. By the looks of things at NAB the 500 was pretty prominently displayed so I doubt it will be phased out anytime soon.
 
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