First Impressions: Sony FDR AX1–The First 4K Camcorder With an Auto Mode

I got some time hands on with an FDR-AX1 with firmware version 1.1. I am not sure if it was a production model or not.The first and most important thing for me was that IT IS PAL/NTSC SWITCHABLE!!! Most Japanese market Sony products are not.It felt very familiar but the menu navigation was a little laggy, hopefully it will be better in future.The only thing I worry about a little is how quickly it went to +18dB gain in a reasonably well lit showroom.The autofocus was smooth, relatively quick and looked accurate but it is hard to know without looking at a 4K monitor.It was so nice using a proper video camera again. I am definitely interested...
 
The lens like my NX5U ramps quickly to f3.4 so if you zoomed in on anything and were in auto mode it would rapidly increase gain. I have FDR-AX1 on order will be a nice match for my NX5U.

Ron Evans
 
Ron Evans said:
The FDR-AX1 also has all the frame rates. Differences appear to be Codec, HDSDI, timecode plug and wireless control cabability with dongle. If the PXW-Z100 already had the firmware update announced for next year then it would be the better deal. For really long record times then the XAVCS would have to be used and so the PXW-Z100 would become a FDR-AX1 !!!

Ron Evans
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What got me sold is the Bit Rate on 4k. FDR-AX1=150 Mbps . The Pxw-Z100 is 500-650Mbps. That is a huge jump in my books.
 
JanusCC said:
Yes, it is much better, PAL/NTSC switching is ver important for me. But until they get a Long GOP version of the XAVC codec it is pretty much unusable, 10 minutes on a 64GB card!!!!
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OUCH!!!!!

Would we be able to hook this up to a Atmos Ninja or something to bypass the cards?
 
JoeJITSU said:
What got me sold is the Bit Rate on 4k. FDR-AX1=150 Mbps . The Pxw-Z100 is 500-650Mbps. That is a huge jump in my books.
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FDR-AX1 is XAVCS 8 bit LOngGOP the PXW-Z100 is XAVC 10bit intra frame ( iframe). Big difference in potential quality. However would need some external record to really record long form programs.
 
I hope the firmware update includes some sort of 10-bit LongGOP rather than simply 10-bit iframe XAVC and 8-bit Long GOP XAVC-SThe other thing I forgot to mention was that the viewfinder was nice. It's not OLED nice, but it is large and clear.
 
I think the firmware update for the FDR-AX1 will be for HDMI 2.0 and AVCHD. The update for the PXW-Z100 will have LongGOP in 10 bit as well as 8 bit, HDMI 2.0 and AVCHD. At least that is what i have found out so far. OF more interest is if the HDMI output on the FDR-AX1 is in fact 10bit.
 
JoeJITSU said:
What got me sold is the Bit Rate on 4k. FDR-AX1=150 Mbps . The Pxw-Z100 is 500-650Mbps. That is a huge jump in my books.
Click to expand...


From what I've gathered, next year's upgrade for the Z100 will give it the AX1's codec. So, it will also do 150mbps, 8-bit, 4:2:0.
 
Hi noirist.

Please note that the "original" file is 1080p only. I will try uploading the 4K file if there is a demand for it.

Thanks.

Johnnie
 
http://www.cinema5d.com/?p=21457

"I would expect this kind of high resolution small sensor handheld camera to be a great working tool for anyone who is doing “run&gun” events, documentary style shooting and even covering sport. I would expect such a camera to perform well in all lighting situations but unfortunately this is not the case with the new Sony FDR-AX1. The combination of a small sensor packed with a great amount of tiny pixels doest not do well to the low light capability of this camera. As you can see in the various sample footage I took, even using the gain control did not help much improving the overall dark images the camera produces. (see Oriental flavor-Night video). Instead, noise was added to the picture. (all in all I’ve used gain 3db, 6db, 9db up to 12db).

 
Thanks for showing the videos. I will get mine hopefully mid November and will be able to do a side by side comparison with my NX5U. I expect low light performance to be very similar. The NX5U does not do well in low light either !!! 12db is the absolute limit for usable NX5U video and even then I use NEAT filter to clean up. Most of the time I try to keep gain below 6db amd expect the same from the FDR-AX1

Ron Evans
 
Thank you for posting such comprehensive footage from the FDR-AX1. You included all the shots I'd want to see. I found the nighttime footage disappointing, the resolution really suffers. But the indoor footage was surprisingly good, and the daytime footage was good IMO. My only question is where can I get some of that eggplant dish?
 
Firefox sees the file but will not download says it is corrupt, Explorer doesn't see the file and neither does Google Chrome. Has anyone had more luck downloading ?

Ron Evans
 
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