Initial HPX300 Impressions

N

nsoltz

Veteran
Got a quick hands-on today at a local dealer's open house.

I am simply blown away at how sturdy the construction feels. As a true shoulder mount camera, it balances perfectly. The controls are all in the right place and it looks/feels like a true professional camera. In addition to XLR mike inputs on front, I was impressed to see 2 XLR's on rear. 2 SDI out. 6-pin locking firewire connector. Real 4-position ND wheel. Convenient menu button thumbwheel located on front of camera. Makes accessing menus much easier.


Looking forward to getting to know the HPX300 a lot better....

Ned Soltz
 
nsoltz said:
Got a quick hands-on today at a local dealer's open house.

I am simply blown away at how sturdy the construction feels. As a true shoulder mount camera, it balances perfectly. The controls are all in the right place and it looks/feels like a true professional camera. In addition to XLR mike inputs on front, I was impressed to see 2 XLR's on rear. 2 SDI out. 6-pin locking firewire connector. Real 4-position ND wheel. Convenient menu button thumbwheel located on front of camera. Makes accessing menus much easier.


Looking forward to getting to know the HPX300 a lot better....

Ned Soltz
Click to expand...

At what point do we stop saying it "looks like a true professional camera".. or "feels like".. and start realizing, that, like the audio industry, or the games industry... professionalism has ultimately become accessible to us all. It's the revolution and the evolution... we're there. And it's not what equipment you ultimately have, but what you do with it... no innuendos intended.

Time to stop feeling like we're "tricking" the world into thinking we're professional, and accept the fact that we are, in fact, creating professional results.

The masses might have access to these things, but this is where we see that talent is what makes the difference...
 
I had the privledge of both the 300 & 500 in my office today thanks to a Panny Rep (thanks Ned). THOROUGHLY impressed with the 300. Don't get me wrong, the 500 is beautiful with its 2/3 chips and glass. Each camera has its advantages/disadvantages over the other. For the price, Panny is going to sell a ton of the 300's. For my workflow, thats the way I plan on going.
 
I agree with GlenRhodes whole heartedly. I think that sometimes people get so caught up in the finer details of what qualifies as (technically) "professional" that they lose track of perfecting their craft. Give me someone with a good eye and a low qual camera over a novice DP and the bees nees gear any day!
It reminds me of when people used to ask if Final Cut Pro was "broadcsat quality" upon telling them that's what you edit with. :-) As if the software somehow makes the content better quality.

I'm currently doing post production on a 52 Episode TV series shot with the Panny 3000 in AVC Intra - Chosen for the BBC compatibility that Philip Bloom has mentioned. It's a beautiful codec and workflow to have on a production. I can't fault it. The HPX300 also looks like it will be amazing! Can't wait.
 
Hi,

Can't help but weigh in here. I don't think that Ned's commentary was referencing the user being a true professional, you all are. His point, at least the way I took it and we designed it was that by using this camera, you become familiar with using the larger cameras. The form factor is similar to our expesive cameras. Finding a camera with this feature set at this price range that can actually mimic the bigger cameras and thus set you up for a life-long learning curve that just grows, has here-to-fore not been done. So yes, thanks Ned for noticing.

Best,

Jan

PS. and Mikey P, love the signature. Too funny.
 
Glen, I think your comments might be a bit misplaced.

The term professional camera is meant to describe a piece of equipment that gives you a lot of options of use all of which are at a standard of quality that a professional organization would accept. Basically minimal to no compromises.

This says nothing about the user or the percieved level of competency.

"We are all creating professional results" is painting with a pretty large brush.

And is the same as saying "we are tricking the world into thinking we are professional".

"We" on a public forum is unknown...

It is O.K. to talk about equipment and equipment alone at times!
 
The camera looks great, physically but at the end of the day from the footage I've seen (not on the web but recently shot footage on a full 1080 screen) - it's a noisy little chip with some of the worst cmos skew I've ever witnessed. Not a good look. Despite the EX1's long GOP codec, it's 1/2" chip creates several advantages that for me produce a significantly better picture.

Pana go back to the drawing board. You want a real hit - 1/2 chip and CCD.
 
Tim Naylor said:
The camera looks great, physically but at the end of the day from the footage I've seen (not on the web but recently shot footage on a full 1080 screen) - it's a noisy little chip with some of the worst cmos skew I've ever witnessed. Not a good look. Despite the EX1's long GOP codec, it's 1/2" chip creates several advantages that for me produce a significantly better picture.

Pana go back to the drawing board. You want a real hit - 1/2 chip and CCD.
Click to expand...

oh snap!!!
 
I heard Panasonic "fixed" some of the noise in the latest firmware. Jan, is that firmware on the production cameras, or needs to be added?
 
Jan_Crittenden said:
Hi,

Can't help but weigh in here. I don't think that Ned's commentary was referencing the user being a true professional, you all are. His point, at least the way I took it and we designed it was that by using this camera, you become familiar with using the larger cameras. The form factor is similar to our expesive cameras. Finding a camera with this feature set at this price range that can actually mimic the bigger cameras and thus set you up for a life-long learning curve that just grows, has here-to-fore not been done. So yes, thanks Ned for noticing.
Click to expand...

And after spending some time with the 300 today I agree with Ned.

I could hold the camera, the entire camera by the lens (hand in the fujinon handle). Thats how light it is. Incredible for the form factor. Hope panasonic sticks with this design in future as well, its a sleek thing, a very nice design pictures you see on the web dont tell the story.

I have some AVCI100 footage I shot on my card here which I will upload later - the point of the shots I took were very simple, look at the skew factor and see how it handles very low light and highlights. I have no glamour shots. Just a simple test for what I wanted to see, will post some up later on a different thread.
 
is that warranty registration website whacked or what? one of
the stranger ways to select options I've ever used ;-)

I'm missing having component outputs from the 300 (as on the 200).
But, you can't have it all at its price-point.

jeff
 
Well the component out was always a dicky connection anyway. Kinda glad they dumped it actually. But, will need to use SDI out.
 
SPZ said:
I heard Panasonic "fixed" some of the noise in the latest firmware. Jan, is that firmware on the production cameras, or needs to be added?
Click to expand...

Not to be a naysayer but a lot pixels in a little chip at a workable ASA can be the root of this noise issue. I hope firmware can solve it. I have my doubts. The footage I saw was by a very competent DP who tried his damnedest to make it look good. When we ran a comparison with the EX 1 it was night / day. The EX blew it away - in long GOP. I know this flies in the face of long GOP vs Intra, but it has me thinking is this a better solution to an EX1 with a Convergent Design Nano on it? There must be a reason the EX1 is becoming an episodic fave (Dexter, the Librarian, etc).

1080 p on 1/3 sounds like a bad recipe. And even the high end wedding crowd won't like the way people dance unless they're doing the CMOS "Sway".

The HPX 500 (one of the nicest images / price out there) made all the right compromises to create a real low noise camera. Too bad many broadcasters aren't hip to to its rez limitations.
 
Tim Naylor said:
Not to be a naysayer but a lot pixels in a little chip at a workable ASA can be the root of this noise issue. I hope firmware can solve it. I have my doubts. The footage I saw was by a very competent DP who tried his damnedest to make it look good. When we ran a comparison with the EX 1 it was night / day. The EX blew it away - in long GOP. I know this flies in the face of long GOP vs Intra, but it has me thinking is this a better solution to an EX1 with a Convergent Design Nano on it? There must be a reason the EX1 is becoming an episodic fave (Dexter, the Librarian, etc).

1080 p on 1/3 sounds like a bad recipe. And even the high end wedding crowd won't like the way people dance unless they're doing the CMOS "Sway".

The HPX 500 (one of the nicest images / price out there) made all the right compromises to create a real low noise camera. Too bad many broadcasters aren't hip to to its rez limitations.
Click to expand...


Being an event shooter the CMOS sway is also one of my concerns, no one has yet ben able to test a fast moving, strobing, scanners etc type of Disco lights on the CMOS HPX300 corder.

I would be happy to buy HPX500 with a better LCD & VF like that on HPX300 ! well day dreaming. cox if panny was to do that then may be hpx300 would suffer setbacks for sales to large corpos.
 
I am currently using the HPX 300s (two of them) on a new comedy series that will be airing sometime in September. The image from this camera is stunning so far and there is ABSOLUTELY no noise in the blacks. It is very clean but of course I spent a couple of hours creating a scene file for the camera with color charts and scopes. I agree about the rolling shutter. It is very disappointing that the skew effect is so bad but on my show we are not seeing it or affected by it.
I do want to comment on the 1/2" chip and Sony EX statement. In my very experienced opinion with all of the Sony XD / EX cameras the footage from them is absolute garbage. 1/2" and 1/3" are not much different from each other and depth of field is not much different between the two sizes. It comes down to compression scheme and the XD compression scheme is the worst I've ever seen.
I just finished posting a 10 episode series that was shot on XD cam and pick ups were shot with EX 1 and EX 3 and the footage was terrible. Sure it looks okay in the view finder or on a monitor but that's not what is being recorded to the media. I was the lead online editor and colorist of the series and in the color process the XD footage completely fell apart and I've never seen more noise in any other camera.
The HPX is blowing it away in quality of picture. Panasonic owes us a good and timely fix on this rolling shutter issue and image skew effect.
 
I'm not certain exactly "how" you fix the skew using a rolling shutter.

I can see some attenuation, but fixing it completely doesn't seem to be an option with the technology.
 
Tim Naylor said:
The HPX 500 (one of the nicest images / price out there) made all the right compromises to create a real low noise camera. Too bad many broadcasters aren't hip to to its rez limitations.
Click to expand...

Maybe some of these "broadcasters " should check with Discovery Channel as they have cleared the 500 for silver level acquisition.
 
I just finished posting a 10 episode series that was shot on XD cam and pick ups were shot with EX 1 and EX 3 and the footage was terrible.
Click to expand...

I guess that's why they're called opinions, because not only is the footage I'm shooting "stunning" in terms of visual technology (whether someone likes the content is another thing, ha!), but I see XDCAM high-def programming on the major HD channels that blows my socks off. The footage is AMAZING! Maybe it's your style of shooting or editing? I dunno.
 
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