PDW-F700 review

philip bloom

philip bloom

Veteran
Just got my hands on one for the weekend. Will do some shooting with it tomorrow and report back!! Looks lovely, got the latest xdcam deck to go with it.

Initial thoughts, much better LCD, V nice viewfinder, menus more like digibeta in using than previous XDCAM ones but got used to them...

Weight heavier than my F350 but balance very good.

Great having separate timecode display. Good for saving battery life.

No 24p, no SD (yet), no over / under crank. But nice to have 2/3" glass

More to come!
 
Still makes no sense; all Panasonic's ENG cams have 24p, and all Sony's cams from the V1 on up all offer it now, except this new one. Why take that feature away? Bizarre.

If someone wanted a 1080 tapeless camera without 24p, they could get an Infinity for about 40% less than the new Sony (IIRC). And heck, the Infinity at least does SD.

And no memory recording, it's disc only? Isn't it supposed to be $37,000? And the discs are incompatible with the existing XDCAM stuff too...

Good luck, Sony, but that has "flop" written all over it. I'm sure it performs well, but -- what were they thinking?
 
All of these things that are "missing" are speculated to be firmware updates shortly after the camera is out for a while.

Philip, I would be really interested in what you think about this camera as we are looking at getting one ourselves. One question about it that we do have is related to the 4 channel audio recording capability. We want to be able to have channels 1 and 2 come in through the slot load with a dual channel receiver and have 3 and 4 get plugged into the rear xlr's. Is this possible with this camera? We absolutely need 4 seperate channels of audio coming in without going with a sound guy and external mixing/recording. Right now we have a old panny that has a 4 channel adapter but no one makes anything anymore. Let me know please if you can. Thanks
 
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