Monday, January 17, 2005
Sony HDR-FX1: High Definition Without Breaking the Bank
Posted by Doug Johnson in "HARDWARE" @ 11:00 AM
Controls and Layout, Part I
Arranged along nearly the entire left side of the camera are most of its controls. And for a "consumer" offering, there are an awful lot. There are dedicated controls for adjusting iris, gain, shutter speed, and white balance. These controls and their operation will be familiar to operators of professional cameras. Having this degree of manual control is a very welcome change over previous models, but will overwhelm amateurs.
Figure 3: Manual exposure toggle buttons.
Also found on the left side of the camera are the focus mode selector switch, neutral density filter selector, 3 assignable buttons, audio level controls, record review, spotlight and backlight controls, plus the focus and zoom rings. The focus and zoom rings are not physically connected to the lens elements, but these are, rather, used to indicate to the camera’s electronics how to position the lenses. On older cameras this technique didn’t respond well, but on this camera it seems to work fine at all but the fastest of speeds.
Figure 4: Additional camera controls.
An improvement over previous cameras is an adjustment wheel on the left side at the back of the camera to manually adjust audio level. When manual adjustment is enabled, two audio level meters appear on the on-screen display. There is only one control, so separate adjustment of the two stereo channels is not possible.
One of the neatest new features of the camera is called "Shot Transition." With this feature, you can setup two shots and have the camera transition between them smoothly. Each of these shots can have different zoom, focus, exposure, and white balance settings, and the duration of the transition can be set between 2 and 15 seconds. Without this feature the individual controls would have to be adjusted manually, something which is very hard to achieve individually, nigh impossible collectively, especially if they have to be repeated over and over again. The resulting transitions are smooth, and add a more professional look to your video if used properly.
Figure 5: Shot Transition, format indicators, and other controls.
