New Sony & Canon Camcorders

Back in September I posted Sony, What are you playing at? in which I moaned about Sony not putting external microphone jacks onto their consumer camcorders. Well it seems since I posted that blog entry, there is now a consumer Sony camcorder with both headphone and a microphone jack! I’d like to think my rant had something to do with this but I highly doubt it. Perhaps they were indeed losing sales to Canon, I know of a few people that certainly switched because of this. So what model is it? It’s the Sony HDR-CX550.

Another thing Sony have changed that I’m really happy with is they seem to slowly be moving away from their stupid propriety Memory Stick format. Yes you read that right, I have come across a few Sony products recently that accept both Memory Stick & and SDHC cards. So far I know that they have released an SDHC SxS Adaptor for the XDCAM EX Cameras and the new NXCAM range has a Universal card slot that accepts both Memory Stick & SDHC cards, as does the consumer HDR-CX550. Also after a quick look it seems a whole range of the Cyber-shot range also takes both types of media. I’m guessing they’ll have products that use both for the next few years and slowly ditch memory stick, but that’s just my personal prediction (and hopes).

What else is new from Sony in the camcorder department then? The Sony HXR-MC50, it’s just recently been announced and will likely be available in July. It’s being described as an “Ultra Compact Professional AVCHD Camcorder” but in reality it’s probably just the consumer HDR-CX550 with an included external microphone and different firmware. It’s a bit like old HVR-A1E which was a compact professional HDV camcorder. Unfortunately though from what I can make out so far from photographs from NAB the new HXR-MC50 seems to lack XLR inputs, instead using the 3.5mm Mic Jack. A few members on the forums at DVinfo.net seem to be bothered about the lack of a full size focus ring. But on such a small camera screen manual focus is difficult anyway.

So what else is new? Canon has finally gone solid state with their professional camcorders. And from the looks of things you can tell they’ve been watching the competition closely for the last couple of years because they might just have made the best solid state camcorder in existence. The Canon XF300 and XF305, they are pretty much the same camera, just the XF305 includes HD-SDI, Timecode and Genlock at a couple grand extra I would guess).

The Canon XF300 main features:

• MPEG-2 MXF recording to CF cards at up to 50Mbps (4:2:2)
• Comprehensive NLE support
• 18x wide angle Canon L-series lens
• 3 x 1/3 type Full HD Canon CMOS sensors
• 10.1 cm LCD (1.23M dots); 1.3 cm (1.55M dots) EVF
• Variable frame rates

Yes that’s right, 4:2:2 at 50Mbps, this should please the BBC! Yes its only 1/3 CMOS but apparently Canon has worked miracles with it so wait to see footage from it before looking elsewhere. I was a bit annoyed at it recording to Compact Flash cards at first, however it does make sense really, we are already starting to see 64GB and even 128GB compact flash cards on the market and yet the biggest SDHC card available is 32GB, not to mention they are a hell of a lot faster and arguably a more robust card.

It’s due for release in June and I expect Sony will be worried because on paper it’s better the XDCAM EX range. We’ll have to wait and see.