There is a primitive focus read-out in the viewfinder. This digitally doubles the picture for five seconds to help you focus better. On top of the camera is an Expanded Focus button. And just below this switch is Push Auto, which when depressed will focus the lens on whatever you’re aiming at. Infinity shifts the focus to – you guessed it – infinity. The Auto mode is more positive than ever, meaning that the noisome “seeking” is pretty much gone.
SONY HVR Z1U MANUAL
The Focus switch has three positions: Auto, Manual and Infinity. Sony has thoughtfully provided a lever on the zoom ring. The Zoom control switch lets you go from motorized zoom to manual zoom. The camera will tell you when it thinks it needs ND by flashing a message on the screen.
There are two filters (1/6 and 1/32) and Off. The neutral density control is just above, and works like that on the VX and PD cameras. The annoying stepping-effect so common in the earlier Sony DV’s appears to be gone. When set to manual, you turn this to set your F-stop (1.6 to 11), which you’ll see in the viewfinder. Using the menus you can change these default settings to suit your needs.Īt the front of the base, just below the lens, is the Iris dial.
There is also a three-position switch for Gain control: Low (0dB), Medium (+9dB) and High (+18dB). To take a manual white balance, you need to press either A or B and hit the one-push switch just above. The outdoor mode defaults to 5800K, but you can adjust it up or down in seven steps of 500K. Taking a cue from Big cameras, Sony has added a three-position White Balance switch that lets you store two settings (A and B) or use the Z1’s indoor or outdoor Preset. An adjacent Auto Lock switch can hold the settings for you. Along the base is an array that includes Iris, Gain, White Balance and Shutter buttons, letting you switch between On/Off or Auto/Manual.
The left side of the camcorder has a lot more buttons than we’ve seen on earlier Sony offerings. Now let’s take a closer look at the HVR-Z1U. More about its performance later in the review. The front diameter of the lens has been increased to 72mm. This is equivalent to 32.5 – 390mm on a 35mm camera. Speaking of the lens, Sony worked a deal with Carl Zeiss to design a Vario-Sonnar T* 12x zoom. The lens cap is integral to the hood – a sort of shutter-like aperture you can open with the flick of a lever. The battery compartment remains at the rear, but is deep enough now to hold the largest batteries without having them interfere with the viewfinder. Sony has moved the tape compartment back to the left side of the camera (where it was on the pioneering VX-1000), and moved the LCD monitor to the front, on top of the handle. With a power consumption of eight watts, the Z1 eats batteries at twice the pace of the PD, but you still have lots of tape time. That makes it a couple of inches shorter than Sony’s popular PD-170, and over a pound heavier. And for the first time in DV (and this is the really cool thing), the CCD’s are true 16:9 widescreen.įrom lens cap to eyecup the Z1 is 14 inches long, and weighs in at four and one-half pounds. The HVR-Z1U uses newly developed 1/3-inch CCD’s that have a pixel count of an astonishing one million, three times the resolution of the chips in the PD-170. I almost forgot to mention that the Z1 records either NTSC or PAL. So, a 60 minute tape really is 60 minutes. While the DVCam format records at 28.218mm a second, both the DV and HDV record at 18.812mm.
SONY HVR Z1U 720P
Word is that they’ll be introducing the AG-HVX200 at NAB in Las Vegas later this month, which will record on a P2 card in either 720p or 1080i. The only other entry in the HDV race, thus far, is JVC’s 720p camcorder. The Z1 employs the basic HDV format, agreed upon by many manufacturers in Japan. But the company has long been an advocate of the former. There has already been grousing about Sony’s decision to use interlace instead of progressive scan. This machine records in three formats: standard definition miniDV, DVCam, and high-def HDV 1080i. But for a variety of reasons, the Z1 takes things to a whole new level. The SDX-900 remains my first choice of “Big” cameras. Okay, I waxed eloquently about Panasonic’s SDX-900 and DVX-100, and I still believe they are impressive camcorders. In three decades of shooting video I have never come across a camera I like as much as Sony’s new DV format, high-definition HVR-Z1U.
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