PXW-X200 in extreme weather Iceland shoot

One of my first XDCAM camcorders was the ground breaking PMW-EX1. It was ground breaking because it brought very high quality images, truly good enough for broadcast television, to a small handheld camcorder with a great lens with real manual control for the very first time. The EX1 was, in fact still is, a great camcorder.

A lot of the image quality came from the use of 3 larger 1/2″ sensors instead of the typical 1/3″ or smaller sensors found in handheld cameras. A bigger sensor means bigger pixels, which in turn means better sensitivity, better dynamic range and fewer diffraction artefacts. We now see that taken to extremes with the current trend for cameras with super 35mm sensors. While these large sensor cameras like the PXW-FS7 or PMW-F5 do offer some very nice benefits such as outstanding cinema style image quality there are also drawbacks. They tend to be bulkier and while there are hundreds of lenses to choose from, good, parfocal zoom options are limited and very expensive. For example, one of the very best compact par-focal zooms you can get for a super 35mm camcorder is the Canon 17-120mm T2.95 lens. That’s a meagre 7x zoom range and T2.95 is particularly fast (the X200 lens is f1.8). What’s more that lens cost around £30k! Even the new Sony 28-135mm f4 SELP28135G lens costs approximately £2.5k and that’s only a 4.8x zoom.

So enter the PXW-X200. At first glance it looks similar to the PMW-200, but gone are all the slots and vents that were quite unpopular on the PMW-200. It’s slightly fatter at the rear end than the PMW-200 and there is a small vent on the right rear, but the camera feels very solid in your hand and is nicely balanced. The front of the camera is dominated by a new 17x zoom lens from Fujinon. This lens has the same sliding focus ring where forwards is for auto or electronic focus and back gives very precise manual focus control. There is a servo driven zoom ring which can be controlled manually as well as a nicely weighted iris ring.

While 17x doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over the 14x of the PMW-200 it really does make a difference as the lens provides both a slightly wider and longer field of view. At 5.6-95.2 mm (35 mm equivalent: 29.3-499 mm) it’s a very useable zoom range. It’s also image stabilised.

As expected the image quality is good. I’m not sure if these are new sensors in the PXW-X200 or the same as the PMW-200, but whatever is going on there is a noticeable improvement in sensitivity, noise and smear. So either these are new sensors or the image processing has improved quite a bit. There is very little noise for a 1/2″ camera from the X200, it actually performs more like a 2/3″ camera. Sony quote 58db as the 0db noise figure for the X200. That’s within 1db of the high end PDW-F800 and I don’t doubt the numbers, the pictures really are very clean with minimal noise. Dynamic range is good too. It’s not in the same league as the F5 or FS7, but it’s good for a small camcorder at around 11.5 stops and highlights are handled very nicely, especially if you use a hypergamma.

Just like the PMW-200, the PXW-X200 records primarily on to SxS cards. But as well as SxS cards you can also use SDHC and XQD cards for many of the internal codec options. Using the MEAD-SD02 you can use SDHC Class 10 cards formatted in FAT to record any of the 35Mb/s XDCAM EX codecs as well as standard definition DVCAM. For news or projects where you might need to hand off the recording media this is really useful. But I still think you should be using SxS for anything really important or whenever you want the best image quality and reliability that comes from using professional recording media. To record at the very highest HD quality settings or to use XAVC you must use the ExFAT mode along with SxS or XQD cards via the QDA-EX1 adapter. Like SxS cards, XQD cards can be formatted using ExFAT, UDF or FAT so these can be used for any of the recording modes in the X200 and offer a lower cost media option for those on a tight budget. It also means that if you have a PXW-FS7 you can use the same media in both cameras.

As well as the cameras great wired connectivity which includes both HDMI and HDSDI outputs, Timcode in/out and genlock the PXW-X200 has a comprehensive range of wireless functions. Via the supplied WiFi dongle you can stream video live from the camera or upload files via ftp to a remote server. In addition you can remove the WiFi dongle and replace it for a 3G or 4G cellular dongle to get similar functionality over a mobile phone network. This will be great for TV news saving the need for an uplink truck in many instances. It could also be used for streaming corporate events live around the globe.

For streaming or ftp applications the camera can produce XAVC Proxy files at various low bit rates from 500Kb/s to 9Mb/s. These proxy files can also be recorded on an SD card in a dedicated ‘Proxy’ SD card slot. Some of the wireless functions were not available in the firmware of the camera we had in Iceland, so I wasn’t able to test them, but on paper at least this camera should be very capable for remote and wireless operation. Even at a very basic level the WiFi dongle allows you to use a smart phone or tablet along with Sony’s Content Browser Mobile application to browse through the media on the cards in the camera and then ftp the files to a remote server or cloud service such as Sony’s Ci.