I had the chance to play, with some DOP friends, one of the two prototypes of the SONY PMW-F3 in Europe at this time. Organized by Visuals Switzerland led by Charly Huser, the meeting was intimate enough for us to observe the latest addition to Sony in all its glory.
All settings were not working yet, but to summarize, it is a sort of a compact XDCAM EX, with a big sensor (CMOS, size S-35), an astounding bandwidth and the ability to set PL mount via an adapter ring. An HD SDI dual-link output is expected for external uncompressed recordings.
Some part of the innovations announced or integrated to the EPIC make their way to Sony, like the lenses that transmit metadata to the support. The lenses don’t exist yet. The new mount Sony has the disadvantage of introducing yet another standard. We’ll see if it becomes popular.
In any case, the quality is amazing and the color reproduction seems at first sight excellent. However is not as accurate than the Alexa, but this is my impression.
Well, an incredible new camera is born. Thinking that I wasn’t a big fan of Sony, now I bow.
The French website Repaire.net has also approached the creature. Rather than repeating the techniques and in-hands, I give you the link that it’s also interesting.
This visit was also an opportunity for me to approach a NanoFlash, a style of KiPro recorder that allows to short-circuiting the internal compression codecs of the cameras and record a very clean signal. It’s an impressive connectivity, light and very powerful. Here is the manufacturer’s site – (be warned! it’ll hurt your eyes).
And finally to finish, the monitor installed on the F3 was a PVM740, that is to say a nice OLED display. The only downside: the flickering diodes, which gives the image an electronic render. But this does not displease Sony …
For those interested, Jason Wingrove shot some intereting images with the new Sony F3 here.
If you would like to read the original post go here, is in french and edited by Pascal Montjovent, Director of Photography living in Switzerland.
Thank you Pascal for your collaboration.
Martin
Cameraman.com
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