The line between professional and consumer level video cameras continues to blur with Sony’s latest offering, the HDR-AX2000.
This new video camera, aimed at the prosumer market, produces broadcast quality footage while recording in the AVCHD format. The camera records full 1920×1080/60i high-definition video at up to 24Mbps and features progressive scan at 1080/24p and 30p. That means you can get full HD video with a gorgeous film-like effect.
As I always say, with video cameras you get what you pay for. And you’ll pay more for the HDR-AX2000 than you will for my favorite consumer-level cameras from the Canon Vixia line.
In exchange you’ll get XLR mic inputs, three 1/3 CMOS sensors, a wide angle lens, gamma and color correctors, high-quality, low-light recording and a ton of manual control…among a host of other things. In other words, many of the things that make cameras shoot video “like you see on TV”.
The one slight drawback is the camera records to Memory Stick PRO Duo media cards (like all Sony cameras) instead of the industry standard SDHC memory cards. So you’ll need to invest an extra $100 or so in Memory Stick cards if you don’t have them.
The HDR-AX2000 is set to be available on February 8, 2010 and carries a MSRP of $3,499. Yes, that’s twice the cost of high-end, consumer-level video cameras, but much cheaper than what you’ll fork over for professional-level cameras.
You can see the Amazon listing for the Sony HDR-AX2000 by clicking here.
@Kent what class cards are you using?? also how big are the cards??? the reason i ask is because i have two 32gb class 4 cards in mine and i just recently used it as a hard cam for a local wrestling event and it was recording for two hours straight on the format 1080/24p FX setting which is the highest quality and it never dropped any frames and it only filled up 3/4 of the card. I have never shot anything long enough to fill up one card to where it transfers to the other card. I feel that the higher class SDHC cards would work better. eventually i’m gonna get class 10 32gb SDHC cards for it but i just got the class 4 because it was all i could afford at the time.
Can’t check class at the moment, I am out-of-town. But I am sure I bought cards inside req spec. If I remeber correctly, they are 32 Gb. Even if I shoot continously, the files will come out in 2 GB sizes (maybe it was 4, but anyway). I can put them together on the timeline, but I loose a few frames. For ordinary shooting it may be ok but for music with multicam shooting I loose sync. It is solvable (but awkward) cause I use another device (Zoom H4n) to record the sound. I can guess one reason… I cannot import those files using Sonys software because it will not work on my 64 bit computer, so I have to import it “manually”. Maybe this is where I loose frames. But still, memory sticks are fine…
It is a completely different story if I shoot continously and card one runs out of memory (which will happen when I a shooting at music fasivals and did not bring a copmuter to dump footage onto), and as far as I remember the camera will seamlessly jump to next card. When I use SDHC it will tell me on the screen that memory is not enough and it will jump to lower resolution shooting on the fly to be able to record more. It seems like it will not understand that another card in in slot B. Nowadays, I make sure I always force the camera to shoot on a fairly empty card when I expect long shootings.
I have a very early version of this camera, maybe I should get a software update… but I love it, the quality and easy workflow.
yea check and see if they have a updated software. one question how do you import it by not using the sony software??? I’m in film school right now and part of my tuition paid for a macbook pro, Adobe CS5, Final Cut Pro and various other software and the sony software isn’t able to run on mac so what i end up having to do is transfer my files in adobe media encoder in order to make it into a file that is readable by premiere, after effects and final cut. the only thing is once i use media encoder it compresses the file and then it ends up being compressed again when i render the final cut. if you know of a way to make it into a file that is usable by those programs without compressing it please let me know. thanks!