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TESTING SONY'S PDW-F350 XDCAM HD CAMCORDER
I evaluated the first XDCAM Professional Disc camcorder almost three years ago. But last year, Sony announced XDCAM HD as part of its CineAlta line. I had to see the improvements for myself.
Sony provided a PDW-F350 camcorder ($25,800) with a Canon KH21ex5.7 IRSE lens ($26,000) for evaluation. Canon and Fujinon supply a range of native 1/2-inch HD lenses, so the total cost of your package will vary. (A less expensive PDW-F330 is available, but it has fewer features.)
WHY PAY MORE?
With that kind of price tag, you should expect improved performance over, say, Sony's HVR-Z1U HDV workhorse. But is an F350 with lens really worth about 10 times the price?
The simple answer is yes, but allow me to qualify that answer-or, in this case, quantify it. The F350 features three 1/2-inch Super HAD CCDs with 1.56 million pixels per chip (1440x1080). The imaging chips are bigger than the 1/3-inch chips in the Z1, but that's not the whole story.
XDCAM HD's superior picture quality is also achieved through better compression. The primary difference between the compression used by the XDCAM HD cameras and the smaller HDV camcorders is that XDCAM HD uses 35Mb/s variable bit rate MPEG-2, while HDV uses 25Mb/s constant bit rate MPEG-2. This difference enables the XDCAM HD camcorders to capture moving objects with fewer compression artifacts.
Speaking of compression, the F350 records four channels of 16-bit, 48kHz uncompressed audio, as opposed to the Z1's two compressed audio channels. So it not only looks better, it sounds better.
Before I get too far into the camcorder, let me talk about the glass up front. The Canon KH21ex5.7 IRSE zoom lens (with 2x extender) has all...