I was just given a new camera called the Sony XDCam for a project I'm shooting over the next few months. The shoot is a reality show about a family and their disfunctional relationships... nothing earth shattering, but it should be a fun shoot.
Anyhow, the producers got the camera for free and I've been asked to test drive the camera and give some feedback when we return it.
As far as I've been able to tell the camera is pretty cool. It's got 3 1/2 in CMOS sensors and records to a new solid state card called SxS cards, made by Sandisk.
I'm not too thrilled with the new cards. They are of unusual size and shape. Just another scheme to get people to buy more memory when they probably already have CF cards that would work just fine if Sony wanted to base the camera off of them.
The camera shoots 1080i and 720p. It's light and there are some features that I like. The hand grip rotates 90 degrees allowing me to hold the camera comfortably when I'm in awkward positions. The menus and standard features are all laid out in a sensible way, though I've always thought that covering the body of a camera with a million buttons is not the best way to design anything.
It's a compact little camera that seems to do the job. I'll update this discussion once I've discovered more about it and I have some stronger opinions.
For now it seems like a $6500 pro-sumer camera with features that make sense.
