User feed back on HDX900

[John Sharaf]

I think buying the low priced “compromise” 17 or 18x lens is ill-advised. as you found out almostr immediately you’ll need the wide lens (either an 11x or 13x) and the longer zoom makes a better complementary unit; such as a 21 or 22x. The in-between lens is ok if you only do handheld 16×9, but if you must protect the 4×3 frame only the extra wide lenses give you a wide enough picture to cut the sides off and still be wide. Sorry!

JS

[Peter Steinman]

You might look into renting the Fujinon digital cinema lenses for critical work. They have some nice zooms and primes. Usually not too hard to find them for rent in bigger markets.

[Bchsiao]

Agreed! I’m spoiled with my 10×4.8! Can’t work without it these days…

[Pat Mcgowan]

I’m not sorry at all. We got huge bang for the buck with the body and lens combination we purchased. Just need to add a second lens to the package. Not a big deal.

[Johann Perry]

Hi,
brought my 900 just over two weeks ago and have just shot a drama doc for the BBC in the Lake District in the UK. I have to say that I and the producers are delighted with the results. It was a good shoot to test the camera out because it offered many different shooting situations. There was period dramatisation set in the 1950’s and I could quickly create a look for the period manipulating the paint controls. There were a variety of lighting techniques that I used and the camera responded superbly in low light and in high contrast scenes. We were shooting in torrential rain on car mounts and steadycam for a couple of days which was a harsh operational test, no humidity problems the camera performed faultlessly. This was the camera’s first shoot so it’s early days. All I can say is that at this point I’m seriously impressed and I’ve always owned sony camera’s until now. Off to Denmark tomorrow to shoot a documentary feature which will be blown up to 35mm for theatre projection. Has anyone blown up hdx900 rushes to 35mm yet? , if so I’d love to hear from you.
best wishes
Johann

[Mark Cc knobil]

Just took our HDX to Iceland for a short shoot for PBS Nova.
You could shoot all say and not realize you were not shooting with an SDX.
Playback looks very pretty indeed.

We had error messages, and image errors from the 1200 deck … (Vericam tapes played fine) … sent it back to Abel for “adjustment for HDX codec” I am eager to find out exactly what was up with that, and whether we will encounter any other strangeness with playback on other peoples decks.

Don’t want any client surprises …

Mark Knobil
Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh!