[Paul Jackson]

Hey, David! PJ here, how ya been?

We’ve been using a 500 for over a year here, and we’ve done some shoots where we’ve rented a 900 for the second cam. The focus assist on the 500 is much better (and I can’t shoot one without it – once you get used to it, you won’t ever worry about focus). In a gun-and-run situation, the 500 is faster to setup and you’re not clawing through menus just to do some quick tweaks.

There’s no question that the 900 is a better cam, the block will shoot a native 1080 whereas 1080 on the 500 is a blowup. Still looks good though, and we haven’t had to deal with noise issues because we rarely shoot in very low light.

For 10k + lens, I think it’s about as good as anything you’ll find. Allow an investment in a good fast laptop with a PCMCIA slot, plus an external HDD, so you can backup those P2 cards as they come out of the camera. No backups = No sleep. But clients love the instant playback, and I really like just dumping the files into the Avid and going to work.

Give me a call sometime and let’s catch up on recent history…