Sony have announced the specs, release date and price of their first interchangable lens consumer camcorder. Retailing in September at $2000 (including 18-200mm kit lens worth $800), the Sony VG10 is an interchangeable lens mount camcorder, available to pre-order today.
“Targeting video enthusiasts and photographers, the NEX-VG10E opens up unprecedented artistic possibilities not achievable with conventional consumer video cameras.”
The camera records at 1920x1080i in AVCHD at 24Mbit, with a proper implementation of the codec designed around video. The stills capabilities from the NEX 5 remain too, so the camcorder can record high quality 14MP stills.
I am interested to see just how Sony have improved the video processing to remove moire, or whether it will still be present on the VG10. Allegedly (but not confirmed) the camcorder has new Exmor image processing hardware designed around a video core to properly scale the 14MP sensor, and a anti-aliasing filter over the sensor. Quite unlike on the stills orientated NEX 5 which line skips, resulting in heavy moire and aliasing and has a weaker AA filter for better sharpness in photos for the pixel peeping review crowd. The sensor is still 3:2, being the same as the one in the NEX 5. Apart from all this the camera is essentially the same as the NEX 5 in a different chassis, but Sony have also removed RAW stills capability as the video core is not designed for it.
However there are cavets to what looks like a game changing camera on paper.
Like the NEX 5, 24p is absent. Instead the camera recordings (quite shockingly) in 60i or 50i depending on whether it is a PAL or NTSC model. Imaging Resource and DPReview say that the sensor records in 30p for NTSC and a native 25p for PAL regions, so it should be possible to at least get true 25p from the PAL version by deinterlacing the 50i stream if it records progressive 25fps on the sensor.
On the NTSC model Sony say in the official specs that the sensor is not recording in an interlaced format, and that “Image Sensor Captured at 30p (29.97p), Recorded in AVCHD 60i (59.94i) format” so it’s a bit like the GH1 with it’s native 24p sensor being encoded to a 60i AVCHD stream for better TV compatibility. However, bit of a pain to see this method used yet again on a camera as otherwise promising as this one. That’s the price we pay for the lower priced consumer gear, cinematographers!
In what is becoming a familiar scenario these days, Sony say that the VG10 removes the ‘hard-coded 30 min clip limit of the NEX 5’ (which makes you wonder what other video functionality was disabled in firmware code on the NEX DSLRs). Sony implemented the 30 minute clip length limit for the PAL version of the NEX cameras for tax reasons, and since the VG10 is classified as a camcorder, they have to pay the higher tax regardless of clip lengths. Thank the EU for this.
I am very excited about the VG10 however I am concerned about the frame rate issue and the lack of anything approaching native 24p on NTSC models. I do however very much like the form factor of the VG10 and the fact it remains quite a small camera with much better handling for video in terms of the main chassis.
I am working on more VG10 news, stay tuned.
To view more high resolution images from Sony click the attachments below.
