Sony HDR AX2000 - Hands-On Review
It's a great time to be an independent filmmaker.
 Having been in the market for a new HD camera for some time now, I was excited to find out that I'd be spending a couple of weeks with Sony's brand new prosumer AVCHD camera, the HDR-AX2000.
While many camcorders in this price range use the HDV format, the AX2000 uses the AVCHD. With broadcast quality bit rates, footage is recorded directly to solid-state SDHC cards with MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression. No more need for tapes.
The camera body is solid black, and has a good weighty feel to it. Not too heavy at 4 pounds, 11 ounces, I like the way it balances in my hand. Most of the controls are exactly where you'd expect them to be. The bulk of the manual controls and assignable buttons are on the left side of the camera, along with controls to navigate the menus and choose presets. Tucked away under the flip out LCD there's a second set of controls to navigate the menu on top of the camera. The right side of the camera has your basic on/off switch, record and zoom in/out buttons as well as two XLR inputs and an assignable button. The back is where you'll find the 2 card slots, the battery as well as HDMI, component, and A/V outputs. The camera also has a removable lens hood. With the flick of a switch, the hood turns into a lens cap, which is great, since one thing I'm great at is losing lens caps.
All the buttons, switches and controls were easy to access and were fairly intuitive to learn. After some time with the camera, I had no trouble finding the controls I wanted without looking. None of the buttons felt small and my beefy fingers had no problem pushing the button I wanted to push, or flicking the switch I wanted to flick. That's a lot better than some other cameras I've used, where I felt I needed to carry around an ultra-fine pen to stab at the tiny, impossible to reach, buttons.
The AX2000 has a whole bunch of shooting modes, frame rate and data rate options to help you really get the images you need. You have the choice of shooting high definition 1080/60i, 1080/30p, or 1080/24p. For each of these modes, you can shoot at multiple data rates ranging from 5 Mbps to 24 Mbps for the interlaced footage and either 17 Mbps or 24 Mbps for the progressive footage. You can also shoot standard definition video at 480/60i, 480/30p and 480/24p, however, in standard definition, the progressive frames are saved as an interlaced 60i signal. Unfortunately, the camera does not record at 720p.
The 3.2" LCD touch-screen has an impressive 921k pixels which is rare for a camera under $3500. Because of its relatively high resolution, it's definitely easier to manually focus on the AX2000's LCD when compared with most competing models. But for more accuracy, you're still better off using the even higher resolution viewfinder, with its 1,227k pixels, or an external monitor.
Right out of the box, the camera shot wonderful video in automatic mode. Zooming in was smooth, colors were natural looking and the autofocus worked fairly quickly,; though in lower light situations, it sometimes took a little while to get a sharp focus.
Like most other prosumer cameras, the real fun and power of the AX2000, is when you switch to manual and take control of your video's look and feel.
The camera has three manual rings that allow you to have precise control over the focus, zoom and iris. The rings have a good feel to them, not too much resistance, but also not too light.
The wide-angle lens has a 20x optical zoom, and if you want to kick into digital magnification, you can get up to 30x. The optical image stabilization seemed to be on par with most other cameras in this range. Definitely acceptable. No complaints there.
The camera allows you to manually adjust the white balance, and you can store two different white balance settings; or you can use the camera's preset white balance for indoors or outdoors.
There are 7 assignable buttons, so you can easily access the features you use most without having to navigate through the menus. I'm a big fan of assignable buttons. I hate when a camera manufacturer tries to give every feature its own button, and then tries to cram all these buttons into the body of the camera. Here we have buttons for the most important features, and then you get to decide which 7 other features you prefer. Use zebra and peaking a lot? No problem. Assign them to buttons for easy access. Don't need them? Assign the buttons to something else.
Other controls on the side of the camera allow you to manually adjust the shutter speed, 3 user assignable gain presets, and three different neutral density filters (reducing light by ¼, 1/16th and 1/64th) for working in bright conditions. While you have a lot of control to manually set the gain through the menu, you can only save 3 gain presets in the L-M-H switch on the side of the camera.
Most of the other manual controls that allow you to really tweak and fine-tune your picture can be found in the menus. They give you a fair degree of control over your image, and you can save up to 6 picture profile presets, which are easily accessible from a button on the side of the camera.
The AX2000 shoots video at up to 1920x1080 pixels and the footage looks great, even when blown up on a 55-inch television. The 1080/60i video was sharp and lifelike. Thanks to three 1/3" CMOS sensors, colors really popped, especially outdoors in the sunlight. 24p and 30p also worked well for a more film-like look, though they may seem a little jerky and stuttery if you're not used to that effect. If you are going for the look of film, the camera also has several presets that change the color and gamma curves to emulate film's look and feel. While the resulting footage is not exactly film, it does have a unique look that could be a great alternative for independent filmmakers.
Shooting indoors also produced above average results. In well-lit rooms, the images were colorful and well defined. Because the AX2000 can shoot in as little as 1.5 LUX, images were clear and surprisingly vivid even in darker rooms. As the room got darker, more noise became visible but the resulting video was more than satisfactory.
Standard definition footage also looked great. Although it didn't look as nice as the HD footage (and who would expect it to?), the SD video had great colors and sharpness. And it seemed to perform as well or better than many of the standard definition cameras I've tried.
Managing footage on the camera was easy. You can see all your takes as either thumbnails in a visual index, or as a list. You can navigate through clips by using the LCD touch screen, navigation arrows on top of the camera, or a click wheel at the side of the camera. Re-watch takes non-linearly, and easily delete bad takes all in camera. Honestly, after working with non-linear media, I don't think I'd ever be able to go back to tape.
The video is recorded onto either standard SDHC cards (class 4 minimum) or Sony's Memory Stick PRO Duo media, which makes transferring them to your computer a snap. Just pop them out of the camera and into an SDHC card reader, at which point they can be imported into many editing programs. With SDHC cards becoming cheaper every day, this may quickly become the least expensive recording format. Also, since there are two card slots, if you are running a long take, and run out of space on one card, the camera will automatically start recording on the next card, and can easily be spliced back together in your favorite AVCHD compatible NLE.
Playing camera footage on an HDTV is a snap. You can either plug it in to the TV using the supplied component cables, or with an HDMI cable. Once plugged in, the TV set mirrors the LCD screen/viewfinder. I didn't try playing the footage on a standard definition TV, but the setup should be just as easy.
Since a lot of the shooting I do is with external microphones, I tested the XLR inputs with both Dynamic and Phantom Powered condenser mics, and the sound quality was great. Manually adjust each of the inputs separately, or link them together to adjust them both at the same time. You can also let the camera automatically adjust one or both inputs.
The content management utility software that comes with the camera is Windows only, and does not support any 64 bit or Starter Editions of Windows. Seeing as I'm a Mac guy, I was not able to try out the software.
The camera also comes with an AC adaptor, an NP-F570 rechargeable battery pack, a remote, component, RCA and USB cables, a removable lens hood/lens cover and a rubber eyecup to make the viewfinder easier to see in bright conditions.
This camera excites me. The quality of the images, the manual control and the price come together to create a perfect storm of affordable quality. As I said earlier, it's a great time to be an independent filmmaker.
| 