A partisan Sony F3 review

I know it’s unusual for an editor to be writing about camera technology as an industry game changer, but so many affordable high end solutions have come along that every responsible post-producer needs to know a little about the competing cameras out there. The RED One was the first to make its mark as a cinema quality file-based digital camera, but has recently been losing some ground to ARRI’s Alexa and Sony’s new PMW-F3. It’s the F3 that I want to concentrate on for a moment.

I took a trip to NAB headquarters in Washington DC back in April to take a look at this little gem. Though it doesn’t have the imposing bulk of a traditional pro rig, it features a Super 35, 1920x1080, Exmor CMOS sensor, and with so much surface area per pixel it has amazing sensitivity in low light. Don’t let the compact nature of the camera fool you!

At the demo I went to, the blinds were closed and the room lights were turned off. Then the camera’s switch was turned to +18 dB gain. I viewed the picture on a high end Sony HD CRT monitor and it looked like a well-lit available light shot, full of detail and contrast with subtlety and no clipping, and more importantly, no noise. Andy Shipsides of AbelCine reports that this equates roughly to a 6400 ISO setting in the traditional film world. Simply amazing.

Firmware S-Log upgrades have improved the performance, with a detailed 3 day “real-world” performance test posted here. In addition to shooting on Sony XDCAM’s SxS cards with the native XD codec at 35 and 25 Mb/s, the camera head gives you a full 4:4:4 HD-SDI output that you can record on to Nanoflash or other solid state media. It shoots 1080 HD, 720HD at framerates of 23.98P, 25P, 29.97P, and 59.94i, and PAL and NTSC. You can over/undercrank from 1 to 30 fps at 1080, and 1 to 60 at 720. Besides the HD-SDI port, there’s also HDMI, Firewire and USB ports onboard.

My complaints are few. The rear viewfinder is awkwardly placed, dead center on the top rear, and the flip out VF is smallish. Still, add a follow focus, rails, and matte box, and this rig stays fairly portable and versatile. Plus, with an MTF lens adapter you can use a variety of traditional film lenses, adding to the versatility - and the stock Sony PL lens is no slouch, integrating nicely with the camera’s onboard electronic signal processing.

When comparing it to other recent options, like the Canon 5D MkII DSLRs, well, there’s really no comparison. The range, the noise, the signal processing, real SMPTE timecode, all these things lead to a better product downstream for the editor. Panasonic’s AF100 is nice (and worth a look itself soon), the ARRI Alexa is fantastic but way more expensive, and RED has become just a bit too fiddly at the post-production end to be as comfortable a shooting choice. If you have around $15K for the base acquisition, and maybe another 10K for supporting gear, you can have a good start on a rig that has true cinematic potential. Start saving those shekels.