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Review: Sony HDW-650F HDCAM Camcorder

The Lens

Like most camera at this price point, the HDW-650F comes naked into the world: no lens, no power, no viewfinder, not even a tripod plate.

Reviewing a camera without a lens would be difficult, so I borrowed a Canon HD-EC HJ8x5.5B, 5.5-44mm T2.1 zoom lens from my colleague Simon Sommerfeld, who normally uses it on a Panasonic AG-HPX500. Although I’m not formally reviewing the lens, it’s worth describing.

Canon HD-EC zoom lens HJ8x5.5B, 5.5-44mm T2.1

The “EC” in the designator stands for “Electronic Cinematography”, and the lens is set up for filmstyle work, not ENG-style operations. There is no handgrip and no zoom motor; instead, focus, zoom, and iris rings are all geared for external motors or follow-focus controls, using film-pitch gearing.

The focus barrel turns through about 270 degrees to focus (and it focuses down to just under 2 feet), to allow fine control during shooting. By comparison, “video” lenses are optimized for speed of operation, rather than fineness; they’ll focus in 120 degrees, 90 degrees, or less.

All lens scales are filled in bright, yellow-green paint for best visibility in dark conditions, and there are scales and witness marks on both the right and left sides of the lens, so it can be operated by a focus puller on either side of the camera.

The iris is calibrated in T stops, not f stops; T stops measure the actual light transmission; f stops measure the geometric aperture. On prime lenses, F and T stops are often the same (or close enough as to make no practical difference), but on a complex zoom the mass of glass can soak up as much as 1/3 to 1/2 stop. Film folks prefer T stops as they need to set exposure, and can’t see what they’re getting until the film comes back from the lab (on a video camera, though, the advantage of T stops is less clear).

The 8x zoom starts off at 5.5mm, a gratifyingly wide angle. On a 35mm academy-aperture camera, the equivalent lens would be a 13.6mm.

The Canon HJ8x5.5B is a wide-angle zoom.

The lens was pin-sharp, center to edges, in all my tests, and had minimal breathing for an 8:1 zoom.

It showed some barrel distortion fully wide, and pincushion in telephoto; the sweet spot is around 7-8mm, but it’s not a lens for architectural views (look at the resolution charts on the previous page and note the slanted row of numbers on the horizontal grating; the chart was shot at a moderate telephoto setting, and the horizontal grating was in the lower right corner of the frame).

The center holds T2.1 throughout the zoom range (actually, Canon says it ramps down to T2.2 at full tele, but I couldn’t see the difference on my ‘scope).

With the aperture wide open the lens vignettes smoothly through its zoom, from only a slight bit of edge darkening fully wide to a smooth rolloff from center to edges, losing nearly two stops at the corners at full telephoto (the waveform of a flat field looks like a parabola). It sounds worse than it looks; the vignette was smooth and even, as opposed to the more distinct “portholing” of some zooms. Stopping down to T4 flattened the vignette from full wide to about 25mm, and T5.6 yielded a perfectly flat field throughout the zoom range.

Flare was minimal. I aimed the danged thing into all manner of bright lights (all part of my dastardly attempt to get the 650F to show some smear), and the image stayed crisp and clean throughout. I sometimes saw some flare patterns, but they were well controlled and minimalist for a zoom, and they were never a problem.

Canon has a PDF describing their HD-EC lenses and it’s worth a look if you’re on the cine side of the fence.

Conclusion

It’s smaller, lighter, and faster than its predecessor. It’s less expensive and has lower noise. It shoots 59.94i, 50i, and 23.98p. It has hypergammas for those that want ‘em. It has the best user controls yet (IMHO) on a Sony shoulder-mount camera. The HDW-650F is a great ENG/EFP camera for anyone shooting HDCAM.

“But”, you say, “HDCAM? In this day and age?”

Sure, why not? There are (by Sony’s estimation) over 43,000 HDCAM camcorders and decks out there already, so there’s a huge number of HDCAM users, and it’s good to see that they aren’t being hung out to dry in the mad rush to newfangled tapeless formats.

HDCAM is 3:1:1 tape at 140 Mbit/sec (more or less), and it’s a proven, mild, intraframe codec. Each frame stands on its own, so there’s no problem with sudden power loss or flaky bits disrupting a file structure or corrupting a directory: if you take a hit on a single frame, that frame may be toast, but the one before and the one after are still fine. Can’t say that about long-GOP compression, file-based disks or solid-state media, can you? Don’t be so quick to dismiss tape!

For those who want progressive scan, but for whom an F900R is too pricey, the 650F is an attractive lower-cost alternative with few compromises: no 25p or 29.97P, and no user gammas, but with most of the other features and functionality of the pricier CineAlta.

If tape isn’t your thing, consider that the PDW-700, the 650F’s XDCAM brother, offers a similar camera section and control layout mated with a 50 Mbit/sec, 4:2:2 XDCAM optical disk drive in place of the HDCAM tape transport. It’s a bit cheaper, too, around $31,000.

(Whether HDCAM or XDCAM is “better” is a religious argument I’ll refrain from addressing, grin. Each has its place, and with the HDW-650F and the PDW-700, Sony has a camera for shooters of either persuasion.)

Pros

• CCD imagers with no Jellocam.
• True 1920x1080 chips with superb optical low-pass filtering.
• Very low smear levels; high dynamic range; low noise.
• Comprehensive image tweaks including a linear matrix and a 16-axis color corrector.
• Great, consistent colorimetry out of the box (See the Green/Magenta test).
• 5 standard gammas, 4 hypergammas.
• Separate status LCD for battery, tape, and timecode.
• Flip-out color LCD.
• Best UI yet on a Sony shoulder-mount.
• Built-in picture cache for pre-record and interval recording.
• Built-in downconverter.

Cons

• Using the handle-mounted assignable buttons as zoom buttons only makes you wish you had a proper, proportional zoom rocker.
• Color LCD is disappointingly coarse.

Cautions

• Setting levels on audio channels 3 & 4 requires some menu-diving.
• “Only” 23.98PsF, 50i, and 59.94i; no 25p or 29.97p (choose the 650P if you need 25PsF, 50i, and 59.94i, if you can find the 650P in your market; or bump up to the HDW-F900R).
• No user gammas (choose the F900R instead).

See also:

Sony’s HDW-650F PDF

HDW-650F on Sony USA’s broadcast site

Canon HD-EC lens PDF

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