(Page 1 of 4 pages for this article  1 2 3 >  Last »)

Filed under: Cameras •Hardware •

Review: Sony HXR-MC1 1-CMOS AVCHD POV Camcorder

The HXR-MC1 is a “camera on a rope”.

Sony’s HXR-MC1 ($2800, street price) is a “POV” camcorder, an HD single-chip CMOS camera head with 10x zoom, separated from the “main body” with controls, LCD screen, and recording media, by a nine-foot umbilical cable. You can put the camera head in unusual or awkward places—on a helmet, strapped to the underside of a bike, on the deck of a skateboard, on the hood of a car—while being able to control it and view its images on its main body in a more convenient location. You can also mount the head on a boom pole (handy for reaching over the heads of crowds), a jib arm, or on a tripod in a sensitive location, while you monitor and operate it from a safe remove.

HXR-MC1 camera head and main body attached to separate tripods.

POV cameras (or “lipstick” cameras) have been around for years, but self-contained, HD-capable POV camcorders, complete with remote recording, monitoring and control capabilities, are a bit thin on the ground. V.I.O. has a well-regarded SD POV 1.5 system ($650), and Panasonic has a two-piece AVCCAM POV camera/recorder combo ($4750 estimated list price) due out later this year, but there isn’t much available that offers direct competition to the HXR-MC1.

The HXR-MC1 is an interesting transmogrification of a consumer camcorder (most of the specs are similar to those of the HDR-TG1). It shoots 1080/60i (in the US model; 50i in Europe) and interlaced SD, but lacks any progressive-scan options. It lets you set and lock focus and exposure, but it doesn’t offer individual control over shutter speed, iris, or gain. It has a 10x zoom, but no optical image stabilization. There are no ND filters. You can’t tweak colorimetry, knee, saturation, or sharpness; you can only choose from “scene selections” such as Sunrise & Sunset, Twilight, Portrait, Spotlight, and the like. There’s no external microphone jack, nor any manual audio control. It records AVCHD at up to 16 Mbits/sec, roughly HDV quality, to Sony’s Memory Stick PRO Duo media.

According to the Sony folks I spoke with at NAB, the MC1 is a repackaging exercise, not an engineering exercise: instead of designing a new remote communications bus to connect camera head to main body, the quarter-inch multicore cable contains all the individual analog signal, data, and control lines normally conveyed between the imaging block and the rest of the camcorder in any all-in-one design. That decision allowed Sony to get this first model out quickly at a reasonable cost, but dictated a permanently-attached umbilical between head and body, and limited the length of that umbilical to nine feet: much longer than that, and the camcorder’s internal signals would need additional amplification, equalization, and retiming to span the distance.

While you might think that $2800 is a lot to pay for a repackaged consumer camcorder, the civilian version of which costs about $550, consider that consumer cams sell in the hundreds of thousands, whereas POV cams sell in the hundreds or thousands—if they’re lucky. The non-recurring engineering costs for a POV camera have to be be borne by a much lower sales volume, so per-unit prices are perforce much higher. By leveraging an existing platform, Sony can test the waters with minimal R&D efforts on their part, and thus a correspondingly lower wallet-suck on the buyer’s part. If the HXR-MC1 takes off, Sony says it’ll only be the first of the line; follow-ons may have higher resolutions, fancier controls, interchangeable umbilicals—and, in all likelihood, higher prices to pay for their development.

Interestingly enough, many of the limitations that the HXR-MC1 inherits from its consumercam progenitor turn out to have little impact on the camcorder’s suitability for its intended tasks. Action shoots where the MC1 is likely to be used aren’t typically situations that allow for detailed fiddling with camera setups; when you’re skydiving, biking, skateboarding, flying aerobatics, or doing any of the other things the MC1 is ideal for capturing, you’re not likely to be worrying about the exact shutter speed being used or trying for the smoothest, most carefully-feathered zoom. When you’re plummeting through the sky at 120 knots, or bouncing between full sunlight and deep shadow as your mountain bike careens down a forest trail at suicidal speeds, you’ll be thankful for the MC1’s 2.7” LCD and handy controls on the main body, but you’ll probably be just as thankful that the MC1’s autofocus and autoexposure are at work to grab usable images. Its AVCHD recording may lack the relative transparency of XDCAM EX or AVC-Intra, but unless you’re pulling stills and super-slo-mo from the MC1’s clips you won’t notice those artifacts that do occur. The lack of optical stabilization may affect the camera’s suitability for camera-on-a-pole applications, but in action sports it’s less of an issue; the MC1 is designed for hard-mounting on a vehicle or helmet, not wobbly handholding.

But enough philosophy; at this point you’re either saying, “so what? I don’t need one”, or you’re eager for details, because, dude, the MC1 like totally rawks.

Details now.

Camera Configuration & Controls

The HXR-MC1 is divided into two parts, the camera head and the main body, connected by a permanently-affixed nine-foot cable. The whole package weighs about 1 lb 1 oz dry, or 1 lb 4 oz with the stock NP-FH60 battery and Memory Stick PRO Duo loaded.

Camera Head

The camera head is a rounded rectangular black box, about 3.3 x 1.4 x 1.7 inches (87 x 36 x 42mm). The sides are featureless aside from the Sony logo. The front sports a flat circular port protecting the 10x zoom, surrounded by a 30mm threaded accessory ring. The top has a flush-mounted grille covering the microphone. The base has a “foot” that fits a standard accessory shoe, and the foot is also tapped for a 1/4"x20 tripod screw. The rear panel, affixed with four recessed screws, holds the connecting cable in place.

Side view of the HXR-MC1 camera head.

Top view of the HXR-MC1 camera head, showing the microphone grille.

The HXR-MC1 camera head’s underside, with shoe mount / tripod socket.

Front and back ends of the HXR-MC1 camera head.

I found the squared-off shape to be quite useful when mounting the head in weird locations; I could tell by feel when it was upright or when it was canted at an angle. Some POV cam heads have more rounded, cylindrical bodies, and they’re a lot harder to get straight and level because they don’t afford any clues to their orientation by touch alone.

The head is said to be “splashproof”, though I didn’t perform any tests to see how successful the splashproofing is.

There are smaller POV camera heads, but I’m not sure how many of those smaller heads include a built-in 10x zoom lens. The 3.2-32mm Zeiss zoom is roughly equivalent to a 35mm still camera lens of 43mm at the wide end in 16x9 mode, or 38mm in 4x3 mode. The maximum f-stop ranges from 1.8 to 2.3 throughout the zoom range.

The zoom lens sits in front of a 1/5” type (3.6mm) CMOS sensor. It’s a ClearVid sensor using a diagonal photosite array. Sony claims an effective resolution of 2304 x 1728 with this sensor, with different subsets used for stills and for video on both 4x3 and 16x9 formats. For 16x9 video clips, it’s said there are 1.43 million effective recording pixels; this would roughly correspond to an effective array of 1594 x 897 photosites if this were a normal, horizontal-and-vertical sensor—which it isn’t, so there’s little point in pursuing this too much further: as I found testing the HVR-V1, HVR-Z7 and S270, and HVR-Z5 camcorders, ClearVid sensors punch above their weight class in terms of resolution performance, though they do have a few quirks, notably a bit more aliasing on diagonals.

Connecting Cable

Camera head and main body are permanently connected with a nine foot (2.8 meter) rubberized cable, a quarter inch (7mm) in diameter. The cable has a strain relief at either end, and comes with a velcro tie to bundle the whole thing up when it’s not all stretched out.

The cable contains a multitude of individual signal lines, and the manual warns that you shouldn’t carry the HXR-MC1 by the camera head or the cable alone. Putting too much stress on the cable (or bending it in a tight radius) is not a good thing to do.

Main Body

The main body, which serves as the CCU, power source, monitor, and video recorder, is a contoured boxy thing about 3.2 x 4.2 x 1.6 inches (80 x 106 x 40mm), excluding the protruding battery and cable strain relief on the top of the body. It’s sized to fit comfortably in an average hand.

HXR-MC1 main body controls and LCD.

The front holds a small speaker, the 2.7” (66mm) daylight-readable touchscreen LCD, a start/stop trigger and status lamp, pushbuttons for photo-snapping and display info toggling, a small zoom rocker, and pair of controls for manual operation. The MANUAL button, pressed quickly, toggles the MC1 between manual and automatic control of the currently-selected parameter, while holding it down brings up a Dial Setting menu letting you choose to control focus, exposure, autoexposure shift, or white-balance shift; you can also reset all the controls to automatic. The CAM CTRL thumbwheel next to the MANUAL button gives you control over the currently-selected manual control. There’s also a button to toggle the primary function of the camera between shooting stills and shooting video.

The touchscreen uses a plastic overlay, like a Palm or a Newton, so it can be activated by any source of pressure like a bare finger, a gloved finger, or the tap of a stylus. It doesn’t depend on skin capacitance and isn’t affected by dampness; on the other hand, it can be damaged by sharp objects like pen tips (the hard glass touchscreen on an iPhone or iPod Touch, by contrast, is nearly impervious to surface damage, but it can only be activated by a bare, dry fingertip).

HXR-MC1’s battery and main body I/O ports.

The left side has a battery release slider and a flip-down cover concealing four I/O ports: a DC IN jack for remote power and battery charging; a mini-USB 2.0 port for file transfer, the rounded-D-shell A/V connector that Sony increasingly uses in place of the bulkier standard RCA and BNC jacks, and a full-size (!) HDMI connector.

The right side has a flip-down cover for the Memory Stick PRO Duo slot, and a small card-access LED visible even when the cover is closed.

HXR-MC1 main body, with MS PRO Duo media.

The base of the unit has a HOLD switch to disable the front panel controls (so you don’t accidentally shut the recording off just as you’re about to pull off the most amazing stunt of your life), a charging indicator, and a sliding power switch with a locking center button, which reduces the changes of an inadvertent shutoff: you can’t slide the switch unless you’re holding the button down. Nice. There’s also a recessed Reset button, just in case the internal computer gets very confused.

The back of the body has a foot for accessory-shoe mounting, and a 1/4"x20 tapped tripod socket in the center of the foot.

What’s In the Box

• The HXR-MC1 itself.
• A small, universal-voltage AC adaptor.
• A power cord for the adaptor with a two-prong plug (in the US package).
• A USB connection cable.
• A composite video + L&R audio breakout cable.
• A component video + L&R audio breakout cable.
• An NP-FH60 battery.
• A snap-on “controller hook” that clips to the back of the main body, so you can clip it to your belt.
• A “cable clamper”, a belt hook with a loop for holding the coiled camera cable. The controller hook and cable clamper let you wear the main body and bundle the cable out of the way when using the camera head on a boom pole.
• A CD-ROM with the “PMB” (Picture Motion Browser) software for Windows PCs.
• A CD-ROM with the operating manual, and the paper manual itself.

What’s not in the box? There’s no Y/C cable, nor an HDMI cable. Those folks preferring the superior Y/C (S-Video) connection over fuzzy, dot-crawly composite will have to buy an additional Sony cable to get the Y/C connector; Sony does their customers a disservice by not providing that cable in the box to begin with.

Sony tells me that in the USA, the MC1 is sold only as part of the HXR-MC1/ACC bundle, which also includes:

• An NP-FH70 Rechargeable Battery Pack.
• An AC-VQH10 AC Adapter/ two-position fast charger.
• A VCL-HG0730A 0.7x wide-angle adapter.
• A RM-AV2 wired remote control (Zoom, REC start/stop, Photo).
• A soft carrying case.

I haven’t seen or tested these accessories as I only got the basic package for review, but B&H has pix of the accessories here.

Fortunately, the HDMI port is full size, so any HDMI cable will work.

More seriously, there’s no MS PRO Duo card included. If you want to record anything, you’ll need to buy a memory card separately. One part of a good OOBE (out-of-box experience) is being able to plug a camera in and start shooting with it immediately, but the MC1 doesn’t offer this—and Memory Stick PRO Duo cards aren’t as widely available as SD or CF cards. Most DV and HDV cameras include a tape. Would it kill Sony to bundle a $12 2 GB card with the MC1?

Of course, the HDMI port is live while shooting, so you could use it to record to an AJA Ki Pro or a Convergent Designs nanoFlash, in which case you wouldn’t need any MS PRO Duo!

Next: Operation and Handling.

(Page 1 of 4 pages for this article  1 2 3 >  Last »)

Hi i just wanted to ask if you had any trouble editing and importing the footage?

i used a couple of these on a job last year and we had such trouble importing them into avid, final cut was easier but the file format was not that familiar to me. i was told that ideally we needed some conversion software, tho compressor seemed to work for us. apparently sony were aware and were going to release something themselves. the job finished and i don’t know what the outcome was however.

how did you find the ingesting process?

thanks.

Posted by charescowper  on  02/04  at  08:15 AM

---

I used FCP 7, and the MC1’s footage appeared in Log & Transfer just like any other clips. In transferred as ProRes422 and had no problems with the transcoding or the editing.

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  02/21  at  01:11 AM

---

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Smileys

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below: