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Filed under: Cameras •Hardware •

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

Menus

Most features and functions of the camera are accessed through touchscreen menus.  Indeed, when I first fired up the camera, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to use it; in true male fashion, I ignored the operations manual in favor of just pushing physical buttons. Only by accident did I finally touch one of the icons in the corner of the screen, which caused a menu to appear, accompanied by a rich orchestral crescendo from the modestly-named “beep” function (you can probably guess that I don’t work with a lot of consumer-level camcorders: now-common niceties such as touchscreens and polyphonic aural feedback throw me for a loop!).

A “Home” menu is selected by touching the house icon in the upper left corner of the screen; this brings up a tabbed selection of several menus, some of which have several pages. Each menu item may also have several pages once it’s selected. An “Options” menu is called up from an icon in the lower right screen corner; it likewise offers several tabbed submenus of varying depth and complexity.

The Tools tab of the HXR-MC1’s “Home” menu.

Page two of the MOVIE SETTINGS submenu.

The ostensible division is between system-wide settings in the “home” menu and mode-specific settings in the “options” menu, but from an operational standpoint the divisions can seem arbitrary and capricious. For example, “Auto Slow Shutter” appears in Home > Toolbox tab > Movie Settings, while “Color Slow Shutter” is in Options > Camera3 tab. I’m sure that after continued use the menu traversal becomes second nature, but it can take a bit of hunting and poking to set up the camera if you haven’t memorized things beforehand (mind you, the same is true for the RED ONE with its three separate menu systems).

Among the various menu items:

• Auto Slow Shutter - Sets shutter speed to 1/30 in low light.
• Color Slow Shutter - shutter speed / frame rate varies in low light, as slow as about 1/4 second (8 frames recorded for every one captured).
• Guideframe - Display two horizontal and two vertical bars in the LCD, like a tic-tac-toe grid, dividing the image according to the “rule of thirds”.
• Zebra - Display zebra above 70% or 100% brightness, or turn zebra off.
• X.V.Color - turn on wide color gamut in HD recording modes.
• AE Shift, WB Shift - bias auto exposure lighter or darker, and white balance towards red or blue tones.
• Spot Focus, Spot Meter - You can touch a point on the screen and the focus or exposure will be set to those found on the subject at that location. (These are touch-to-set, not touch-to-track; focus or exposure is fixed at the time of the touch.)
• Beep - Enable or disable polyphonic melodies whenever a button is pressed. Seriously, calling this a “beep” is like calling the selection of alerts and ringtones on an iPhone a “beep”. I’m waiting for someone to compose a “Toccata and Fugue for Sony Camera Beep Melodies”.
• Widescreen - Set SD recordings to use a 4x3 or 16x9 aspect ratio.
• TV Type - Set up letterboxing and pillarboxing as needed for 4x3 or 16x9 TVs.
• Digital Zoom - Set a 20x or 120x digital zoom.
• Control on HDMI - Lets you use the transport buttons on your Sony TV remote control to operate the camcorder when it’s connected via HDMI.
• Scene Selection - Presets for twilight, candlelit scenes, sunrise & sunset, fireworks, landscapes, portraiture, spotlit scenes, beach, and snow scenes. These settings bias exposure, color, and in some cases focus, as appropriate.
• White Balance - Continuous auto white balance, or indoor, outdoor, and manual white balance (using a white card).
• Fader - Black or white fade-ins and fade-outs.
• Old Movie - Turns the image sepia and drops the frame rate to 15fps.
• Picture Effect - Turns the image B&W, sepia, or “Pastel”, an amusing effects in which the luma level is set to a flat 50%, but chroma and edge enhancement are untouched (see image below).
• Zoom Microphone - Causes the built-in mic to become more directional as the image is zoomed in.
• Mic Reference Level - Toggles the mic sensitivity between Normal and Low settings, the latter useful in loud environments.

A rack of gear and an iPod Touch seen in “Pastel” Picture Effect mode.

Performance

The lens focuses down to 1 cm (under 1/2”) in wide angle, and 80 cm (just over 2.5 feet) in telephoto. There’s a Tele Macro mode that zooms the lens to full telephoto and allows focusing down to about 14 inches; focusing is somewhat slower than normal, especially distant focusing, because the normal operation of the zoom and focus groups have been subverted to the cause of macro focusing. Zooming the lens wider cancels tele macro mode.

The aperture is a diamond-shaped, two-leaf system, which gives a diamond-shaped bokeh on out-of-focus subjects as well as an X-shaped flare on specular highlights. Aside from that, the optical system is quite clean; I could get some green and magenta ghosts when shooting directly into a light, but the lens’s multicoating does a very good job of suppressing internal reflections and flare.

The lens has a 10x optical zoom, or up to 120x when using the digital zoom. There’s ample room on the telephoto end for most anything you’d try to shoot with this sort of rig, but I found that I could have used a wider wide angle. Fortunately there’s a 30mm threaded ring for attaching wide-angle adapters and fisheye lenses. Sony offers 0.6x and 0.7x adapters, and Schneider Optics has some interesting lenses with 30mm adapters, too.

The image loses about a stop as you zoom from full wide to full tele, and in the last 10% of the zoom range there’s a bit of vignetting, but neither is objectionable in normal operation. Distortion is admirably low: a very slight bit of barrel distortion fully wide, a tiny bit of pincushion in mid-telephoto, but never enough to be noticeable unless you spend your days shooting test charts.

The quality of the digital zoom is about at good as it can be; there is no obvious blockiness or artifacting, but the resolution of the image drops as you zoom in farther: consider that at 120x, or 12x the optical zoom’s limit, the image is upscaled from a 160x90-pixel center section of the original image!

Sony’s slantwise-oriented ClearVid CMOS sensor does a creditable job. It’s nothing to write home about (after all, it’s a 1/5” single-chip consumer camcorder at heart), but it’s not too bad. The MC1 renders a fairly standard video image with about 8+ stops of latitude, including an auto knee that kicks in around 95% brightness. Compared with pix from high-end cameras, the MC1’s image is a bit contrasty and its highlights tend to be a bit clippy, but this is not unexpected. Very fine, pixel-wide detail sometimes shows red/green moiré, an artifact of its single sensor and color mask.

On test chart zone plates, the camera resolves something like 650-700 TVl/ph, with the aforementioned chroma aliasing quite noticeable. Detail extinction (aliased or otherwise) occurs around 800 TVl/ph.

1:1 detail of DSC Labs CamAlign MB-SW, 16 Mbit/sec “FH” recording mode, transcoded to ProRes on capture.

Colorimetry is quite good. On the ChromaDuMonde chart the vectorscope pattern was an almost perfect hexagon, though it tended to be shifted up on the R-Y axis, favoring reds and magentas over cyans and greens. Rendition of real-world subjects was pleasing overall, if a bit on the saturated side.

There’s a bit of sharpening visible in the images; fortunately it is not excessive.

The camera lacks ND filters, so in bright light it shortens the shutter time and closes down the iris. That’s fine for a lot of material, but again: what you see is what you get, and you’d better like it because you can’t change it through the menus. If you don’t like it, of course, you can add external ND filters.

As to the tweakability of contrast, knee, sharpness, shutter speed, iris, and color? Fuggedaboudit! You can’t tweak diddly-squat. Whaddya want from a consumer-cam menu system anyway? You wanna tweak image parameters, go gaffer-tape your EX3 to the underside of your bike. See how you like them apples!

Purists, shaders, DITs, and the like may argue with me, but for this camera’s target applications, I think Sony has set up an acceptable “look”. Yes, I’d like more adjustment, but for the kind of footage this camera is designed to capture, I had no problems with the way the camera rendered the picture.

Of more concern for the cinematically inclined is the fact that this camera records only 1080/60i (or 480/60i in SD mode). It does not offer any progressive-scan modes.

The camera uses Memory Stick PRO Duo or PRO-HG Duo media, smaller than plain old Memory Sticks and just slightly smaller than SD cards. AVCHD bitrates in HD are 5, 7, 9, and 16 Mbit/sec; these are called LP, SP, HQ, and FH. FH is 1920x1080; the others are 1440x1080. All recordings use 4:2:0 color sampling.

An 8 GB card will hold 55 minutes of FH-quality HD, or between 140-185 minutes of LP quality; the camera can use MS Pro Duo cards up to 16 GB in capacity (note: Sony just released a 32 GB MS PRO Duo card; it may also work, but I haven’t tested it).

I found the FH-mode pix to be roughly equal to HDV quality in terms of artifact level. Lower bitrates were lower in quality, as you might expect, with the most noticeable drops in quality occurring in busy, high-motion scenes—exactly the sort of thing you’re likely to shoot with this little camcorder.

There are also SD recording modes consuming 3, 6, and 9 Mbit/sec, recording an MPEG-2 program stream. SD can be shot in either 4:3 or 16:9 using “conventional MPEG-2” program streams (.mpg files). I didn’t test these modes in any detail.

The camera comes with an NP-FH60 battery, which is good for about 100 minutes of continuous HD shooting, or 160 minutes of HD playback. If you stick with SD, add about 25% to those times. Optional batteries offer up to six and half hours of record time.

Next: Conclusions and more info.

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