ProVideo Coalition.com: Camera Log by Adam Wilt | Founder | Pro Cameras, HDV Camera, HD Camera, Sony, Panasonic, JVC, RED, Video Camera Reviews

The US$8320 (street price) Sony PMW-EX3 is an eight-pound, high-definition “chainsaw” camcorder with three 1/2” CMOS sensors. It’s essentially a repackaged EX1—true 1920x1080 sensors, 1080 and 720-line XDCAM EX recording on SxS cards, variable frame rates, wide-latitude cine gammas, hugely tweakable—with an interchangeable lens mount, an impressive EVF, and improved ergonomics. Like the EX1, it makes stunning HD images, and like the EX1, it’s a handheld handful.

The $6500 PMW-EX1 shipped in late 2007, and immediately raised the bar for image quality in affordable HD camcorders, even as it pushed the limits of handholdability past many people’s breaking point. Less than a year later, Sony has offered up the EX3: the same guts in a new, more flexible, and more ergonomic package. The EX3 debuted at NAB 2008 at a suggested MSRP of “under $13,000”, and indeed so it turned out to be: $9990 list. The resulting $8320 street price, only $1800 more than the EX’s, made a lot of prospective EX3 purchasers very happy—and annoyed many folks who had just bought EX1s. EX1 owners needn’t feel bad: the EX3 expands the EX lineup, but doesn’t replace the EX1, which remains available as a smaller, lighter, 20% less expensive alternative with the same image quality.

Sony kindly lent me an EX3, and I set it up side-by-side with the EX1 we purchased earlier this year for a close comparison. As a result, and because the EX1 has been so thoroughly dissected already, I’m going to focus this review on the differences between the EX3 and the EX1. I’ll then cover the camcorder in a more normal manner, with multiple references to the EX1 review—if you’re already familiar with the EX1, you can skip those links and go straight to the conclusion.

What’s New

Sony’s First Chainsaw

The EX3 looks like the results of an unholy assignation between an EX1 and a Canon XL H1.

The Sony PMW-EX3.

The lens, surface treatments, and user interface are all clearly descended from the EX1, but the upswept “chainsaw” body, large EVF, lens interchangeability, and weight (the XL H1 is 8.3 pounds) echo Canon’s camera. While the Canon with its 20x lens is almost three inches longer than the EX3, the EX3 is slightly wider, and their weights are comparable. Indeed, the XL H1 series aside, the EX3 is the biggest and heaviest non-shoulder-mounted camcorder around.

PMW-EX3, PMW-EX1, HVR-Z1, and Panasonic HVX200 side by side.

It may not look so different from the top, at least lengthwise, because handycam-style cameras usually have EVFs projecting aft of their bodies, but the side view makes the height and length of the EX3 clear:

PMW-EX1 in front, PMW-EX3 behind.

The EX3 towers over the EX1 and is considerably bulkier. While neither one is huge by the standards of shoulder-mount cameras, the EX3 is pushing the limits of what you can comfortably stuff into an airline carry-on and still have usable room for anything else. While the EVF’s eyepiece tube can be removed, the rest of the EVF remains sticking out the side of the camera, so it can’t really be packed flat.

If you attach the supplied cheek pad and pull the shoulder brace out to its full extent, you get the following package:

EVF tilted up, shoulder pad extended, cheek pad attached and locked in place.

Handholding the Chainsaw

The biggest operational issue with the earlier, Handycam-style EX1 is the challenge of handholding it: it’s heavy, and its off-center grip is so smoothly rounded and untextured that it’s nearly impossible to hold the camera level with the right hand alone. The EX3’s chainsaw form factor lets you brace the the camera against your body, adding another point of support and stability. The EX3 has a squishy shoulder pad nestled beneath its upswept back end, with a cylindrical, padded bolster at the back. You can press in a latch at the base of the camera and pull this pad out about an inch and a half, as shown above. When combined with about three inches of front-and-back adjustability in the EVF, this lets you tweak the camera’s position to fit your shoulder in a number of ways: you can let the pad ride up, as Nigel Cooper does, or you can butt the bolster hard up against your shoulder, albeit with the camera a bit lower down.

Bracing the camera against you this way definitely helps, making it easier to grab stable shots without benefit of tripods or other supports. But the camera is still quite side-heavy; without the left hand under the lens, the EX3 wants to dive to the left. The EX3’s handgrip is the same as the EX1’s: it’s just as smooth and untextured, and just as far off-center, and the bulk of the EVF makes the camera even more laterally unbalanced than the EX1. Considering the added mass (the EX3 is 30% heaver compared to the EX1), the EX3 is still a handful to handhold: it’s inherently more stable, but for shots longer than a few seconds, it winds up being equally stressful.

But we’re not done yet. At NAB, Sony was “experimenting with” a bolt-on cheek pad, and the cheek pad wound up shipping with the EX3. It’s a bracket that attaches both at the base of the top handle and between the shoulder pad and the body, with a large plastic “flag” that rests against the side of the face. It uses a spring-loaded cam system to keep it in place: slide the flag up along its bracket, and it can be swiveled away from the camera, or inwards 45 or 90 degrees, both of which have latching positions.

The cheek pad in its normal position rests solidly against your face, so the camera is constrained from diving off to the left. You can safely remove your left hand from the lens to go fiddle with controls without the camera immediately departing from controlled flight.

Swung outward, the pad lets you gain purchase on the many BNCs on the back end of the camera; swiveled in 45 degrees it’s out of the way, but still allows attached cables to pass or an oversized BP-U60 battery pack to remain installed; swiveled in 90 degrees, it sits flush with the back side of the camera (even with the stock BP-U30 battery installed), assuming you don’t leave any cables plugged in.

The cheek pad can be opened outward to allow easy cable access.

The locking cam is a small plastic tab at the base of the flag; it’s one of the three components on this camera that I worry about breaking in normal use. It just doesn’t seem robust enough to deal with normal stresses as well as the occasional unintentional rough twist. Having said that, I didn’t try to force it, and it may be perfectly fine; it just seems uncharacteristically flimsy given the build quality of the rest of the camera.

Attaching or removing the cheek pad requires three different sizes of screwdriver, and the swapping in (or out) of a long screw in place of a short screw, so it’s not something you’ll do on the spur of the moment.

Overall, I’d rate the camera better than the EX1 for stable handheld shooting, but it’s still not something I’d like to use without secondary support. No one operating either the EX1 or the EX3 will ever mistake it for an HVR-Z7 or HPX170.

Adding a support like the DvRig Junior makes the EX1 far more user-friendly—I shot a Direct Action Cinema feature with the EX1 on a DvRig Junior and found the combo very pleasing—and it works just as well on the EX3. Doubtless other monopods, belt pods, shoulder braces and suspension rigs work their magic as well; when something other than your own wrist is carrying the weight, both EX-series machines transform from heavy handfuls to smoothly controllable camcorders.

(To be fair, though, some folks handhold Canon XL-series cameras all day long and don’t complain. I’m curious about Bruce Johnson’s take on the EX3, as he’s a long-time Canon user.)

The EX3’s EVF

The EX1 has one of the best LCDs around, but its EVF isn’t anything special. The EX3 takes the EX1’s LCD and makes it the EVF: the LCD is wrapped in a proper hood, mounted on a rigid, repositionable arm, and equipped with a long eyepiece tube and a large eyepiece lens.

The EX3’s EVF, with controls across its front.

The 3.5” LCD at the base of the EVF is the same one used on the EX1; it resolves about 500 TVl/ph horizontally and 400 vertically. The eyepiece allows easy viewing even with glasses, and its magnification is substantial. Even without the Expanded Focus pushbutton on the handgrip, which enlarges the image by 2x, the EVF is quite usable for HD focusing: its image is huge. It’s about 20% larger than the image seen in the EVFs on the EX1 and the HVR-Z1, and about 40% larger than the image in an HVX200’s EVF. Indeed, I had to go back thirteen years to find a comparably large viewfinder image: I literally blew the dust off my venerable DCR-VX1000, one of the first-generation DV camcorders, and powered it up to compare it. The EX3’s image is slightly wider, but not quite as tall (the EX3 is of course a 16x9 machine, while the VX1000 makes a 4x3 picture).

This is what an EVF should be: big enough and sharp enough to see detail, not so small you think you’re looking down a dark tunnel at a distant image.

Furthermore, the EX3 is the first small camera I’ve seen with an LCD EVF that has a real, honest-to-goodness peaking control.

No peaking.

Maximum peaking (note its effect on the data displays).

The front of the EVF has rotary knobs to vary the EVF’s brightness, contrast, and peaking, so you can dial in just as much (or just as little) as you’d like.

As it’s a peaking signal applied by the EVF itself, even the data displays wind up with extra edging. It can make them a bit harder to read, but (for me at least) that’s a small price to pay for a real peaking control. The camera’s menus let you choose between High and Normal peaking frequencies.

If you prefer, the “digital peaking” as used on the EX1 and Sony’s HDV cameras is still available through the menus: select “color” instead of “normal”, and choose white, red, yellow, or blue edging. Now the rotary control dials in the colored peaking at the four fixed levels of off, low, mid, and high, just as the menus do on the EX1. As this peaking happens “in the camera” instead of “in the EVF”, digital peaking doesn’t affect the overlaid data displays.

The EVF is affixed to the camera on a dogleg arm, secured to the camera’s top handle with a locking lever beneath it. It offers one inch of lateral adjustment and three inches of back-and-forth adjustment, the latter through a 90 degree pivoting range for the mounting arm (45 degrees forwards to 45 degrees backwards). Combined with the pivoting range of the EVF itself, you can position the EVF at any angle around a complete 360 degree circle. However, you cannot retract the EVF under the handgrip, nor can you aim it sideways.

The EX3 uses a sliding, rotating EVF mount.

That lateral 1 inch adjustment is rather less than the normal interocular distance of about 2.25 inches. If you have the cheek pad mounted, a left-eyed person extending the EVF leftwards as much as possible will find it hits him (or her) smack on the bridge of his (or her) nose. However, lefty viewers are readily accommodated by removing the cheek pad and snuggling closer to the camera.

The EVF’s eyepiece tube attaches at two points: a snap-in pivot at the top, and a latch at the bottom. You can unlatch the tube and flip it up, or depress a small catch and slide the upper pivot out of its mounting to remove the tube entirely. That pivoting mechanism is the second part of the camera I worry about breaking; it’s a tiny little thing, and the EVF tube is a long lever arm, easily whacked. Perhaps the pivot is made of black-painted adamantium, but I worry about it nonetheless.

The EVF includes a Mirror Image switch to reverse the image for viewing from the front, since the double-jointed EVF mount precludes the usual flip-over switch inside the LCD’s pivot. The Display / Battery Info switch is here, too, as is the zebra button.

In summary, the EX3 has a real viewfinder: a big, fat, crisp, focus-worthy, color one, closer to the EVF on the $100,000 F23 than to anything on a Handycam.

Changing the Lens

The EX3 uses the same superb Fujinon glass as the EX1, but in Sony’s new, interchangeable-lens EX mount:

The EX3’s lens attaches with a mount as big as the camera is.

The EX3’s stock 14x lens, all by itself.

The handgrip comes away with the lens, so replacement lenses need their own handgrips. As most 1/2” and 2/3” lenses have their own grips, this is fine.

The EX3 comes with an adapter for standard Sony 1/2” mount lenses, which neatly drops into the EX mount, letting you use existing 1/2” lenses like those used on PDW-series XDCAM camcorders. Sony warns that only hot-shoe lenses communicate with the camera (there is no separate lens data port for cabled lenses), and that not all lens functions may work, depending on the lens.

The EX3 naked, and with its 1/2” lens mount adapter.

Sony offers optional adapters for 2/3” B4-mount lenses and for Sony Alpha-series DSLR lenses. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if third parties developed EX-mount adapters for Canon and Nikon SLR lenses, and I expect the various 35mm relay-lens adapter folks (P+S Technik, Redrock Micro, and the like) are looking into EX-native adapters (of course, you could also get the EX-to-B4 adapter and use existing relay-lens systems).

As to EX-native lenses, Sony has announced a Fujinon 8x wide-angle zoom with a 4mm wide end, but I don’t know of any that have escaped from the labs yet.

The stock 5.8-81.2mm zoom lens has the same 77mm front threading and the same bayonet system as its EX1 counterpart, so current EX1 lens adapters, such as Sony’s $450 VCL-EX0877 0.8x wide-angle adapter, will also work on the EX3. That Sony adapter gets you to 4.6mm, or roughly what a 16mm will do for you on a RED ONE or a 35mm mopix camera. (Mind you, the 1/2” Fujinon XS13x3.3BRM goes as wide as 3.3mm, and it fits on the EX3 using the supplied mount adapter. Mind you, that’s a $13,000 hunk of glass!)

Control Improvements

Connector Changes, etc.