I was wondering what Sony would try to do to compete with the great little Canon HD “crash-cam” that blew everyone’s minds last year. They already loosed a swarm of cameras around Christmas, hoping to scarf up some market share then – which may not have been a bad strategy, seeing as how the economy has soured so dramatically in the last few months.
Anyway – at NAB in Vegas, they came correct with some nice prosumer cameras that look promising to the aspiring DIY documentarian. Best of all, they don’t capture in that hinky proprietary Canon codec that has caused me so damn many problems in the post on my long-delayed short film.
Here’s a shot of the PMW-EX3, which, unlike so many other Sony HD cams, has interchangeable lenses. This dissipates the advantage that Canon had in this market space, as its H1 used to be the camera of choice, since you could swap out wide-angles for big zooms, rather than screwing in some half-assed adaptor to get good in-car video of your subject driving and talking…
