I was shooting last Friday with a Sony F3 camera. This is one of the first ‘new generation’ cameras based upon CMOS technology.
The advantage they offer is cinematic quality at a relatively affordable price.
This camera was recording to an external drive at 50 megabytes per second. That is high definition broadcast quality.
For those who don’t know, the revolution began with the introduction of the Canon 5Dmk2 camera three years ago. Canon incorporated a video function into this still camera. When filmmakers saw the stunning moving images that it produced they rapidly adopted it, despite its limitations.
The size of the chip (the sensor on which the light is recorded) means that it records the images from lenses at their correct focal length whereas most video and still cameras crop the image because of their smaller chips. They are therefore effectively ‘zoomed in’ ie if you put a 50 mm lens on them you may see the equivalent of using an 80 mm lens on a full frame chip such as the 5D.
Three years later the video camera market has still to exploit this game changing technology fully.
The F3 is one of three new cameras in this genre.
I said ‘relatively affordable’. The cost of an F3 with a set of Zeiss compact prime lenses and the kit you need to make it work comes to around £35,000. Actually the lenses cost a lot more than the camera body.
So I am renting for the time being at least!
And looking forward to creating more stunning imagery with cameras like these.