camera review | panasonic's SDX900

About ten years ago, my first camera experience was shooting cable television programs with a Sony VO8800, "portable" 3/4" deck tethered to a DXC3000 camera over-the-shoulder. With this rig, the camera adjustments were all but limited to color correction through filter selection and white balance. Jump forward to the present and the release of Panasonic's AJ-SDX900 and it's multitude of options, one can't help but marvel at how the times have changed. Now, I don't plan on reminiscing about how I had to walk for miles through ten feet of snow to shoot news stories, but rather luxuriate in all the clever touches and user controls that Panasonic has included in this camera.

The camera and what I like about it

With the Panasonic's VariCam taking on the high definition world and the DVX100 taking over the miniDV world, Panasonic needed a camera that fit in between as well as take advantage of the lessons learned from both cameras. The result is the AJ-SDX900. First off, all the techie stuff. The SDX900 is a "true" 16:9 progressive scan camera with 520,000-pixel 2/3" IT 3-CCD with a ƒ1.4 prism system. The camera captures in what is called "Progressive Segmented Frames" or PsF. Frames are scanned progressively, then the frame is split into two interlaced segments, one containing all of the odd lines, and the other all of the even lines. This produces a frame that is free of interlace edge distortion since both fields were captured temporally and spatially at the same time. The camera sports a 12-bit A/D signal processing circuit at the head and it lays 8-bit quantization to tape. When 8-bit is not enough, if the camera has the optional serial digital interface (SDI) card, you can output the video to a D1 or DigiBeta deck and get 10-bit quantization for that added touch of color and picture depth.

Short of what an engineer might say, the SDX900 is equivalent to Sony's DigiBeta format. Because of the camera's versatility, it's an excellent choice for the news videographer, EFP projects, education institutions, and corporate productions. But it's also being seen as an excellent alternative for higher quality independent narrative projects.

The SDX900 is an amazingly versatile camera capable of recording in either 24P, 24PA, 30P and 60i in either 16:9 or 4:3 and can either record in DVCPro50 (33 minutes at 50 mbps, 4:2:2 color sampling, and 3.3:1 compression) or in DVCPro (66 minutes at 25 mbps, 4:1:1 color sampling and 5:1 compression). The camera's optical filters are the traditional set of:

CC: Cross, 3200K, 4300K, and 6300K

ND: Clear, 1/4ND (2-stops), 1/16ND (4-stops) and 1/64ND (6-stops).

The SDX900 has the much-touted "Cine Gamma" that emulates film's gradual transfer function performance within the constrained 110% video signal limit by making the most of the 600% dynamic range that the CCD imager provides. What does all this mean? Well, by being able to play with the camera's gamma, you have greater control over the tonality of habitually restrictive images such as bright highlights or low shadow areas - image killers in video whether hi-def or standard definition. A window that might otherwise be blown-out might be able to brought down to an acceptable or at least tolerable range. Aside from gamma, adjustments can also be made to the knee slope, knee point, pedestal, flare and a 12-step color correction matrix just to name a very few.

All this is cool, but there's more. One of the functions I especially like is the camera's 2x digital zoom, which enlarges the image by twice the normal lens magnification. This can serve two functions. One is for ENG shooters to "punch-in" when you're at the limit of the lens, for instance, when behind a police crime scene yellow-line. The other is when focusing in low-contrast situations or just to double-check focus. An optical version of this feature has available with extension viewfinders on film cameras for years and it's nice to see an equivalent implementation on a video camera.

While audio is not my thing, one nice safety feature is that you need to press in the audio levels knobs before they can be turned. This beats having to tape off the levels. The camera is also designed to do interval recording of two seconds or more, but with the optional Prerecording card, the camera is capable of recording 1 frame increments (60i or 30p mode) or 5 frame increments (24P or 24PA mode), so time lapse and stop frame animation are possible. This card also makes it possible to record up to 15 seconds before the tape starts recording. This is a great feature for news photographers making it possible to capture images that otherwise might not have been captured while the heads got up to speed. Like many other modern cameras, user presets are one button away and the ability to save those presets or "looks" to a Secure Digital memory card for future use.

The last function I'll write about is the intergraded GPS (Global Positioning System). While not very useful for me and the shows I do, I can see how this can be great for nature programs, law enforcement, military and documentary production.

What I don't like about the camera and some suggestions to Panasonic… nudge, nudge, wink, wink…

There's not much about the SDX900 I don't like. One bummer is that if you need to record in 10-bit quantization, you'll need to record to a D1 or DigiBeta deck. This is really only a big issue if you need that extra punch of color depth or when the image is planning to go through some heavy effects compositing, esp. with green/blue screen work.

The other thing that bugs - and it's somewhat of a minor thing - is also something that I don't like about the VariCam and that's the inability to turn off the matrix and get a black and white image or to reduce a specific color's saturation in the matrix to shades of gray. I know there's work-a-rounds, like setting up the monitor to black and white and while adjusting the hue and saturation on the camera, monitoring the grey values on the monitor. Then, removing the color saturation in post. All well and good, but there are times it would be preferable to do it in camera.

Not much else to pooh, pooh.

The last word…

Personally, I think Panasonic "did good" with this camera. The SDX900 has all the right features for shows that require more than miniDV but less then high definition and don't want the 60i look. I can't wait to shoot a project with a P+S Technik Pro35 and 35mm cinema lenses. I also really like the idea of using IEEE 1394 to capture your footage into your edit system - DigiBeta quality without special capture cards and breakout boxes or intense hard drive space. For the money, it's an especially attractive option for low-budget narrative projects (shorts or features) to end up with a much higher quality image than miniDV, particularly for projects that really do stand a chance of going the film-out for a theatrical release. Panasonic, nice job!

POSTSCRIPT:

I'll be posting my practical review of the camera soon. I'm shooting some commercial and informational spots for Time Warner Cable (Los Angeles region). For those interested, we'll be renting from Moviola (Los Angeles) and shooting on the Gear Monkey stages (Orange, CA). I'll also be posting frame grabs and my camera settings after the shoot.

2004 April - Since that time, I've shot two commericals and a music video. A practical review of the camera was written for MVwire.com. You can see the article about the music video on that website (click here) or on my website by clicking here.

© 2005 - Property of Eric G. Petersen

This material may not be changed, reproduced or citied without the expressed written consent of Eric G. Petersen.