Sony PXW-X70 Professional Hand Held Camcorder,4K

This is my 2nd Sony X70. It's a great compact camera with multiple record format options. The image is fantastic, even when the gain is bumped up. You cannot go wrong with this camera in your gear bag!

This camera exceeds my expectations! PICTURE The images this camera generates are fantastic. The dynamic range is rich and accurate and it's got plenty of HD formats to choose from. HANDLING Very nice feel with well thought buttons. SIZE This is a BIG camera in a very SMALL body, just like Shawn Johnson, the strength of a football player packed in a tiny body. Very easy to carry around. It's just heavy enough to achieve a good balance in my hand. ZOOM Good, not awesome. CODEC I haven't had any trouble. Once you download Sony Catalyst Browser it gets pretty easy. LOW LIGHT Great. Subtle grain starts showing at 18 DB...not too shabby. AUDIO Awesome. 2 XLR's, plenty of controls, excellent built-in mic. 4K Purchase and installation can be a little bit challenging but once done (15 min.) It works great! FEATURES Lots of features, my favorites are the Picture Profile variety, Histogram on the screen, XLR inputs, Built-in ND filters, HDMI out, just to mention some. PICTURE STABILITY Excellent near to awesome. AUTO FOCUS Medium fast but very good. Extremely accurate. MANUAL FOCUS Very slow, you need to turn the ring MANY times to be able to focus on anything. Overall, a very powerful little camera. I do recommend it!

Great quality for the price. You can make very large high quality files with this camera. The Ziess lens is great and gives a really crisp image. You can get up to about 18 dB until you notice noise. Very compact.

This is a great little camcorder and the quality is astounding. The only thing that prevents me from giving it 5 stars are the controls. They are laid out in a very unergonomic way and it's awkward to get to them. The menu button is directly under the LCD foldout screen so when it's open it's very tough to get to it. White balance involves clicking a button on the outside, then having to go into the menu to set the value. Dumb! The manual, as are most Sony manuals in my experience, less than fruitful when looking for detailed information on functions. You can find custom picture profile settings on the Internet to enhance the ones that are provided. It's a sturdy piece of hardware and takes great video. It's upgradeable to 4K which is a huge plus for the near future.

Nice high bitrate for 1080 video, but low bitrate for 4k if you decide to pay sony another ~500 bucks for an unlock key. Honestly, they should have made it a free update. There's plenty of other cameras at the same price point that can do 4k, including their own consumer version which is almost the same exact camera. Another downside is you can only toggle between manual zoom/focus. Would be nice if there was separate rings for it.

This is a great camera! It has been great to go out and make videos with. And it arrived well packaged and on time

My overall opinion on the camera itself is rather favorable. I've had the X70 for about a week now and took it for several days of shooting in the Sierra Foothills. The fit and feel of the camera is nice, feels solid and well constructed (except for the zoom rocker which could be a bit better sealed against dust and moisture). The dual XLR audio inputs are what really make this a step up from the AX100, more of a pro camera with line, mic and phantom options. If you want to output video beyond the 50Mbps, you also have an HD-SDI (especially useful for broadcasting or sending to an external recorder). And Sony has included the colored peaking for fast and accurate focusing (as found in some of the camera's bigger cousins like the PMW-350). BUT let me tell you why you should wait to buy this camera. Sony has labeled this fine piece of technology as XAVC. What they don't tell you (unless you call ProSony) is that it is not XAVC-intra like the F-5 and F-55, which happen to be supported by all the big editing programs. No, friends and neighbors, this is XAVC-long GOP, and nothing can read this codec. By nothing, I mean FCPX with the XAVC plug-in cannot. Edius cannot. Sony's own Vegas Pro 13 cannot. I'm not sure about Premiere Pro. Aftermarket transcoders cannot (of the three free ones I've tried). Sony Creative Software folks say the new Catalyst Prepare will be able to read and transcode, but that software is not yet available. Catalyst Browse, however, will transcode XAVC-L to ProRes but only one file at a time (no batch projects) which is a huge issue if you've just shot 119 clips over your weekend in the Sierra Foothills. In fact, I am writing this review as I manually transcode every file. That said, if you don't mind shooting video on any of the X70's lesser formats like AVCHD, you'll be okay. Does this product launch fall into the dismal failure category? Yes. The PXW-X70 camera is well worth your consideration for its performance in its price range, just not until Sony finishes developing everything needed for it to work. Once all these bugs are worked out, I'll have no problem bumping this review up to 4 or 5 stars.

Lovely camera but has to return because of an intermittent error (code E62?) that would occasionally (50% of the time) prevent the image stabilisation from working.

The camera is very visible used, and one part of the camera is broken, also I have received a battery that actually is not even for this camera!