From experience I know these switches can be re-positioned inadvertently in the heat of battle. I liked the raised profile now protecting the side toggles.

The camera’s overall power draw is a scant 17W without the Wi-Fi board or encoder, so a single Dionic 90 may last, as it did for me, an entire shooting day. The two-way color viewfinder (available as an option) doubles as an LCD screen and may well be the best all-purpose viewfinder Panasonic has ever produced. Its low profile makes the camera a joy to hold and peer over, watching, as we always, must for potential perils approaching from the blind side. Poorly promoted by the company, CAC is becoming increasingly vital to today’s shooters, as cleaner noise-free cameras emerge and many more serious lens defects are revealed.Īt only 6.2 lbs (2.8kg) sans battery, viewfinder, or accessories, the HPX600 is lightweight and well-balanced. CAC doesn’t take the place of a $25,000 lens, but it definitely helps. The result is markedly improved performance from what would other otherwise be quite mediocre optics. CAC identifies the signature of a compatible lens and applies an average correction from a library of look-up tables (LUTs). To help this effort, the HPX600 employs chromatic aberration compensation (CAC) to suppress the most serious artifacts. Owing to the camera’s very clean images, high performance optics are imperative. A low-light shooting mode buried in the setup menus facilitates this look, adjusting the master detail, pedestal, and detail coring without the user having to make the individual adjustments. In this respect, the camera borrows a page from Sony’s traditional playbook, applying plenty of noise reduction to produce noise-free images with a concomitant loss of shadow detail.

The new 2/3-inch single-MOS sensor with F12 sensitivity and a 59dB S/N ratio is very quiet, with little noise apparent in the darkest shadows. Performance was about what I expected in a state-of-the-art mid-level camcorder. The new Panasonic AG-HPX600 camera-server. Lighting conditions at the studio ran the gamut from bright sun at midday to late dusk and night the HPX600 is at its heart a nonfiction and news/documentary camera and so was clearly working outside its normal job description in a Bollywood production environment. I recently had the opportunity to work with the new camera on a short narrative project produced jointly by Chapman University and the Annapurna School of Film and Media in Hyderabad, India. Taking advantage of a LAN or Wi-Fi connection, the new camera-server enables remote screening and collaboration on a level we haven’t experienced before. The Panasonic AG-HPX600 is not so much a new camera as it is a new way of working.

Panasonic p2 600