I recently made the leap into a professional format camcorder and purchased an HPX500 package. All in all, it is an amazing camera with very thought out controls, a large feature set with some interesting surprises and a few surprising omissions. After having shot with the camera for a week I am convinced that this is a revolutionary camera at this price point. A camera is certainly a new model when the manual you receive with it is a stapled photocopy – yes the camera came with a photocopied manual. I guess printing costs is one way to save money.
Check out still from this camera here.
Download the HPX500 manual here. (right click and save as)
When you first pull the camera out of the box you know that you are holding a professional piece of equipment. The build is solid, connections all recessed or protected and layout makes sense. There are a few plastic plates covering buttons that seem surprisingly easy to break but nothing that seems too critical. Putting the lens on is your first clue at how solid the build is. The package’s lens is heavy but has no need for any support and doesn’t settle at all in the mount after you tighten it down.
Also in the package are 4 16 GB P2 cards. This allows for a wopping 170 minutes of record time at 720 24P or 65 minutes at 1080i (or 1080 24P). Wow – what a departure from the short recording times that I was used to with 4 GB cards. On narrative shoots we were offloading constantly and now we are able to offload only at the end of the day with plenty of space to spare. The only negative is that the cards no longer fit on DVDs for archival purposes so we are copying to 3 hard drives for safety which is a hidden cost in this system.
But what about the image? To quote the director I worked with this week, “Wow it looks like the new Superman film.” Now of course its not going to compete with the Panavision Genesis or the Viper. But the image was incredibly crystal clear and devoid of even minimal noise. The deep shadows of course had a bit of mosquito noise. But really very little. Everytime we powered the camera before we lit the set both my AC and myself couldn’t believe the sensitivity of the camera. If you are coming from using the HVX you will be amazed at the sensitivity of this camera. Due to less noise, using some gain will be reasonable BUT it appears that we wont need it often. At times we were shooting interiors with an ND filter so we could open up all the way for a shallow depth of field. The colors were rich and clean – although there was a small bias that I will get into later with the vectorscope tests. But the bias wasn’t apparent to my eye. Motion rendition was beautiful as it was with the HVX. It is truly beautiful. The easiest thing to see as compared to the HVX is the ability to use Depth of Field as an artistic choice at all light levels due to the 2/3 inch sensor. The image is surprisingly clean and vivid. The camera has similar gamma and scene file settings as the HVX but because of the less noise they seem far more beautiful. The latitude seems to be a couple of stops wider on this camera (although I did not measure exactly) helping to handle highlights more gracefully. All the same recording modes that were available in the HVX are available here including the same frame rates, resolutions and codecs. You also have the special recording modes such as one-shot, and intervolometer.
I purchased the package with the Fujinon XA7.6x17BRM (no extender). Overall the lens is a good solid lens at the price point. There are some shortcomings but also some interesting surprises. The lens give a great sharp image with a T –stop of 1.8. The CAC correction automatically turns on for the lens if you enable it in the menus and significantly reduces much of the unpleasant fringing. The lens focus feels nice and smooth but the scale is a little tight for narrative work. Your focus pulls need to be more precise because of the scale but it is certainly doable – just a larger scale would have been nicer. But after all it is an ENG lens. The lens aperture is super smooth allowing for constant changes without stepping between stops and has an automatic function. The zoom can be used manually or with the servo and rocker bar with an adjustable speed range with 8 settings from VERY slow to SUPER fast. You can also reset the zoom range to any point. One interesting feature is the ability to lock a zoom in at any speed and have it continually go until you stop it. This works well for simulated dolly pushes with super slow speeds when dolly track is not available or time doesn’t permit. There is a one button fast zoom that takes you all the way in to focus and then returns to the previous zoom setting when the button is released. There are other standard buttons on the lens such as record ret and VTR start/stop. Before you begin to use the lens you need to adjust the white shading file by following a procedure that is poorly outlined in the manual. Once the lens is fully adjusted it really makes a nice image. Even so, it would have been great to have a package with a CAC cine style lens.
It should be noted that the Fuji lens breathes a lot. It is very noticeable at full wide focal lengths and less noticeable at telephoto. You can rack focus with the lens but need to be careful to “hide” the breathing in the action or learn to accept that the breathing is there and most non technical people will not notice. If you rent a high end lens (or buy one by mortgaging your home) you will of course not need to worry about this issue.
The package also comes with a tripod adapter plate. For those who are only familiar with non-shoulder mount form factors, this plate is needed to bridge the shoulder mount arch to allow mounting on a tripod. You add your tripod plate to the bottom of the adapter and the camera is then mounted and removed from the adapter plate. The plate has a nice solid locking mechanism with a very satisfying click when you mount the camera. I also purchased the Chosziel lightweight rods for the varicam which requires a simple installation requiring four screws – they are surprising short screws securing the camera but the mount is rock solid. To use a follow focus unit with fuji lens you need a .6 pitch gear. The Chosziel follow focus unit felt very nice on the lens but again, the scale on the lens was tight so the focus wheel just barely completes ¾ turn for the range of focus.
The buttons and switches on the camera are very well thought out. You can access the menu function from 2 different places. Near the rear of the camera is the familiar HVX style menu system and near the front is a jog wheel and enter button menu access system. Both do the same thing but will appeal to different people. The front menu system likely is useful when the camera is shoulder mounted and needs an adjustment. Many functions found in the menus of the HVX are now surfaced in buttons. One example is a switch for turning the settings display on and off on the external monitors. Another example is a “save” switch that turns off the lcd to help preserve battery power. The shutter switch is on the front of the camera and guarded by a missile command style cover to prevent accidental activation of shutter modes. The user assignable buttons are protected by slide covers. All buttons are recessed or covered to some degree to bumping settings doesn’t seem likely.
The menu structure is very similar to the HVX. One simple yet amazing enhancement is that any menu setting changes INCLUDING scene file changes are saved immediately when they are changes so you no longer have to remember to save your scene files after you change them and power down the camera. There are a couple of new menus to support new functionality in this camera such as the audio menu (for specific audio settings), lens menu (for CAC correction), and battery menu (to set the type of battery being used to make the remaining time display correct).
The audio configuration has been significantly improved from the HVX. All 4 channels have independent and recessed level controls. You can only monitor 2 channels in the lcd at a time but can assign a user button to see the other 2 channels. There are 2 xlr ports on the front and 2 on the back. Each can be assigned to different channels in singles and pairs. The front supply phantom power. The rear ports take line or mic signals or supply phantom power. Each channel has a limiter, automatic gain control and a low pass filter that can be engaged in the menus. There are a handful of other audio settings that your audio engineer will want to have a look at. Of course there is no internal microphone on this camera to record a scratch track so we found ourselves mounting a low end shotgun mic on the camera for this purpose. There is a handy audio level control near the front of the camera that you can assign to channel 1 or 2 to help adjust the level when you are working alone or without someone watching audio levels.
The camera uses an Anton Bauer gold mount battery system. I purchased a handful of Dionic 90 batteries which have been allowing about 3 hours of run time while also powering a Marshall 7” HD monitor. Since the batteries take about 3 hours to charge we never ran out of battery power and didn’t have a spare ready. The battery mount has a standard power tap to power the monitor with an on/off switch to avoid trickle drain. You can also power the camera with an XLR 4 pin power cable – these are available on some charger or from a standalone power source.
The viewfinder that comes in the package is adequate without too many bells and whistles. You can turn the zebras on and off, adjust peaking in the image, and adjust brightness and contrast (all of course not affecting the recorded image). It is black and white which can be an adjustment for those who are used to color viewfinders. It also displays all the same info that the LCD displays. The viewfinder can adjust left-right but not forward back. When using the viewfinder my AC was just able to see the LCD screen behind my head to use the focus assist. But being able to move the viewfinder forward would have helped. The LCD looks to be very similar to the one on the HVX – certainly adequate for framing but not even close to use for color or exposure. As you would expect, a professional external monitor with waveform functionality is necessary for proper imaging in narrative productions.
There is a new supposedly innovative focus assist system. What is does is puts up a graph in the upper right corner of the screen. The graph is semi-transparent so you can see the full image under it. When focusing you are attempting to get more of the graph to move right. In effect you focus until the graph stops moving right and starts moving left again and you know you just passed ideal focus. Then you go back a bit and you are sharp. This combined with zooming allows for tack sharp focus. However, there is no documentation how this system works so I am not really sure what is being measured. When you have the graph up on a static image and are not focusing, the graph moves around quite a bit making me questions what is being measured since nothing in the image is changing. It appears to be center weighted which makes some focusing using the system difficult if the images is not in the center and you cannot move the camera. Of course you can always measure focus by tape measure but this is not entirely accurate because of the above issue about the lens having a small focus scale. Overall, it seemed my AC worked with a combination of the graph, tape measure and eye on an HD monitor. Between all of those focus was dead on 95% of the time. It would be nice to have a precise description of how this focus assist worked internally.
The camera has 4 P2 card slots well guarded behind a sliding door with a button lock. You can load one or more slots and then choose which card to record to using a user button assignment or let the camera choose for you. The camera has all the same hot swap, loop and other capabilities you would expect after using the hvx. No longer is record time a limiting factor – and when 32 GB cards are released watch out – over 5 hours of 720 24P or 2 hours of 1080 24P will be recordable when using all 4 slots.
Much of the timecode functionality you would expect in a professional camera is available here including gen-lock, timecode in and timecode out. You can now rely on timecode for syncing in post or for multicamera shoots.
There is now a flip mode assignable to the user buttons allowing the image to be flipped on the lcd (not the viewfinder or recorded image) to help with use of a lens adapter such as the M2 or other adapters that flip the image.
I am in the process of performing some vectorscope and waveform analysis on the camera and will post results when I do so.
Now there are a couple of surprising omissions on the camera. Most notably for me was the lack of 2 zebra settings. I have gotten used to checking zebras at 80 and 100 percent to see where the highlights lie. The HPX only allow one zebra setting to be assigned and the assignment is done in menu. So you no longer can toggle between both zebra settings. The cover to the menu and Mode buttons is plastic and seems to be screaming to be broken off. On such a nice build I am not sure why this was made this way.
As you can tell I love this camera. It’s amazing, great, unbelievable at this prices point. Keep in mind that I am not comparing this camera to any other camera here. This is not a shootout but rather just a review of the camera itself. While Red is holding a lot of our hearts and minds hostage and will for sure be an amazing camera, the HPX500 is here now. It is built on existing workflow and technology and it is ideal for narrative, documentary or ENG style shooting allowing for many streams of income. Is it better then the Varicam is a question that will come up often. The Varicam has a better CCD with more resolution but can only shoot 720 and you are tied down by tape. The HPX500 can shoot 1080 24P and is freed by P2 technology. Which is a better image? That’s for someone else to answer with a side by side comparison.