2 Sep 2010
First use review: Sony MC50E camcorder
I recently bought the diminutive Sony MC50E camcorder for use as a second camera and for bolt-on action shots in car videos and I have to say I am very impressed with the quality it spits out.
The main selling point of the camera for me was simply the size - it really is very small - but I recently used it to shoot a product review of the Pure Oasis DAB radio and the images it produces a really quite good.
Obviously with a camcorder this small you have to be very careful about camera shake but as long as you use a good tucked elbow stance it gives some very nice handheld shots.
The only annoyance I have with it is that when you asign any of the manual controls to the little control wheel, everything else gets sets to auto. So, for example, if you asign iris to the manual control, the auto on the camera compensates by adjusting the shutter speed and aperture settings.
This is particularly annoying because shutter speed should always be left at 1/50 (1/60 for NTSC) unless you are after a particular effect but if you try and adjust the iris manually the MC50E adjusts the shutter to what it thinks is necessary to compensate.
Despite this the camera is very nice to use and even the fact that it is AVCHD hasn’t been a problem for mixing it with XDCAM EX footage from our main Sony EX1, although we are using Premiere CS5 and hardware accelerated Mercury playback engine.
I’d seriously recommend the MC50E if you are looking to produce decent quality web videos on a budget.
Trained as a sound engineer, I stumbled in to text journalism, but knew it wasn't really me. Then I found video.
