Sony NEX-VG10 tests

I bought a VG-10 as a backup and to have something that will shoot more than the 13 minutes my DSLR's give.

Off hand low light is pretty bad. With the gain up, the video has a lot of noise. Not so much that AE noise reduction couldn't handle but more than I am used to from the 5d and 7d

Hand held shots are great using the "active steadyshot" Even at 200mm handheld it's steady and no jello.

Here are a few tests.

This was 200mm using the active steadyshot handheld


200mm handheld

A short film I put together of a water color artist.
The first scene was with the 5d. all inside shots were hand held with the Sony.
Color graded with Sony Vegas Pro 9


The artist


And another outdoor that I uploaded to Pond5. Outdoor or anything with good lighting looks great.

That is pretty darn good I must say.

Yep, its pretty sharp even with the kit lens. Colors are great.

Are you shooting at 60i and then converting to 30p?

Yes, the camera shoots progressive then converts to interlaced?? Don't know why they do that.
Anyway, I use NeoScene to convert it back to progressive. The video looks great.

Perhaps interlaced is consuming less bandwith???

Another test using a 50mm 1.4 lens on the Sony


Sony with Canon lens
Lens was at 1.4

Jake, I've been looking hard at this camera. It's in AVCHD and has a bit stream of 24mbps. I think we are going to see lots of these from different manufactures. The 550D killers. Converting it for me would be an issue, but it's an intriguing animal. They are all sold out here in Bangkok. The main issue for me are the artifacts inherent in these highly compressed formats. As storage gets cheaper and thru-put faster why the codecs still create these tiny files I don't know. I stopped contributing lots of files to iStock because I got so many rejections for artifacts even on brightly lit shots with both the Canon HD30 and the Panasonic XH1a. I believe they are much more demanding than any enduser. Are you seeing artifacts after you convert to photoJPEG?

I don't see artifacts except in low light. But thats another issue.
Remember this camera has a larger sensor, I don't think you can compare to cameras with small sensors like the HD30 no matter what the bit rate.

The thing with this camera is to use a fast lens so you don't have to pump up the gain.

IS just does not like HDV cameras such as the Canon HV-20 or even the XH-A1. They reject a lot based on video coming from HDV cameras. Not sure if IS is a good judge of camera capabilities or really quality for that matter. IS has rejected clips that I've made thousands of dollars of sales elsewhere. IS is not a player for me too.