Sony HDR-FX1E

While HDTV has yet to arrive in the UK, both DivX and WMV support the various resolutions, making computer playback the current target medium. You can, of course, down-sample HD to widescreen DVD-Video with stunning results. If HDV has one major drawback, though, it's at the editing stage. The footage is intended to be captured over FireWire like DV, but it requires new software to do so. This is currently in its infancy. Ulead was the first to provide an HD capture plug-in for Media Studio Pro 7, and Pinnacle Liquid Edition 6 (see issue 124, p160) claims to support HDV out of the box. However, the latter will require an update (via a free download) to capture from the FX1E. So far, the slickest implementation is from Canopus. The latter's EDIUS Pro 3.1 transcodes the HDV to Canopus' own HQ AVI format on-the-fly during capture. This doesn't noticeably reduce quality, and we found we could mix a couple of streams in real-time on our dual-processor test workstation.

However, there's something almost as amazing about the FX1E as its picture quality: its price. To put it in context, Sony's most recent semi-professional DV camcorder, the DCR-VX2100E, costs just £500 less. Seeing as the FX1E can shoot DV to a similar standard, you're paying only £500 more for the HDV capability. So, if you have the money for a £2,000-plus semi-professional camcorder, buy Sony's HDR-FX1E.

Author: Bentley Dean