SONY HXR MC 50E

[col lamb]

It looks like Sony have produced another winner

http://www.sony.co.uk/biz/view/ShowProd ... =HXR-MC50E

Their new solid state AVCHD camcorder which is released on 1st July, 64Gb internal memory in addition to the card slots, 12 Meg stills and about the size of a TRV 900 (now that was a great camcorder, mines for sale if anyone is interested).

Creative Video has the price at £1410

[billyfromConsett]

Sony don't seem to be exactly lavishing us with hard information about this camcorder. Like is the microphone on the picture the only mic supplied - does it also have an internal job? Also I can only find about two pics of the cam and little hard info about it.

What switches/buttons are there on it for easy manual control?

My next cam will probably be an AVCHD cam, but I've an i7 powered computer just about capable of editing the format (hopefully).

I like the info of low light response, and will look out for a review.

[col lamb]

Billy

The August issue of the IAC mag will have an article on AVCHD camcorders and then the issue after that will be about PC's and editing.

If your i7 is quad 3Ghz, 6Gb RAM and your graphics card CUDA and you have fast enough hard drives then you should be OK to edit native AVCHD files, if it is not up to spec then transcoding will be necessary. Using a MAC all AVCHD files are transcoded into Apple's IC format files

[billyfromConsett]

I'll look out for our IAC mag's article. I'm using CS4 Production Premium with a i7 864 overclocked chip, with 8gb ram and a Win7 64bit OS, but with only a GTX260 graphics card, it won't be quite up to graphics hardware to be worthwhile in upgrading to CS5 just yet. CS4 is excellent with HDV though.

The consumer version of this cam, the HDR-CX550VE, looks pretty good mind. Maybe that is more than good enough to invest in for a holiday cam.

[tom hardwick]

Probably the reason why Sony are just tempting us with mere snippets of information is because their dealers have a lot of A1s on their shelves, and this MC50 is its replacement.