Sony FX30 Review: BUDGET Cinema Camera!

this is the Sony fx30 a proper cinema camera for under two thousand dollars pretty amazing what makes this a proper cinema camera versus every camera that has video recording well there's actually a lot to it okay of course it's got good specs for k60 even 4K 120 with a crop of course it's got a very angle screen a flippy screen that flips forward two card slots so you don't have to worry about a card failure it has digital mic in as well as like an available handle that means you can use up to two proper XLR mics and have analog dials to control their levels it has sensor stabilization it has s-log 3 but it has something that people are really going to like if you're creating vertical content if you frequently need to fit your camera into weird places it is a built-in cage that's right tripod mounts on the sides and the top of the camera can I just tell you why 4 k60 is important on a camera like this it's not because people are going to appreciate the higher frame rate or they're going to watch it on some big monitor where they could see the 4K resolution it's for coverage look I have hours until the Embargo for this camera ends and I have to publish this video I don't have time to go and pick up shots and I did not show those mounting points for a long enough period of time but you know what I can do is I can zoom in 200 which will still be full HD and I can slow it down 50 percent which extends the footage long enough to cover my voiceover 4k60 is about covering mistakes not about quality tripod mounts on both sides and the top of the camera so it does take 26 megapixel Stills but the Stills are taking a back seat to the video capabilities sort of the opposite of every other camera out there and that really closely reflects the current trends in our world right on Instagram everything is now video first first and still second so I think a camera like this makes a lot of sense now it looks a lot like the fx3 from Sony yeah it seems to have an identical body but they cut the sensor size in half and they cut the price in half now they're other what they call Super 35 or aps-c Cinema cameras out there like the Canon C70 but it costs three times as much and it actually kind of does Less in many ways it doesn't have Sony's lineup of mirrorless lenses like the 11 millimeter F 1.8 a super wide angle lens designed for aps-c that still allows you to blur the background still gives you good low light performance and allows some cropping in for things like stabilization mounted on the camera here is my go-to aps-c lens for vlogging like this a 15 millimeter F 1.4 look at that aperture that can be clicked on or off and a really cool lens the 10 to 20 G F4 power Zoom that you can zoom in and out smoothly using a button here or a button on like your DJI gimbal or your Sony remote control these give you capabilities that other aps-c cameras just don't because it really is more about the lens than it is about the body there's not really a direct competitor to this but I'm gonna do my best I'm going to compare it to the Nikon z30 this is Nikon's Creator camera it is a flip screen but no proper viewfinder I'm going to compare it to my daily Workhorse what I'm recording on now a Sony a7s3 and for all those creators who got a good sponsorship and they have a few bucks to spend and they thinking about upgrading from their smartphone I'm going to compare it against the most popular camera in the world the iPhone specifically my iPhone 14 pro Max to see what you get when you upgrade to a real camera so let's start those tests for a piece to camera test I'm starting with the iPhone 14 pro Max in cinematic mode at 4K 30. I'm using the rear wide angle 24 millimeter camera and I'm composing the shot on my watch why would I compare a cinema camera to a smartphone because everybody starts on their smartphone now so if you are buying a camera you have to justify the difference between what you can get with your smartphone and that camera now the iPhone costs almost as much as this Sony but the fact of the matter is you need an iPhone anyway this is how you consume content this is probably how people edit content it's certainly how you upload content to places like Tick Tock so you don't get around having one of these it's kind of a sunk cost the Sony has to justify the difference in quality by providing significantly better result this is the Sony fx30 in our piece to camera test and I'm noticing a few really interesting differences first there is a red tally light so I know for sure that it's recording and if it shuts off I think I would notice the screen itself also has a nice bold red border and I can see that Sony has changed the arrangement of some key things like the audio levels now show in the upper left corner instead of overlaying the screen so the screen itself is much cleaner I'm going to move in and out get really intimate and see how it tracks autofocus on my eye each of these cameras is recording in 4k but not all 4K is recreated equal this sensor is a 6K sensor that is down sampling to 4K it's also capable of shooting at 4K at 60 frames per second now our channel is all 60 frames per second I prefer that smooth look now right now the sound you're hearing comes from the on-camera mic attached to the handle and that's really novel because it moves the audio much closer to my face and there is no bigger factor in audio quality than proximity of the mic so let's switch to a standard it on camera shotgun mic and see how that sounds now this is the sound you get with an on-camera mic and even though the handle only pushes it I don't know a foot closer you can see there's a pretty big difference in audio quality especially in a room that doesn't have professional soundproofing because now the mic is hearing so much more of the echo volume relative to my own voice as I'm turning this on and off I really appreciate that Sony has made a camera that I can operate from the front the record button is big and huge and easy to see I have a second record button over here the tally light is bright and obvious and I can even adjust the zoom watch even though this is a prime lens I can still do a digital zoom up to 1.5 times because the sensor is over sampling so it's staying a true 4K it just crops in basically turning all of your primes into a at least a 50 Zoom this is recorded with the Nikon z30 which costs less than half of the fx30 despite having the same number 30. there are some significant disadvantages to this first the half price gets you the DX kit lens that's their aps-c kitlin so the background here isn't going to give me the same amount of background blur that I would get out of the fx30 with its available prime lenses Nikon does not have any native mirrorless aps-c wide angle primes like you would use for vlogging like the iPhone 14 cinematic mode this is limited to 4K 30 so you're getting half the frame rate of the FX 30 and 4K mode the z30 also doesn't support digital mics and it has a single card slot so if that card fails you've lost all of your recordings which has happened to me and that's the reason I insist on using cameras with two card slots finally this is the Sony a7s3 which has identical image quality to the Sony fx3 which is one step up in the cinema line the big difference here is that this camera has a full frame sensor and that gives it more light Gathering capabilities and more background blur at a given f-stop oh God this is again we know everybody knows let's just skip to the side by side the full frame camera has more background separation that's a good thing the Nikon z30 with a slow lens has almost none what's surprising is the iPhone's Boca actually looks really natural until you look at my face and then if you look really closely you can see the iPhone's Boca blurs the hair unnaturally whereas the other cameras do it much more naturally that's the benefit of getting a real camera also the iPhone makes me look like an Oompa Loompa and removes all the Shadows that I very carefully placed there by using a softbox otherwise even on a 30 inch screen they all look good now let's talk about Tick Tock Instagram reels YouTube shorts this is short format vertical video and some of you are like oh no this is a cinema camera twerking is not cinematography well maybe Martin Scorsese isn't on Tick Tock but Francesca Scorsese is look I resisted vertical for a long time too but guess what they started paying and if you want to sell stuff to people under 30 you pretty much need to figure it out now the vast majority of vertical content creators are using a camera that looks like this right and that makes it really easy because this is how you hold it anyway and if you were to put it on a tripod you could slap on a moment magnetic thing here and look horizontal vertical cannot get easier than that the Nikon z30 is a capable video camera and if you want to go vertical well you could just put it on a ball head tripod and flip it like this but that wouldn't work on most video tripods and that's also not going to work on something like a gimbal because the z30 does not have vertical tripod mounts so instead you mount the camera to an L bracket or a cage but this is not an ideal situation because this adds bulk and it adds weight especially on a gimbal or any handheld situation that is not ideal that makes your job more difficult this is my vertical gimbal rig and you'll see that I had to use an L bracket to get it attached to my a7s3 because it does not have a built-in cage like the fx30 does and if you watch my Tick Tock where I showed you how to take the doors off the a7s3 now maybe you understand why I needed to do that it's not because I didn't know whether ceiling was a thing so let's take a look at the integrated cage on the fx30 you can see I've attached this tripod directly to the side of it and at least with this specific tripod I can still open up the door and retrieve the cards though if I were using a bigger quick release plate it would be blocked so it's not perfect in that way I wish they could put all the ports and stuff and the SD cards on the top and leave the sides both of them available for mounting now I pretty much have to leave this side open in this scenario because for when I need to use the flip screen but also this is where the HDMI ports are this is where the mic Jack is so I couldn't necessarily Mount that that to a tripod this is probably more useful for mounting accessories let's move some of this clutter out of the way so how does the fx30 function as a vertical camera the results are honestly kind of mixed it'll detect the vertical orientation and put that into the video file's metadata so when you import it into a video editing app you don't have to rotate it that's good and the screen is visible and the microphone attached to the side here does still work okay but it has some real drawbacks in vertical format like the user interface does not rotate vertically and if you go into the menu systems they don't rotate vertically either but for vertical creators like me follow me on Tick Tock the biggest challenge using a camera like this is indeed the workflow because you have to transfer the files from the camera to your smartphone and the smartphone app kind of sucks like it could transfer things via Wi-Fi but it's frustrating and slow and kind of unreliable and as a result I end up pulling the video files off of a memory card Sony I need Cloud sync for the files or something solid and reliable and fast to transfer things to my phone for the next test I've switched to the 11 millimeter F18 a fast aps-c Prime that doesn't exist for any other system like Canon or Nikon and I've put it into the s-log 3 picture profile so that I can capture more dynamic range and this will allow me to walk around with a pretty stable setup and capture really bright highlights like this while my face is in Shadow so I'm going to walk through the yard a little bit and we can switch between different scenes and see how it handles this huge dynamic range and the exposure here we can get the sun right in the background and hopefully we can see some of the sky still while also being able to capture my face now the 11 millimeter seems really wide in aps-c to full frame format at that puts me at about 16 millimeters but also I have active stabilization turned on which crops in a little bit and helps to stabilize the footage and this is allowing me to hand hold it without having to use a heavy gimbal that means that the rig is lighter and I'm still getting a pretty stable shot by contrast here's the footage you get from the iPhone's cinematic mode and you can see it's providing me some decent background blur but let's move into the sun let's move into the sun shut up and show the side by side look the iPhone gets all washed out on the sun and it has crazy flaring sew it down 50 and the iPhone cinematic mode gets all jerky while the fx30 stays smooth it does do uh hlg High dynamic range as does the Sony FX 30. by comparison this is the iPhone's action mode and here it doesn't have a rear facing screen and it doesn't work with the front facing camera so I have to use my Watch to compose the shot and then just kind of hold it and hope that it works out okay wait what don't do that okay the iPhone's action mode actually worked really well it was smoother than even the fx30 it has the same video quality problems but yeah I'd use it for vlogging the on camera mic actually sounds pretty good too it's work and post processing now we're in my satin dark basement to test low light performance my shutters at 160th the iso is 12 800 and I'm using the fastest lens the 15 millimeter F 1.4 and I want to see how it handles Auto focusing in this more challenging scenario and just how noisy everything is getting you know how bright candles are yeah everyone's seen a candle for sake what's important here is that I go out of focus for no particular reason as I ramble on and on sometimes it goes back to my face and then back to the background and the screen is really too small to make this obvious the only way to understand how cameras with different size sensors are going to perform in low light is to use the crop factor and then oh God he's talking about crop factor again just skip to the next camera this is the Sony a7s3 again the same sensor as the Sony fx3 so you can see that what I should be getting is better low light performance I should yeah it's cleaner the autofocus is better next this is the Nikon z30 and it probably looks worse but it's not really the camera's fault it's the lenses fault oh stop trying to please the Nikon Fanboys they're gonna be mad either way like I made a camera for creators and gave you no good lenses next this is the iPhone 14 pro Max and once again I have to use my Watch to compose the shot because I'm using the rear camera here and honestly it doesn't look really good actually it's not bad it's cleaner than the Nikon and it kept me in Focus the entire time it'll think it's worth testing because computational photography can do shut up about the computational photography we get it okay you get what you pay for the full frame camera did better in low light the only surprise here is that the iPhone clearly outperformed the Nikon with its kit lens Nikon needs to produce some faster aps-c lenses if they're gonna play in this ballpark I am really impressed with the fx30 it provides a really unique price point and though it's aps-c and I'm kind of a full-frame snob the fact that Sony gave us good quality fast designed for aps-c mirrorless lenses meaning that you can actually create full frame equivalent results and I'm totally satisfied with that now I've also been impressed with the Nikon z30 but without those lenses you're not going to be able to get the same results but it is half the price and that says something and of course I still love my Sony a7s III or the Sony fx3 if you want that built-in cage body and full frame is kind of impossible to beat but they are twice the price but if you do have the budget it might be worth upgrading but that said I've also really liked most of the results I got from my iPhone I think the reasons I'd want to upgrade from my iPhone to a conventional camera at this point are well the nitpickiness of the real bokeh versus the fake bokeh but honestly Without Really squinting and looking for the flaws I didn't notice it the cinema mode is pretty good but it doesn't do 4K 60 in cinema mode which is what I like to film in I also continue to hate the way it renders skin tones why does it make me look so flat and orange the iPhone is just doing too much with the skin processing just back off and give me like natural human skin there are a few competitors worth mentioning there's the Canon C70 a cinema camera that costs three times as much it adds a built-in ND filter and a few more things you can plug in and some nice features it's a little more of a serious high-end cinema camera but you're pretty much going to end up adapting aps-c DSLR lenses because Canon hasn't gotten around to making little RF Mount mirrorless lenses for aps-c that can produce these types of results there's also the Panasonic gh6 which is an amazing cinema camera that we would use for everything except for one problem autofocus the autofocus still does not work very well and especially when we're filming ourselves we really really rely on that so that's a must-have feature for us there's also the Fujifilm xh2s which has all the features and a great selection of lenses but it lacks any power zoom lenses at least in this focal range of 10 to 20 F4 that creators like myself would want it also doesn't have the autofocus capabilities of Sony in the comments down below let me know why you might want the fx30 what are you creating get a tick tock or a YouTube or you're actually trying to make film And subscribe to see more reviews like our full review of the iPhone 14 pro camera that I would have finished if I didn't have this release coming up as as well as reviews of the Nikon z30 and tutorials for everything bye

Channel: Tony & Chelsea Northrup

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Id: 3heQQKhfOns

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 28 2022