A short test -freehand - with the new RX100 - the RX100 which is a very interesting camera

I've been shooting mostly with the VX9 out HDMI to Hyperdeck for the last six months. Pretty amazing little combination. With manual, this is my next buy.

Finally in stock at amazon here. Will order one! Thanks for your reviews and sample images.

Here is an example of video which IMO no self-respecting camera should ever have taken. The jerking of stabilization during pans is just unbelievable, and the tone grading is not good:

vimeo.com/46957884

I have been getting quality video from compact cameras ever since the Sanyo Xacti series changed the paradigm, and put handheld HD into our hands...

As for "Cinema pro grade video," maybe you would like to define exactly what that is? Provided the lighting is there, "pro grade" has a lot more to do with the operator than with the sensor size :) I recall that the HV20 was doing pretty well, in its day, with a 1/2.5 sensor... and my four HF100s aren't bad either, even though the M41 is better. Surprisingly, video quality out of the LX7 is looking superb. Particularly the tonal grading. It really is impressive.

oh that stuttering during pans is awful, they need to fix that ASAP

Should i get this V? Any more confirmations, positive experiences?

My brother recently bought a Sony RX100, and while I visited him today, I had some opportunity to try it - and of course I brought my GH2 for comparison.

I generally liked the results from the RX100, it really produces very nice pictures for such a tiny camera.

Regarding the "stuttering while panning"-issue: I think I know what you mean with that since I saw that sample video on dpreview with the mountain biker, where I, too, wondered: What strange kind of motion is that...? Yet, today I was not able to produce any such effect while trying the RX100. I explicitely panned over an outdoor garden scenery, quickly, and saw nothing unusual or bad in the result.

From the two uncompressed video screen shots below you can see that the GH2 certainly delivered higher image quality, but only the RX100 was able to record 1080p50, so its motion rendering was better at 1080p resolution. Please keep in mind that I brought a well-configured GH2 (with FM2.02 patch), while I used the RX100 with mostly default settings.

The RX100 video suffered from the usual consumer-camera-default-syndrome of exxagerated contrast and when there is lots of complex motion, compression artefacts are visible in screen shots.

I did not see any disturbing aliasing effects in the scenes I took with the RX100.

Surprisingly, if one selects MP4 recording format on the RX100, "Full HD" will actually mean 1440x1080 resolution - you need to choose AVCHD recording to really get 1920x1080 resolution.

Sony annoys its buyers with the same stupid restrictions that Panasonic applies: A european buyer can choose only 25 or 50fps, US buyers will certainly only be offered 30 or 60fps.

The bit rate of the .MTS files was 28 MBit/s in 1080p50 AVCHD mode as advertised by the camera.

The RX100 "continuous focus" was less sluggish than the same of the GH2, but certainly still unusable in many situations. The RX100 single-focus function surprised me in that as long as I half-pressed the trigger, the camera kept hunting, only when the trigger was fully pressed or released, the camera moved into focus.

Indoor recording in low light looked much better on the RX100 than I would have expected. I would actually go so far to say that the quality gap between the RX100 and the GH2 became smaller, not bigger, in low light - but I had not too much time to do extensive testing.

http://www.cameralabs.com/reviews/Sony_Cyber-shot_DSC_RX100/

Here's a vid I shot with this over the weekend...

I can't make out the autofocus on the RX100, sometimes it works and sometimes it refuses to budge. At least it's smooth...

A test I did on the RX100 - lightly graded from Portrait setting at -3,-3,-3

And some other videos

Test with Magfilter threaded filter holder with Marumi Polarizer and ND8 filter part 1