My Business

Thanks again to the guys over at Cleveland Camera Rental for letting me take the Panny HPX-250 out for a ride. After taking a couple days to acclimate myself to the new menu features and some new settings, I put it to use at a shoot at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey for client Jet Aviation. The shoot involved an interview and b-roll of some of the staff in and around the plane terminal. I brought over my regular color settings from an existing SD card and setup was very quick.

It’s remarkably easy to focus now with the newly enhanced on-board monitor and EVF settings which are widely customizable to varying degrees of frequency adjustments. The only focus options I miss on this camera is the ability to toggle the EVF completely off or on just to be able to reference some shots against the current settings. Why no EVF toggle as an option for one of the four customizable presets?  I would also like to see the “focus-in-red” option carried over from the AF100 as an option for those of us used to using that feature for sharp focus adjustments.

The biggest physical change in this model from it’s predecessors is the intergration of an iris ring instead of the bothersome iris wheel which has been a part of these Panasonic cameras dating all the way back to the time of the DVX lines. My hope is that Panasonic integrates the iris ring into all of their cameras going forward. In the age of DSLR and interchangeable lenses, the standard should be an iris ring instead of the annoying, hard to reach wheel. Kudos to Panasonic for listening to their customers and improving their lines on a consistent basis. I am a huge fan and loyal customer for that reason!

I would recommend the HPX250 for run-and-gun and ENG style setups. It has everything you need to get in, get the shot (and know you actually got it!) with the amazing picture quality in AVC-Intra codec for right around $5,000.

This camera just came in on Friday and I was able to shoot a few hours on it already!  So far I love the 22x optical zoom which is a HUGE improvement over the older ENG-type Panny HVX line although the zoom is not a constant aperture, it ranges from f1.6- f3.2.  The resolution on the monitor is also way better and there is also a complete EVF control system in the menu functions which allows the user to dial in the frequency and amount of EVF in any given shot- truly a needed resource for all run and gun shooting.

The HPX is a little longer than it’s predecessors but I actually don’t mind the size- it’s really almost easier to manuever and handle because of it’s length not despite it. I had a little trouble dumping the footage but not because of the new AVC-Intra codec (which looks great) but because of an innocuous little setting in the menu tab which indicated that my camera was the “host” and not the “device”. I switched the setting and the ingest was extremely easy after that. So far, it’s a great camera–I have a shoot this week and I’ll be trying it out again, this time for real.