The new high speed mode which will shoot action shots up to 120 frames a second is a nice feature except that there is only enough memory buffer to record 12 seconds at that speed, which really renders the feature useless for capturing anything but planned out short, action shots. (Uses might include capturing a baseball pitch or a brief gunfight in slow mo.)
The fact that the Z7U can record to both Flash memory as well as tape at the same time is a significant feature. This is the only camera in its class that records to both simultaneously. Sony does this through a flash card recorder that mounts on the back of the camera. The ability to have footage usable for editing immediately is great.
Lens
The lenses are my favorite feature of this camcorder. Finally a camera in this class that has a real focus ring which means there is no more guessing about what point in a rack that you will be in focus. There is an option to slide the focus ring forward, which turns it into a continuous focus ring. I see no really good application for this except to quickly get into auto focus.
The supplied Carl Zeus lens gives much better depth of field than most other similar cameras. With a little extra work, you can get this lens to give you some of the nice shallow depth of field shots that filmmakers love. While I haven’t tried this camera with other lenses to see how they fare, scientifically, none of them will give you the same results that you could get from using a Redrock Micro (or similar 35mm) adapter on this camera. (Tech Note: The 1/3” CMOS chipset is substantially smaller than the 35mm projected image that is recorded in a 35mm adapter, which means the depth of field would be much deeper in the Z7U than if you use a 35mm adapter. The size of the recording surface helps determine the depth of field that can be achieved, with larger areas being capable of shallower depth of field.)
The zoom ring now has two modes. You can have the standard servo mode, which has a lot of resistance when you zoom and is perfect for smooth manual zooms and auto zooms. Then you can turn off the servo and have the ability to do resistance free snap zooms.
The iris “ring” is finally an actual ring. It is part of the lens—like it should be—but, alas, it is a continuous ring, so I guess you can’t have everything you ask for. Like many other cameras in its class, the manual iris does have an auto protection feature that keeps you from being able to go to crazy with over-exposures. Most of the time I don’t even notice, but there are moments where it kicks in and it really drives me crazy. It would be great if you could turn this off, because, on the Z7U, it’s a little more “exposure-fix” crazy than the Z1U was.
Audio
Sony opted to drop the built in stereo mic that was on the Z1U and provide a vastly improved shotgun mic mount as well as provide a shotgun mic with the camera. This is where another feature comes in handy. Sony has put two shoe mounts on the top of the camera – the standard one in the front and an extra one in the back. With one mount you typically have either a light or a lav receiver on the mount. If you do like me, and have a light up top, then you know how much of a pain it is to clip the wireless lav receiver on the handgrip when you do handheld shops. On the Z7U I can now keep the light up front and mount the wireless receiver in the back.
The audio level controls have been moved from the back to the side, which makes them much easier to control levels while recording. It’s is also much harder to bump them and change levels when doing hand held shots.
