Sony is recharging its batteries after a busy launch-week at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas. The tech-giants launched a staggering nine new products at the electronics-based convention which is aimed at industry professionals.
The five-day NAB Show is aimed at professionals from the film and broadcast industry and wrapped up at the Las Vegas Convention Centre on April 19.
This year saw Sony Professional build on its ‘Believe Beyond HD’ vision, which they launched at the 2011 NAB Show. ‘Believe Beyond HD’ was aimed at providing creative professionals with new tools for creating content, in both HD and 3D.
Building on the success of its 4K range which launched last year, Sony Professional has launched new 4K, 3D and 35mm cameras.
Last Sunday at the NAB Show, Sony Professional launched its NEX-FS700, a Full-HD super slow motion camcorder with a new 4K Super 35 CMOS sensor. The new 35mm model is designed for high-speed shooting and is capable of capturing footage at 960 frames per second. 4K offers a much higher resolution than the current HD standard.
The 4K image standard for cinema projection is 4096x2160 pixels. This is four times the size of 2K digital cinema and HD images. 2K images have been in use for a number of years, however 4K is becoming more popular since Sony launched its 4K range last year
It is estimated the camcorder will cost just under €8,000. It is expected the camera will be available to purchase in June of this year, soon to be followed by an upgrade that will enable the camera to use 4K features with an optional Sony 4K recorder.
The Sony HXR-NX30E high-definition camcorder is a streamlined camcorder designed for efficiency. It comes equipped with balanced optical steadyshot for image stabilisation, and a built-in video projector. The camcorder is palm-sized for compactness, making it Sony’s smallest and lightest handheld professional camcorder.
The third camcorder launched by the electronics company is the PMW-100 camcorder, the smallest and lightest addition to the XDCAM HD422 family. The device is hand-held, making it the ideal partner to the shoulder-held PMW-500 XDCAM HD422. The camera records MPEG HD422 at 50 megabits per second. It has a newly developed 1/2.9-inch ‘Exmor’ CMOS sensor and achieves the minimum illumination of 0.08lx.
Three additional cameras, the BRC-H900 remote camera and the HDC-2000 and HDC-2550 studio cameras, were also launched at the five-day event.
The BRC-H900 uses three half-inch Exmor CMOS sensors, each with a pixel count of 2.07 megapixels. The full-HD resolution camera is expected to enter the market as early as May. As additions to the HDC-2500 family, the HDC-2000 and HDC-2550 deliver pictures through a newly developed two-thirds-inch-type Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) image sensor and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) with a 16-bit A/D converter.
Sony Professional also launched its memory drive unit, the SR-D1, an affordable and easy-to-use memory drive unit which opens up the power of F65RAW and SStP workflow to a much wider audience. The SR-D1 is the latest addition to Sony’s SRMASTER family and has been designed to ‘drag and drop’ content from SRMemory media.
The final products launched include a video network unit (NXL-IP55), which can transfer multiple HD image signals, audio signals and control signals over a single network cable; an optical disc archive storage system, which will deliver long-term storage capabilities; and a digital wireless microphone system (DWX series), which transmits and receives high-quality 24-bit/48-kHz digital audio in a specific frequency bandwidth.
Other launches at the NAB Show 2012 include master director James Cameron’s new 3D system aimed at broadcasters rather than filmmakers. The new system is designed for broadcasters to shoot in 3D with the same camera positions used for 2D.
Following the success of this year’s convention, NAB Show has already announced its dates for 2013 as April 6-11.
