Can a camera be TOO good? - Sony ZV-E1

Sony has been kicking butt and snapping pics all over the place and they just ran out of room on their SD card this camera might be the most disruptive camera they have yet produced not only to their competitors but to themselves as well this is the brand new zve E1 so it's part of their zv lineup but it is an interchangeable lens and it's full frame buddy full frame interchangeable lens budget lineup this changes everything and the best thing about it is it has the same sensor as some other six

thousand dollar cameras oh buddy let's go let's finish this unboxing this is clearly not final packaging but it might give you an idea what will be in the Box this is the version that comes with the kit lens uh 28 to 60 versatile little lens uh it's you know it's not gonna win any awards but it's nice when you have an option when you're spending all your money on a camera other than that you know strap charger and cable this looks like it's like a 2.0 cable so I'm guessing you're not doing any

data transfers on this just power Sony has learned a lot and is not doing the typical Sony thing that they've done in the past where you know new camera new batteries new formats new things this camera is going to work with the same batteries you use and most of the alpha lineup so you know the a74 a7r5 a7s3 and the fx3 which uh based on the specs and the little experience I have might have fewer and fewer reasons to be bought when we look more deeply at this thing last thing in the box is just

a little wind sock uh built into this camera there's a three microphone array and you can slide it into the hot shoe Mount this way and it'll probably provide a little bit of wind protection as well as you know give your camera a little haircut that's cute it's like a troll doll let's take a closer look at the body of the camera uh first thing first it's noticeably smaller than other Alpha cameras but it is quite a bit larger than the zve E10 which is very similar in a lot of ways but it is a ap

s-c sensor I like the way this feels it feels comfortable in the hand I find mirrorless cameras in general always a little bit small when I squeeze the grip my fingers kind of press against the body not the grip but uh in my experience over the weekend I never felt like I could I was gonna like you know launch this away in the same way when I'm holding you know point and shoot or a smaller one this is kind of uncomfortable to hold for long periods of time but also feels like it's going to slip o

ut of my hand at any point one of the first things I notice when I look at the zve E1 is the dire lack of controls on a professional camera you want dials knobs buttons everything everywhere so that with one button press you're in complete control of whatever setting you want but that is not the target market of the zve E1 this is a camera built from the ground up for vloggers on the top we have our power slider Zoom toggle we have our shutter button for the photo mode which uh we will get to la

ter we have custom functions one and two two is for Focus magnification one I believe is set for some of these AI processed super modes that are gonna steal my job Boo get out of here you stupid smart camera I need dumb cameras for dumb camera operators like me then we have our record button we have our toggle between the three different modes uh which is a lot less than you know something like an A7 mark IV or an A9 Mark II on the top we have our toggle for photo mode uh which we will get into

later we have our video mode which is definitely this camera's primary function and then the slow and quick function for slow-mo and time lapses and whatnot besides that we have our hot shoe Mount which in my opinion will be a very important port on this camera as really if you want to get good audio into this camera this is your one option other than that there's the internal mic which is fine for certain applications a 3.5 mil Jack in so there's some accessories you can use there but it's usua

lly kind of not so great and then we have our LED indicator it turns red it's a tally light and we have our film plane indicator if you don't know what that means basically this means that's where the sensor lines up just a neat little tidbit for you if you want to keep this camera topped up while shooting you'll need at least a 50 watt charger and you can use less than that but it'll just slowly drain as you're using it here we have our single SD card slot that's fine for most people most peopl

e aren't dual recording or shooting proxies uh because the danger of losing footage isn't that dire and if I was using this as a vlog camera I would consistently backing up to a hard drive or my computer so luckily the slot is SDXC 2 UHS 1 and 2 compliant v90 you will need a fast card to get the most out of the high bit rates of this camera in fact you just you know you'll get very short recording times on a slower card in the bottom we have our micro HDMI and a headphone jack uh you know for mo

nitoring yourself on the bottom we have our quarter thread mount it would be nice you know to have two for a little bit of uh stability on a tripod plate but at this size I don't expect it and then we have our fz100 battery slot considering this camera is so small it's Quite a feat that they've managed to engineer using one of the bigger batteries on the zve E10 we get the older model FW p50s as you can see there's a lot more capacity and there's also more sophisticated battery chemistry in the

newer ones as well this is good because even though this is a more sophisticated camera with higher end features having the bigger battery in the zve1 is amazing because it can actually take more still photos and video on a single charge even though this is a higher end camera with more features on the back I guess is also kind of the top is a control wheel this is I guess our primary one uh we'll explore you know the ways you can assign functions to it we have our menu button back to custom 2 o

r Focus magnification we have the function button and it's pre-programmed to work with the smartphone app and then we have you know our back control wheel with center button and all its various functions are playback and our deletes all typical camera stuff overall for a vlogging camera that is primarily used by someone who isn't interested and find controls over the camera this is fine but for someone like me who's looking to possibly replace an a 7 S3 or an fx3 with something cheaper but poten

tially as good a video it's a little bit of a letdown thankfully Sony has implemented a better UI than the zve10 which we'll explore and a touch screen control so yes we have all these buttons but hey we got the best button of all a touch screen it's got the same level of manipulation as a lot of their other cameras you can spin it around so when you're shooting Vlog you can point it at yourself there's a few things I like about where things are placed I like actually having the SD card on the l

eft side of the camera your right because this is a camera I imagine living on a gimbal a lot and so you know you have your gimbal arm here and a lot of the time you're trying to switch cards but you can't you have to take the whole camera off just to switch your card on this side luckily hey you just you can reach it on the other side you still will have trouble with the battery because you know the batteries on this side so I think that's a nice little quality of light feature that I don't kno

w if it was on purpose or just by happenstance by having to you know fit everything into this camera and then my final little complaint and this is across pretty much all Alpha cameras as well is having the HDMI on the same side that the camera flips out onto and so if you're streaming with this camera and you're using the screen as a little monitor it's gonna be at least partially obfuscated by the cable blocking it luckily it's been moved down lower on the body so it's not as big of a deal one

of the huge features of this camera is that the USB can actually do 4K 30. even though a lot of alpha cameras are capable of 4K 30 4k60 through the USB port they've often been limited just by data transfer rates this one is according to them the first one that can actually do 4K 30 properly it also has an HDMI output but it's not quite as high bit rate as the cinema line that can do 16-bit raw finally and most importantly is the sensor the thing that's most exciting is that the sensor that's in

the fx3 and the fx6 and the a7s2 is the same sensor full frame everything backlit bion's XR that's in this and this camera actually has more modern processing it's got AI supplementing some of its uh stabilization and it's tracking and so even though the alpha cameras have been top tier in autofocus this bad boy could be even better I can't wait to explore what this bad boy can do but not before I tell you about our sponsor Mexico if you're working from home and are in need of a new webcam Mexi

co has a wide variety to choose from to keep you looking sharp on conference calls whether you're on a budget and need high quality video or you want the best possible webcam regardless of price their selection of webcams and webcam accessories will help you look and sound your best even if you're looking for something more in the middle nexago has got you covered take your webcam set up to the next level and get a next to go webcam at the link below the touchscreen on this camera is actually de

cently usable I think the gold standards in terms of touch screen interface is still the Blackmagic Ursa not even the most current ones the older ones that had the bigger screen where anything you need on the camera you just touch it and then you manipulate it you change it for all disclosure I took this camera out on the weekend and shot some video the camera's asking me if I want to set the tolerance for higher temperatures up higher that's reminding me of one of the big shortcomings of this c

amera due to the fact that they've compressed almost everything that goes into this bigger camera into a smaller frame there's effectively no not a heatsink or a way for heat that the camera is creating to escape and the record times at the higher bit rate on this camera are quite reduced I've actually did some testing so I'll just read what I what I experienced the numbers that Sony give are comparing the fx3 to the zve E1 and they say that at 150 megabits 60p 4k on the fx3 you get about 90 min

utes of recording and on the zve one that's 30 minutes and you might say hey that's still a lot of time I'm shooting my Vlogs I'm shooting shots here yes but there is definitely use cases where you need a camera rolling longer you're shooting an interview as a b cam or you're doing weddings and even though it's not continuous recording the heat is still going up and so you'll just come up against walls especially when you consider that that 150 megabit mode is only a quarter of its highest megab

it on offer this camera can do up to 600 megabit at 60p and on my testing that gave me about 15 minutes of recording and then I let it cool off for a little bit and then tried again and I got about two minutes of recording and I went back again and got about 30 seconds of recording your use may vary uh this was a inside you know around 20 degrees Celsius but 15 minutes at your highest bit rate could definitely be a bottleneck that you will come against and if long recordings is something that's

essential to you that's a huge consideration for moving up to the fx3 oh they're like really going for iPhone measurements it's a gesture based UI which is interesting once we have the camera in the phone connected and we've gotten through all the initialations and we've gotten through all the initialation initial installation once you've gotten past all the startup steps once you've gotten past all the startup steps and you've connected your phone and stuff you'll be presented with the UI that

should be very familiar to you if you use any Alpha cameras before part of their design philosophy was actually to transplant the UI of the proline cameras into this which I think is a great thing the zvit you want menu was kind of confusing and a lot of it's just just familiarity but in navigating this I felt the categorization uh and the way things are lined up makes a lot more sense by default it's shooting HD we're going to set up to the high bitrate 4K let's go the bit rates are held behind

a different frame rate so if you do want the highest bit rate the 60 megabit mode you're going to have to go to 60p but we shoot this video in 30p uh and so we're going to shoot in 30 just so it's a little easier to use like I said the sensor is the same as the alpha lineup and so you're getting a 422 readout which is you know a slight compromise on color information but I bet if you're considering buying this camera you're shooting in 420 right now you dirty dog you outside of that we have our

slow motion and time-lapse settings one thing that's really nice about this camera is that you can actually shoot in s-log 3 or cinetone which is a color profile designed to mimic Sony's Venice Line of camera so hey we're moving up from the alpha Lana all the way to the top to Venice baby you can even set using a cropped mode for video so if you have aps-c lenses or you know you just need a little extra throw you can set that and one thing that's really nice is there's actually lens compensatio

n so if you're using Sony first party lenses they can work together to mitigate lens breathing which is you know as you focus the size of objects changing and also you know chromatic aberration at the edges of frames we have our media control so we can format you can recover if you lost stuff hopefully that never happens to you you can give it a naming convention on your camera you have your different shoot modes and this is where this camera could potentially surpass the fx3 and the fx6 inside

of this camera is Sony's most sophisticated AI processor yet they've already had the top of the game in terms of autofocus and we use the fx6 here and I trust that autofocus with my life but there's still shortcomings it can track faces it can you know identify certain objects but when a person turns and it's the back of their head it has issues this has AI compensation for that and should do a better job same with tracking objects during stabilization it's going to use this AI to move the cropp

ed frame on the sensor to track that subject better and adjust the image stabilization the electronic image stabilization even better and let me tell you the results are impressive first we have the intelligent Auto which is the full AI mode it's going to figure out what you're trying to shoot in the best ways to shoot it it'll change everything in some pretty neat ways and if you're someone that knows nothing about cameras I think this will be a really appealing option you have your program Aut

o which in a lot of Run and Gun situations is something that I've often used basically you lock in some settings that you like and then the camera will automatically compensate others in order to keep the the exposure consistent kind of keeping in line with that you have your aperture priority where basically you set your aperture and then everything else compensate and your shutter priority where you set your shutter and it compensates and then you have the mode that I would use which is manual

exposure as someone who has used cameras for many many years and I'm comfortable this is the mode I'm gonna want but this is definitely not the mode Sony wants me to use we have our shutter controls uh and so you can set this you know to silent mode even though this is always going to be silent mode basically you're just turning off the Beeper one of the big downsides to this when you compare it to the more hybrid minded Sony cameras is there is no mechanical shutter there's a photo mode that h

as you know all these Auto compensations and it'll do in a pinch using the 12 megapixel sensor which is fine for Instagram and Twitter and whatnot but if you're planning on using this as a hybrid shooter probably isn't sufficient but not having a mechanical shutter actually does kind of impact you know your image quality your dynamic range going down and you can get more rolling shutter artifacts even in photos that's fine really this is a video camera with you know a mild picture shooting mode

you can use this same USBC adapter that the fx3 uses to jam time code in this camera and then we get to the image stabilization which is pretty darn neat there's four options here we have off and off is off we have active and dynamic active which will more aggressively crop and move the image on the sensor around to stabilize the image I have a little bit of demo footage that you're seeing now there's some lens settings you can give to help the camera out when you're not using Sony first party l

enses in terms of compensation and whatnot using both the kit lens and the slightly upgraded 24 to 105 that we we do all our Vlogs on I was really impressed when you combine the optical image stabilization of this lens with this camera the results are so impressive gimbals are going to start to go out of style I was running around one handing this thing not even trying my best to use all my camera guy skills to hold it steady and it is more than watchable we have the zoom options you can lock of

f digital Zoom I would highly recommend that at least for the video modes because there's not a whole lot of room on the sensor to to go in you can set up what's on your display as you go uh your markers and you have your different shooting modes one of the big modes that Sony talks about is the Cinematic Vlog preset if you're someone who wants full control and is going to edit and apply Luts and stuff after you shoot this isn't ideal but if you're just running and gunning and you want your foot

age your short films it'll just look like a a cinematic film basically this applies color profiles a an anamorphic crop and is intended to make your footage that you shoot as easily as possible look cinematic regular and cinematic oh yeah to be fair you'd be surprised what a big difference shooting an anamorphic does for changing the image to feel more cinematic not only does it force you to frame a little bit differently but it's just like a cue in your head same with shooting in 24 frames it's

just like a little thing that'll happen in your brain we're like that's a cinematic image instead of that we have all our exposure options exposure conversation how it's doing its metering white balance color tone display you can import Luts we have our AI enhanced dynamic range optimizer cool we have our creative look as you can set custom profiles in the camera in terms of you know saturation contrast sharpness what not yeah the creative look and then you have your picture profiles that you c

an mess around with usually s-log 3 is picture profile 8. I've done a reset and now there is no seven through nine I mean seven eight nine am I right I was shooting with the 709 preset uh just because I knew we weren't gonna have time to color correct uh and so what you're seeing is mostly 709 I think I shot a little bit of log we have our soft skin effect which you know is just AI enhancing of skin General really I'd keep that off but if I was vlogging and you know I didn't have time to correct

lighting and I just want to make sure my skin looked good I might have that on we have all our different autofocus settings so generally you're going to want continuous autofocus it's still going to try and track your face and or your body this is all pretty standard Alpha stuff which is really important as I've used the more and more modern Alpha lineup I've relied more and more on the autofocus often you know you're just shooting you're just touching the different subjects on the screen being

able to change the autofocus transition speed is really really important especially if you're one man shooting or you know vlogging having it be able to not just whip between the two subjects can be nice it can create a more cinematic soft feel you can change the focus area you can tell it to recognize certain subjects uh there's you know focus peaking and you can change those settings considering how limited the physical buttons on this camera are having this level of control in the settings i

s absolutely a godsend and this is a totally excellent UI for what this camera will be doing I will note that this camera is already warm and we've just been going through the menu you'll notice that we're quite deep into this camera unboxing and I haven't really talked about image quality or sensor quality and like I said this is the same sensor in this camera as exists in the fx3 the fx6 the a7s III and that sensor produces images that are absolutely phenomenal there's a reason Sony is kicking

everyone's butt up and down the block it's not just the autofocus it's not the build quality it's their sensor quality and the low light performance of these cameras it's sometimes mind-boggling how good of an image you can get with just Moonlight out of uh out of some of these cameras by default the ISO on this camera ranges from 80 to about a hundred thousand and is expandable up to just about 400 000 uh obviously it's gonna be grainy at like 12 800 ISO these things can pick up so much light

and you have so much control you can stop down your aperture even in really dark settings and get the exact image you want what I've really enjoyed using Sony cameras is it's really easy to get exactly the image I want what I was testing one of the things I was testing on the weekend is if I was using this camera to shoot a vlog in my garage I'd spend my free time you know modding consoles and doing stuff so I just like pointed the camera at it let the autofocus do its thing how does that image

look because I'm not I don't have very many lights in my my garage I don't have time to move and do the console stuff at the same time so I want to see how this camera can do and when I looked at this footage I was very pleased not only does it look as good as a six thousand dollar camera like the fx6 the AI controls that it's doing are thoroughly impressive this is the kind of camera you can just use without really thinking about as a camera operator whose livelihood uh depends on me proving th

at my skill set is worth it to my employer this thing scares me uh this thing is absolutely phenomenal if you don't know what you're doing you just set it on some of the auto modes you might have to do the shot twice as it figures what's happening out but the Sony cameras are essentially running themselves now it's a little scary man I thought AI was is going to take all the labor jobs first it's coming for creative jobs I will work for uh for Bitcoin going back to the main interface something I

really like about this camera is if I want to change the iso I just hit the iso and I can switch it around same with the f-stop or shutter speed same with white balance this is a very intuitive way to do it sometimes especially if you're someone that doesn't use cameras often it's just so much easier to touch the thing you're trying to change and change it I think this is a great UI and even though the touchscreen is a little bit small I appreciate that level of control if you're shooting Vlogs

you know you might have a bunch of needs for video this can do 4K from 24 to 120 with the future firmware upgrade currently it's just 24 to 60 or 1080p from 24 to 240. 240 is a pretty darn good slow-mo mode especially if you're doing you know action you're not trying to do a scientific kind of test I did some testing with the rolling shutter and they have the same processing that's in the a7s3 or the fx3 and even though it's a full frame sensor the jello wasn't too bad until I'm really whipping

the camera around quite impressive for what you know is an entry-level profession video camera another feature I really like is using the AI like I talked about for tracking where it's moving the image along the sensor to do a better job stabilizer stabilizing as well as Luts can all be recorded internally while you're sending an unprocessed version of what the camera is capturing to an HDMI so you can do dual recording one with what the camera processes and one that is untouched so you have mo

re control later I think that's a really cool feature and very nice also just sometimes the AI processing might mess up and do some kind of catastrophic error that ruins your shot now you don't gotta worry about that that being said you still have to have an HDMI plugged in so that limits you know gimbal stuff that you're doing after all this exploration of the feature set of the zve E1 the question remains should you spend your hard-earned money on this camera well the first part of that equati

on is how much does this cost Sony hasn't given an official price they said that it's going to be somewhere between 22 and 2 400 and add on 300 to that price for the kit lens which is not great it's fine and if you have no e-lenses sure I would probably recommend going on the use market and getting one of those Tamron 28 to 70s they're gonna serve you a little better it's kind of a hard question if you are a hybrid shooter and photos are part of your business or part of your hobby no this is not

what you should buy for about the same amount of money for 2500 you can get an A7 mark IV which yes it's quite a bit less good for video it's about 4K 30 some good bit rates uh slightly worse rolling shutter but it has a mechanical shutter and a bunch of photo features uh that will serve you much better if you're a vlogger and you're just getting into it 22 to 2400 is a pretty big asking price for something to just get going but if you're someone who's looking for a b cam to their Sony setup wh

en you consider that this camera is 6 000 this is 3 900 and this is just above half of that this becomes pretty Bonkers of a value proposition yes there are shortcomings you know just the single SD card slot could be an issue the overheating could be an issue depending on your on your workflow but the fact that this is a full-frame sensor that is as good as these much more expensive cameras has high bitrate video even better autofocus and AI processing than these if you are a vlogger who's looki

ng to step up their game this is an absolutely phenomenal Choice when you go into the broader Camera World it starts to be a little bit harder to digest the price when you compare it to a Panasonic S5 II can do 6K video it's got great image quality I mean if you've watched Bo Burnham's special of inside that's the S5 that that's shot on problem with the Panasonics is that the autofocus isn't as good so if you're doing you know you're a video professional and you are going to be doing manual focu

s that might be a better option for you for a little less money the lens options available for that camera are a little less uh comprehensive but it's a little less money and the s52 has some extra little video features that might even push it over the edge Canon also has their mirrorless line that they're constantly updating like the R8 which is fifteen hundred dollars yes its video modes are more limited it doesn't have as good of a bit rate again if you're hybrid shooter it's got all those ph

oto modes that might come in clutch if you're a vlogger and you know you're just creating content for YouTube and you're not that worried about the look The zv10 is an amazing option and it comes in at less than a third of the price at 700 it's still a compelling option with a lot of the same autofocus and AI assisted features the sensor is a little bit smaller and the lens selection will be a little less high quality but at the end of the day you know what your budget is and this is a very comp

elling option at 700 and so really the zve E1 is an absolutely phenomenal camera if you are a video only professional who's shooting by themselves and who wants auto focus and auto processing that is going to allow you to just run and Gun Shoot wherever you are and just bring this tiny little package thank you so much for watching short circuit if you're looking for some more Sony content uh check out Brandon's unboxing of the zve E10 also an absolutely phenomenal camera for its price