Sony PXW-Z200 & HXR-NX800 Pro 4K Camcorders -- What's New???

hey everybody Doug here I wanted to do a video where I kind of go a little bit deeper into some of the information that's been uh revealed about the Sony pxw z200 camera that was announced a couple weeks ago I've actually been out of town so I haven't had a chance to make this video previously but I've watched a bunch of videos read a bunch of documentation read the manual on the product and I've got probably a little more information than you've seen in other videos here on YouTube so with that let's actually just Dive Right on in okay through the course of this video I'm going to be making some comparisons to my kind of Workhorse camera that I've been using for the last eight years and that's the Sony pxw z150 uh I used this camera for most of the events that I've shot over the last eight years and it has worked really really well for the types of things that I do uh it's got pretty decent Zoom range on it it's got very high quality image on it uh little little wonky and low white but for the most part this has been a great camera for doing Live Events I was a little disappointed to see that it was discontinued a couple months ago but I just couldn't possibly imagine where Sony would leave that hole in their lineup and not replace replace it with something else but it turns out that the camera they came out with is not just a replacement for this one but it's also a replacement for its bigger brother the pxw Z 190 as well now it's a camera that most people haven't really liked a whole lot I played with one once and I was pretty disappointed with the performance of it so it's no wonder that it's actually been discontinued at this point uh but both the 150 and the 190 uh have been replaced by the new model which has just uh been announced uh a couple weeks ago uh the pxw z200 now with that with that uh replacement it's actually got quite a few upgrades over both the 150 and the 190 and I kind of want to go over not just the specs of the new camera but how that compares to the older models that uh that it replaces so uh let's kind of dive on in so I'm going to be referring to information on the website as as I go here but here is uh Sony Sony's uh website for this particular product and this uh is what it looks like and it looks fairly similar to the old ones but it looks a lot more like the FX series in particular the fx6 and I think there's a reason for that I do believe that this camera was probably designed by the same team that designed the fx6 as opposed to the team that designed the the 150 and the other cameras in that particular lineup uh the DNA on camera is very clearly coming from that upper range of of cameras as compared to this one which is more of the prer type of type of uh of camera and that's evident not just in the way that it looks but as you go through the menus you can see that the menu system has come from those upper camera upper model cameras as well it's not the more consumer menu system that the the 150 has had now there are some some huge upgrades on this camera but there's a couple things that are kind of down grades as well uh so looking at the image here the most obvious downgrade is the loss of a dedicated Iris ring so then this new camera has uh that's this one's going to be a focus ring and then this one right here is going to be a zoom ring but the 150 I don't know if you can see it in this shot here but the 150 actually has a dedicated Iris ring on there and it actually has H gear teeth on it so you could control it externally the new one places the iris control on this Little Wheel right here and that's probably honestly a bit of a downgrade uh but pretty much everything else about this camera is really an upgrade compared to the 150 and the 190 so just going to talk about what the camera is in general so this is a camcorder style camera um it's in the professional line but it's kind of the bottom of the professional line aside from some old other cameras that are in this 150s family uh it had one sensor on on the uh uh for the for Gathering the image which is pretty good size you know most of theg cameras out there are are 2/3 inch handful are one 1/3 inch but most of theg cameras are 2/3 inch so this actually has a bigger sensor uh and notably bigger than the 2/3 sensor that's available on egg cameras now that 1-in format is kind of a decent compromise between the 2/3 in that on egg and going with a say an APS C or super 35 or fullframe 35 millimeter it allows you to not have to be quite so careful when when you're focusing images but it's big enough to gather a decent amount of light and give you a a pretty clear pretty decent image I've been pretty happy with the 1-in sensor cameras that I've used and it seems like other other manufacturers have fallen uh in line with what Sony has done with this as well so Panasonic Canon each have offerings JBC I believe as well have offerings that are kind of in this same market and also use the one-inch sensor as well uh that the sensor on this camera actually is about 20 megapixel so same resolution as the old one uh which works out to about a 5k resolution so five five 5,000 pixels roughly horizontally same as the old one and since it's a 4k camera and it's got a 5k sensor that actually gives you a little bit of room to crop in on the sensor and not have to lose resolution so but I'll get i'll get into more of that as we go so the old camera this this one right here the z150 was 4K at up to 30 frames per second um SDI only did HD at up to 60 frames per second if you wanted 4K out of the camera you had to go with the HDMI port I always found that to be a little bit of a nuisance uh the z190 would do I believe 4k on the SDI I could be wrong on that but I believe it would so uh so the the new one uh does up to 12 gig SDI so it shoots 4K in normal mode up to 60 frames per second it'll also do uh slow motion up to 120 frames per second in 4k and 240 frames per second in HD so quite a bit of an upgrade there compared to this one which would do 120 frames in 1080 but only 30 frames in 4k uh it seems like they've gotten rid of some of the weird limitations that were on this camera so with the 150 if you're recording in for K either you could see the image on the LCD screen or have it come out the output on the back but you couldn't do both at the same time so if you needed to use it in a live situation you had to basically disable the LCD screen and use an external monitor in order to see what that image is that limitation appears to be gone also on the old one you could either output SDI or HDMI not both at the same time it appears with a new one you can do both another thing so the 190 and the 280 which by the way is not continued the 2 280 is still going to be around they will not do 30 frames per second on the SDI output which is a real Downer uh because I shoot the majority of the stuff that I do in 30 frames per second so the fact that those cameras wouldn't do it is highly disappointing I believe this new one does the new z200 I believe it does based on what I'm reading in the manual it does spec that it does 6 gig SDI which is 40 frames per second sorry 40 4K at either 24 uh 25 or 30 frames per second so I I believe it does I can't tell for sure that the manual doesn't go into that as much detail so this camera actually has a a sibling um it's the NX cam this is the hxr nx800 the two cameras are nearly identical with a couple of small exceptions so the nx800 does not have the SDI output it does not have the time code input yes by the way the z200 does have time code input/output it can be one or the other not both you flip a little switch to determine which which that that BNC Jack does but the nx8 800 does not have the SDI and it does not have the time code connection and the other thing is the nx800 is not going to get a firmware upgrade that's coming next year to a while recording in mxf files so uh but other than that they the two are identical they perform the same in every other way and getting the 800 versus the 200 would save you about $700 us so okay so 4K uh 120 frames per second up to 120 frames per second I believe no audio when you go into slow and quick motion that's kind of been a Sony standard for forever um when you shoot in 120 frames per second there is a 23% crop on the image so uh it's cropping into 1: one pixels on the sensor uh and in order to make the processing a little bit easier for it to handle that's reasonably common on this type of of camera uh the sensor on this one does have um phase detect autofocus rather than the contrast detect that the 150 had uh some of the other cameras in this lineup have had contrast like the Z z90 and its siblings the nx80 and the fx7 and that's that's not right fx700 FS fs700 there you go no that's not right anyway the consumer run uh they had they did have the uh phase detect autofocus on them as well but the 150 kind of got left out with that so so the new one does have a phase detect autofocus across I believe it's 100% the width of the of the sensor and like 90 some odd percent of the the vertical height of the sensor so pretty cool there um it does support uh Sony S log which the most of the other ones do not the z90 did but the 150 did not uh so if you're someone who likes to do uh a lot of coloring in post you can do that another another feature that anybody who watches this channel may find interesting is that these cameras will actually let you load a cube file for a 3D L that can get applied to the footage that's being recorded and or the outputs on the back so if you want to actually apply um a a specific look a specific color grade you can do that on the new ones without having to use any external equipment it happens right in cameras you just load load that L file in there uh one of the things that this can camera has is it has what Sony's calling AI uh AI processing uh and basically what that does is allows it to a little be have a little bit more intelligence in how it is able to focus figure out where people are in the frame and focus in on those and so that should make the the focusing system a little bit better I never had any real issues with the focus focusing system on the 150 but I have talked to people some people who have um but the new one should be should be better um than the old ones were um so scroll down a little bit here there's another sensor that there you go so this autof framing feature this actually uses the AI feature of the camera so what this does it allows the camera to you can set it on a tripod just lock it down and then you can you put it in this a auto framing mode and it will use AI to track the subject and it we'll zoom in crop and move around and follow a human subject that's in the frame you got various controls over that so like you control how much it zooms in how quickly it moves uh how quickly it it does a zoom change uh all of that is done digitally so from the demos demos that I've seen if you go go intoo much the image does start to get a little bit soft so it may be useful in a pinch when you can't get a camera operator to help out but other than that I'm not sure that it's that super super helpful um so yeah let's see the back to the sensor it's a 1.0 type which basically their way of saying it's 1 in xmore RS Coss sensor uh the RS is the newer technology that they've used with this it's the back backside illuminated produce a cleaner image and faster readout speeds than the e xmore r sensor that was used in cameras prior to the 15 so the r the 150 was I believe the first one in the lineup that had the RS sensor uh so it's got this XR image processing useful for trying to do white balance a better job of Auto white balance and and better noise reduction um so a lot of marketing ter terminology around there we'll see once we get my hand get once I get my hands on one uh what that actually means in the real world so okay let's keep going down here all right so big upgrade so 20x optical zoom so the 150 has just a 12x optical zoom and then it has what Sony called clear image zoom and the new camera has a clear image Zoom as well but what that allows those cameras to do is to crop in on the sensor and use some fancy algorithms in order to uh digitally Zoom but without the weird artifacts of most digital zooming it's I I've been shocking shockingly impressed by the clear image Zoom feature on the 150s and even though it only has a 12x Optical with the clear image Zoom that goes out to 18x with 4K and 24x with HD and I shoot with that all the time and it's not evident that you're shooting uh a digitally zoomed image whatsoever you can't tell it's it's very very good it's excellent this new camera has that as well so in addition to being a full 20 times optical zoom on the new camera it also has the clear image Zoom so you're when you're shooting 4K you're able to go out to 30 times zoom and we're shooting in HD you're able to go out to 40 times Zoom which is just crazy for a camera of this size and this price so if you're the sort of person who has to put your camera in the back of the room and and really zoom in on a subject because you know they don't they don't make room for you or whatever uh this is going to be a game Cher compared to some of the other ones the 190 I believe had a 17 times Zoom if I remember right but no clear image Zoom so it was limited to that that's 17 times so this is going to be a huge upgrade uh for there uh there is one little thing about this lens that maybe not as good see that here that the maximum aperture is 2.8 that's been the case on the 150 as well but it goes to 4.5 when you're zoomed in the old one did 4.0 so just a very slight loss in terms of what the uh aperture is able to do as you're zooming in so but just by way of information uh this Zoom Zoom range so 24 mm is the 35 mm equivalent on the wide end 480 is the equivalent when you're zoomed in at 20 times so that's the optical and if you add that clear image Zoom that 480 goes to 720 for 4K and it goes to 960 mm for for uh HD so really impressive um zoom capabilities on these cameras Advanced image stabilization I'm sure this is just more of the the same steady shot feature the Sony's been offering for a long long time um it works okay it's not super aggressive you're not going to handhold the camera and have it shake and end up with smooth footage it's just not it's not that aggressive in the way that it corre that it corrects but it does use a combination of optical and then optionally a digital uh stabilization as well so it's got steady shot off which is no stabilization steady shot on which is Optical and then steady shot uh in active mode which is Optical stabilization plus a digital stabilization with a slight crop it's not it's not much and you hardly notice it but uh but it it's it's it's reasonably effective for what it is but uh if you shoot on tripod you're probably going to turn that off anyway okay this is one of the the coolest features about this new camera this is the new built-in electronic variable and KNE filter so Sony has had this on a handful of their other cameras in the past last a little while but what allows them to do is to control the neutral dening filter that is in front of the in front of the sensor uh anywhere from two stops to seven stops smoothly so basically any any value that you want in that range as opposed as opposed to most cameras which have two or three or may maybe four different discrete filters that you can put in front of the sensor in order to reduce the amount of light coming in this particularly useful for shooting Outdoors particular on a sunny day so it's a great feature to have but this new variable ND filter is pretty amazing and it actually has an automatic feature so if you are shooting in a situation where lighting conditions are changing a lot like maybe you're shooting Outdoors uh and it's a day where the clouds are going in front of the sun uh periodically but not always uh the variable ND filter can sort of help to compensate for that and so your camera operators don't necessarily have to be Iris up and down or adjusting the gain up and down in order to maintain a consistent exposure on the image so this variable ND filter it's a awesome feature uh people who have used it absolutely love it okay all right uh I won't say much about the LCD monitor and led viewfinder they're they're good well goodish they're they're fine all right so the this new new camera uses a very different style of LCD monitor on here so what you're seeing right there zoom in just a little bit maybe is the storage position for the LCD so it flips around to the side whereas on the old one it flips around to the top so quite a bit different there uh but what they've what they've done with this is they now include a a sun shade that you can slide on from the side that's uh it's designed with with that in mind from the very beginning and also they've added some buttons on the side for peaking um zebra and one other feature I forget off the top of my head but uh so you can you can turn those features on and off right from a dedicated button right on the side of the LCD so pretty cool thing there you can shoot in auto mode I don't know how many people who work professionally will ever do that I certainly never do um all right so another big upgrade on this camera compared to some of the older ones so you get a lot more control over the color and Gamma on the camera um the older older camera well in particular 150 actually did support hlg for HDR the new one supports several different modes for that gives you a lot more control over that it also has more options for catone it also has something they call 709 tone which is supposed to be like rck 709 which is the color standard for HD uh but a little bit different the footage I've seen from it it's pretty flat it's pretty desaturated uh I I suspect it's really meant for somebody who wants to start with something that's not quite as flat as log but they do intend to color it um so uh there's more going on there one of the things they've done with this new one is it's meant to match some of the cameras in the FX series particularly the fx6 in terms of the color so if you're shooting on uh shooting an event where you've got FX an fx6 in the mix and you want to have a camcorder style in there as well you can have the the z200 in the same production and cut between them and the the color and exposure is pretty consistent across those I saw some demos of that it's not necessarily exact but it's pretty close so that's a pretty significant upgrade over what we've had in the past the camera the color on these is not bad but you don't have a lot of control over it some control not a lot and uh introducing that extra level of control is certainly pretty awesome all right so in terms of recording options so the old one uh it would only record long upop uh in ter in terms of the recording format it goes to the memory card uh the new one will actually do intraframe as well which is pretty cool it's really really nice that they've added that addition Additionally the this old series when you're shooting in 4k it was only 8 bit at 420 the new one does 10 bit 422 for all of the different resolutions that it shoots it can also shoot in h.264 or h.265 so with h.265 you can either get twice as much footage on a card or you can have higher quality footage with the same bit rate as as h.264 or somewhere in between so that gives you a higher quality image than uh for on recording than what we've had available to us in the past uh all these cameras actually have the ability to record proxy files I'll talk more about that in a little bit because they've done some pretty cool things with that but what that allows you to do is record full size full resolution full bit rate uh recordings on one memory card and then have a proxy lower resolution lower bit rate file on the second memory card which can be uh handy for transferring the footage to somebody who's doing EDI editing or if you have a computer that's not quite up to the the task of editing High bit rate 4K 8 sh265 footage you can edit with the proxy file and then later render with the actual real file as well so they have these they record xavc xavcs xavc HS which I believe is something that's new to this line I think I believe that's the 265 and then there's an option for mxf which is what the fx6 uses that's coming next year they say they're saying June 2025 so uh in terms of recording the new camera can record on either SD cards or on CF Express type a uh the CF Express is only necessary if you're recording the absolute highest bit rate of 4K in the highest frame rate so for for everything else you can get away with SD cards and it will will work just fine okay all right so comprehensive connectivity so this is what I was talking about a little bit earlier so the new camera has SDI output um it says input as well I'm not sure what they mean by that but SDI output in 12 gig 6 gig 3 gig Level A or B and the camera in the past their cameras have only been level B at least cameras at this part of their lineup as well as 1080 uh so they also include a Time code input and output so if you're in output mode your camera can generate time code which other cameras can sync to so uh but just to make sure everybody's on as on the same page here time code is not gen lock time code just records frame numbers that's all so if you need to do editing in post and you want to sync up the footage from two cameras you can syn you can record time code from One camera to another when you're shooting and then they'll it's really easy to line them up uh when you're editing but it's does not mean that the frames always start at the same time that's where you need genlock which these cameras do not have so something to keep in mind there uh they have added an Ethernet Jack on the back you can see that there that's used for streaming and copying footage and camera control which I will discuss more in a little bit there's also a USBC which going to use for transferring footage I believe also oh that's that's also how you tether it to a cell phone for stre streaming as well and some other things you can do with that it has uh lank NC remote Jack same as the others but because it's link you got some limitations there like zooms can only be done at one of seven speeds and forward in Reverse which is pretty pretty sad limitation um I wish they would either extend the format or go something else to provide finer uh control over zoom on the cameras so but uh yeah there's pretty good compreh uh connectivity here also HDMI I think I've mentioned that as well uh the new camera has four channels of audio so you can record from XLR inputs that are on the side built-in microphones that are on the on the front there is a 3.5mm stereo audio input jack and then you can use the Mi shoe which is this little shoe here on the top uh which Sony has wireless microphones uh and that works great i' I've loved having that capability so means your receiver is wired directly into the camera and in the case of newer cameras the audio is transferred digitally so it's an exact match and also the camera is powering the wireless microphone receiver and you can even do some limited amount of control over it so with a four Channel audio any of those four channels can come from any of the various audio sources that are that are on camera so if you wanted to have channel one come from a wire with microphone phone and channel 2 come from a shotgun microphone you can do that or if you want to use one of the internal microphones you can absolutely do that so pretty cool that's the old old camera the 150 is elited to just two audio channels so that's a pretty big upgrade there I all right so as mentioned I'm going to talk about the wireless monitoring a little bit okay all right so designed for live streaming so built into the camera it has the ability to stream using rtmp rtmps or SRT and and most of those you can do in up to 4K so uh just with the camera itself if you're going to do an event where it's just be single camera single operator you don't need to worry about Graphics or anything like that you can stream directly out of the camera and you don't have to uh put an external hook up an external box or computer in order to do the encoding one of the things that Sony intends for people to do with this is for live news production EG and for these cameras to actually be used out in the field and streamed directly back to the studio over cell phones so that's one of the things they've they're doing with this or other events where you want to have cameras that are streaming over cell phone and the production being taken taking place in the cloud or a remote studio so these cameras are all designed to do that so you just basically add your own connectivity whether that's ethernet uh or USB to tether to a phone or Wi-Fi these these these cameras all have Wi-Fi both 2.4 and 5 gigz and so you can use uh those connect that connectivity in order to stream from these cameras it also provides remote control which again I will kind of get into in a little bit but it allows you to control most aspects of the camera so your white balance your exposure your Zoom your focus all that kind of stuff can be controlled through this capability okay uh file transfers so uh that's the other thing you can do with this type of connectivity so if you want to take footage you record it on memory cards on this camera and transfer them up to an FTP server or ftps not SFTP ftps you can you can do that uh pretty easily uh when you're recording in proxy mode you can set it up where it breaks up the files into 30 second one minute or two minute chunks and then have it automatically upload those so every 30 seconds it's starting the upload of one of those chunks and so someone can start downloading and editing the the proxy files right away as as you're still shooting so yeah it has dual memory card slots just like they've had for a long time it supports both CF Express type A as well as SD cards if you use SD though you're going to want to have some pretty fast ones especially when you get into some of those higher bit rates it uses the new it uses the BPU series of batteries rather than the npf that we've used with some of these other ones in the past uh so anybody who is used to the the NP npf and the pricing and the number of clones that are out there is are going to be shocked by the price of the BPU series batteries so there it's a huge upgrade in in terms of pricing these are better batteries there's no doubt about it but you're going to be dropping quite a lot of money if you're going to invest in more than a handful of batteries on these new cameras but um so so these are the same batteries that been used by the z280 and 190 in the past as well as like the fx6 fx9 and so forth so it's not the batteries are not new to Sony they're just new to a camera at this level all right um accessibility you can read that I find that very interesting that they're doing things like screen reader but anyway uh so just kind of go over some of the some of this um I haven't mapped out the exact dimensions see how much bigger or smaller this new camera is compared to my 150 I think it's probably pretty similar overall uh one thing I found interesting power requirements DC 19.5 volt whereas the old one was 8.4 so I assume it's using a new connector I've not seen what that connector is and any of the pictures or any of the documentation so I guess we'll find out once it actually ships so uh battery shooting battery running time with the that's Note 2 let's see which battery they're referring to Note 2 is a bp35 I think that's probably the battery that it comes with so that gives you where was that roughly 35 minute or sorry 90 90 minutes of recording with that with that battery that's and that's the smallest of the ones that are available in that Series so when you get up to the BPU 100 I imagine you're talking about several hours quite a few hours of shooting on a single battery uh power consumption is 20 watts for normal and then up to 37 based on what what codec you're shooting and what accessories you have attached to the camera all right as mentioned the zoom ratio on the lens is 20 times the 35 mm equivalent on that Zoom range is 2 4 to 480 without going into clear image Zoom which I think everybody should just enable uh it's that good just turn it on Wave it on forget about it but that would take you out to either 720 for 4K or 960 for HD okay let's see shutter speed down as fast as 1 8,000 of a second I don't know if that I don't remember if that's any better than what this one offers or not uh gain is now controllable in one debel increments rather than three that was available on on the 150 um has some L compensation features which are which the 150 did not so it helps to get rid of some of that peripheral shading or vignetting as some people like to call it I get rid some chromatic aberration and other types of distortion uh so the this new sensor from what I can tell uh it's base ISO is600 whereas the old one was 1000 so the that means the new camera is probably going to be cleaner in low light than the older one was uh although the footage I've seen seems Seems like it's more or less equivalent that said though the camera if you put it into the fully custom uh image processing mode then it will switch you can you can switch it to uh I believe a base ISO of 250 um so much cleaner and so if you've got enough light you're able to take advantage of that and you're willing to take time to configure the camera it sounds like you can get a much cleaner image out of that than you've been able to get out of the other cameras in the past so um so yeah phase detect autofocus so AF uh through AI only recognizes humans does not recognize pets and other animals that's something they've kind of uh left to their Alpha line so audio 3.5 M stereo some you mentioned XLR two XLR channels uh that will take either line or mic and they do provide Phan and power if you want as the headphone terminal is on the top um and with the with dedicated buttons for volume control that's certainly nice cuz the old one you had to go into the menu to adjust the volume has a built-in speaker it's not going to be super useful it's really only for playback uh Records an lpcm which is uncompressed audio um SDI has I think from what I can gather just two channels of audio so even though the camera can take in four channels it looks like the SDI and HDMI can only do two of those channels but you are but you can select which of the channels you want to send out on those so USB terminal is USB 5 gbits so it's not even remotely the fastest USB that's out there I wouldn't recommend using the USB to transfer footage on this camera um I would pull the C card out and put it in a card reader okay see what else uh okay so yeah so here here's your streaming so if you're using rtmp or rtmps you can stream in up to 4K if you're shooting if you're using SRT then you're able to do uh 1080 or 720 and then the audio format on streaming is AAC and the streaming will do h.264 or h.265 I presume that probably means that you can actually stream in in HDR as well so the fact you can do uh h.265 h.264 nobody's officially supporting HDR with that so if you want to stream in HDR you have to do H2 5 so uh anyway so there is that so just kind of give you a few uh pictures here of the camera itself so the layout on it is I think better designed than the one that's on the the 150 it looks like it has fewer controls but it actually has more they're just more densely packed here on the 150 I don't think you're losing anything I think you actually do gain things other than the dedicated Iris ring everything else that the 150 and 190 have I've had is there on this camera uh there's the back oh that there there so that's the DC Barrel it's a a barrel input for for power so any of the power supplies you've had for the 150 will not work with this and there's your HDMI your USBC your SDI output your time code input and then your ethernet there as well um and over here on the right side you can see the labels for those the remote Jack is here that's the the 2. 5 mm link uh is there that's available your your headphone inputs or sorry your microphone inputs and I like that they move the switches for selecting whether it's line or mic or or mic with Phantom right underneath the xlrs so you don't have to go back to the other side to select that and then that 3.5 mm Jack is there on the side as well there's a look at the front you can see the microphone module is quite a bit smaller than the old one uh so there's the shot from above they have moved so the 150 be able to see this here all the buttons for controlling the menus are up top which is always a little bit awkward especially when the camera is on a a tall tripod and they have moved them to the right place on the side with the new this new camera so big upgrade there uh but uh yeah so there's there's the with with the sun shade on a removable sun shade and there is using one of Sony's wireless mic receivers so audio is coming in to the camera through the shoe there you don't have to actually run any cables if you want to use Sony's in my shoe system so and then there yeah there you go this a shot uh of an external monitor being plugged into the camera okay now um one of the things I wanted to talk about with this new camera uh Sony's come a long way in allowing remote control over their cameras and this camera is taking it to yet another level compared to what they've done in the past going back to the 150 um you could control a handful of features from a smartphone if you connected directly to the camera over Wi-Fi but you can only control One camera it had to be a direct connection you couldn't like put the camera on a network and then have uh your tablet or phone or whatever connect to the same network it was a direct connection so you meant you had to be close by line of site and even then it never really worked very well limited control over the features like I believe you couldn't even like control the white balance on the camera with that with the new one they have what are they what they call this command Monitor and control is the name of it so they have this app that's called monitoring control it's available for iPads and I believe probably Android uh as well um it allows control over most of the important aspects of the camera remotely in addition to that you also get a live feed of the video right there as well um in addition you can actually take advantage of the fact that it's a touchcreen so you and use that to to focus uh the camera remotely speaking of I forgot to mention the the z200 does have a touchcreen and that can be used to specify the the focus targets so you can put it in a mode and just tap on the screen whatever you want the camera to focus on so there is that but uh so this monitor control app not only allows you to get control over most of the important aspects of the camera it allows you to connect up to four cameras simultaneously you can monitor four cameras on one screen so for those of us who maybe hire camera operators who are not necessarily familiar with the camera or maybe maybe even not necessarily familiar with some of the concepts of controlling white balance or ISO or or whatever you can do it now over ethernet uh over the internet using a cell phone or you can do it over Wi-Fi using this Monitor and control app so huge upgrade there um I can kind of show you this page this is Sony's help guide on Monitor and control so you've got instructions on here on there and how to connect um so so that there you go so an example a phone connecting to what's that a a router yeah um and remote control rolling the camera and then streaming footage out to a server on the cloud so you've got all that kind of capability there uh so you go come come to operating a camera you you can start and stop recording um set Focus uh playback clips that are stored on the memory card actually uh let's see change cam camera settings let's see here's here's supported functions so it depends on which model of camera you have here but let's just say for example it's going to be close to the fx9 or fx6 so click on the details button there does it say what we can do no it doesn't but but uh but it allows you to control most of the most of the stuff that's that's important in terms of operating the camera so pretty cool there um adjusting Focus you you set the focus you can set the iris so yeah so Focus there you can set different modes for for for Focus as well it's like whether you use fa facial tracking or facial work condition or or not um and then yeah other so the control over Iris there you go so yeah you you can it looks like you can even import a what remotely so if you want to change the what the camera is using you can do that over over this connection as well uh so and then multi- camera monitoring so let's see and see what that looks like see did they have a yeah there you go so there's kind of a summary of what that looks like so you're able to Monitor and control four camera simultaneously and put it in this mode and you're you're seeing the settings of four cameras all at the same time so a little bit like having an RCU um not quite as powerful but but stepping in that direction for sure so um yeah anyway so bottom line is like this new camera is a huge upgrade in so many ways compared to some of these older ones and these were great cameras and I will still be using these uh but Sony is really throwing down the gauntlet when it comes to uh camcorder um and what it can do especially at the price point speaking of price point um go over here to B&H and looks like I have to refresh here so this is the pxw z200 so pricing here in the US is just under 400 ,000 which for the amount of stuff you're getting in the camera is pretty phenomenal that's only slightly more expensive than the z190 and not that much more expensive than the z150 so it's that's pretty pretty uh pretty nice price for everything that you're getting uh the nx800 on the other hand is $3,300 just under $3,300 so $700 cheap $700 cheaper H but if you don't need SDI you don't need time code and you don't need that mxf this camera will do you're just fine it has everything else so as far as Sony has let on so far those are the only differences between the two so all right um as if this camera is something that's interesting to you and you think you might want to get one uh I would appreciate you using links that are popping up throughout the course of this video Adorama is an affiliate uh partner of mine so anything you do when you buy through them you can use the links here on my site and that helps the channel out quite a lot once they start to sell on Amazon I will have I'll modify the link in order to include that as well B&H I don't have an affiliation with I've tried apparently my channel is too small and they just never reply to me whenever I've tried to uh get a form form a partnership with them on selling gear so if you want to help out the channel then uh use one of these links and buy through either Adorama or through Amazon very much appreciated there but um aside from that yeah so it looks like a pretty amazing camera in terms of whether I'm going to get one or not at some point I will I don't know that I'm going to get one right out of the gate um speak speak can get right out of the gate it looks like these are going to start shipping here in just a couple of weeks so September 19th is sort of the estimated date uh that a lot of sites are saying they're going to be available so they're coming out real soon and you can pre-order these cameras now but yeah I don't know I'm going to get one right out of the gate but I will certainly be getting one at some point I may start with renting one to start off with um I've put so much money in my 150s and I've got I've got nine of these things now and if they don't if the new camera doesn't match up color-wise with the 150 then I won't really be able to use it on multicamera events which is the vast majority of what I shoot so I might hold out until I can get three to four of them before I really before I really invest but I do fully intend to go in that direction at some point the new camera looks so amazing and I think that's where I want to be going in the future I was kind of stuck not knowing what I wanted to do camera wise to go to the next level um particularly because when you move to the next level in the lineup the price jumped significantly and in the case of the z280 it was not a better quality image than the 150 in my testing so why would I spend twice as much on on a camera it doesn't look any better than what I got in fact some cases actually worse so but anyway so if you have any questions about this camera you can leave those in the comment section down below and I will do my best to try and answer them obviously I don't have this camera in my possession so I can only go off what I've read and seen and been able to observe with my own two eyes and so my knowledge of what about what this camera is going to be is still somewhat limited uh but but please do speak up if you have any questions and I'll do my best to answer if you want to get involved in a more lank the discussion you can join me over on my Discord server uh Discord uh is a discussion free discussion server and a little app where go to your web browser and you can have conversations with other people who work in video and audio production a lot of people there very knowledgeable and very eager to help out so if you want to join the community there that's free to do so just to click on the link djp Discord in order to get there so with that though I think that's going to be about it for now so thanks everybody for watching thanks for sticking with me through this lengthy video with a lot of talking and uh we'll we'll chat with you soon and hopefully you'll have a great day