Been out and about in Hong Kong shooting with a pre-production EA50 and I really quite like it. It is not an FS700 or FS100, the image quality is not quite that good.
The pictures are contrasty and it’s not as sensitive. It’s really nice to have the same familiar menu’s as the FS100 including the same picture profiles so you can dial in a look to suit your needs. The servo zoom is OK. It’s not perfect, there is a picture shift when you change zoom direction and some small focus shifts (these should be significantly reduced in production units).
It was really nice to have a functioning zoom on a big sensor camera. But even if you don’t have a zoom lens the EA50’s 2x electronic zoom works really well and I didn’t notice any significant change in image quality when using the digital zoom. The camera is front heavy, but it’s not a heavy weight camera so I didn’t find it too bad to use.
The buttons and switches are easy to access when it’s on your shoulder. I missed having builtin ND filters and had to resort to using the shutter to deal with brighter scenes and there are no special functions like S&Q so no time-lapse or slow motion other than by shooting at 50p/60p and slowing it down in post.
I did shoot some time lapse by just letting the camera roll and then speeding it up in post. It does have a few slow shutter speeds so I was able to use these in some of the night sequences I shot for a blurry effect. I’ll be writing a longer more detailed review in due course and posting some sample clips and frame grabs.