OK, not very scientific I know, but for those that want to see how close the pictures from theses two cameras are I have shot a quick clip with each and put them in a 54mb zip file for download. The PMW-350 clip is a 35Mb/s MP4 and the PDW-700 clip is a 50Mb/s XDCAM MXF.

The cameras were both set up with similar paint settings using Hypergamma 4. The detail is backed off a bit from the factory settings on both and I used the same lens on both cameras which was the Fujinon 16×8 lens that comes with the PMW-350. The clips have not been adjusted in any way other than trimed in length, this is how they look out of the camera.

Both are remarkably similar. I can see that the 350 is more highly saturated and that you can just about make out the difference between 4:2:0 and 4:2:2. The interesting area is how the 350 handles the overexposed sky behind the trees, or rather the way the trees don’t appear to blur into the overexposure as with the PDW-700.