Why I was WRONG about the Sony ZV-E1

0:00 we've got a brand new camera in the house this is a camera I never thought I'd own but it was definitely the best camera for my particular situation I'm going to talk about that in a moment I also publicly ridiculed this camera when it first came out due to all of its compromises I was looking at it with a very narrow mind at the time and I'm mad enough to admit I was wrong so I'm going to talk about why I ended up buying this camera what changed my mind on it and how I plan on using it moving forward this is the Sony I have another Sony camera it's the zv E1 let's get into it [Music]

0:50 [Music] welcome back folks my name is Shane I'm shooting this entire video on the Sony zv1 and you can make your mind up what you think of the image quality now this isn't quite a straight out of box experience I got this camera yesterday I shot the footage that you've seen already with this camera last night down at a park Sunset down at the lake it was really quite beautiful and it performs great as it should this is a fullframe mirrorless camera with the same sensor as the A7 S3 and fx3 both of which I owned both gave me exceptional image

1:37 quality but I grew to use them less and less as the Lumix cameras got better and better and sometimes you got to prioritize what you like best do you like 4K 120 or 60p without a crop or do you like cameras that don't overheat that have excellent inbody image stabilization and 6K open gate and I was leaning more towards the strengths of the Lumix cameras but what really changed my mind on the E1 over here is the fact I got the Testa Lumix S9 this in hindsight was everything I thought I wouldn't like about this only to realize that this was the most fun I've had shooting with any camera for quite some time so I reapo the zv1 and I decided that it was probably the camera that I would buy if I ever got another Sony camera it took me a while to admit this

2:24 but it came up on sale for almost 30% off and it's in white so it's probably why it's on sale I'm not sure if people like white camera bodies or not but already I've grown to really like this combination it's kind of fun and quirky a lot like how I feel about the Lumix S9 the cv1 also has a lot of the same shortcomings of the S9 or vice versa so there's no mechanical shutter there's no electronic viewfinder and the camera can overheat in certain modes or in certain shooting situations the reason I went for this white one other than the fact it was heavily discounted was the fact that white tends to stay cooler than black especially if you're shooting outside now I don't plan on switching to Sony I'm not getting on any Sony hype bandwagons there's plenty of those already you know one of the things that kind of drives me crazy about every Sony

3:10 camera release is everybody selling their great stuff and moving over to the cheaper stuff I kind of get it now I was something that I didn't quite understand at the time if you're not utilizing something to its maximum potential or if you've got a lot of money tied up in a certain product like I did with the fx3 and you're not using it that much it doesn't make sense to hold onto it and that's why I thought this camera would serve my needs I love the image quality out of the fx3 and A7 S3 but I didn't love the Ibis and I didn't like having eventually all of that money tied up because I could buy two or three S5 mk2s or X's for the same amount of money as this single fx3 and for my situation doing multi- camera stuff these were just far better value so I flipped all of my Sony cameras you might remember a

3:56 while back I was talking about how I sold all of them now I'm going to talk about why I ended up with this one this kind of ticks more boxes than the ones I had and it was less expensive so let's talk about it all right let's talk about the main features and why I ended up getting this so we've now got better inbody image stabilization and while the sensor stabilization probably isn't any better there's this new Dynamic active stabilization which is kind of similar to e stabilization on the Lumix system and I use this all the time you get a wi angle lens you turn it on you get almost gimbal like results and it it's just a fantastic way to work at the expense of a crop now if you can't live with a crop you'll probably prefer to use a gimbal but for Run and Gun stuff or anytime I'm doing a lens review for example for emat now I don't have to take a gimbal with me all of the time I found the fx30

4:43 especially with you know tighter focal lengths really hard to get steady footage and a lot of people commented on the micro jits it was what it was I didn't want to run everything through Catalyst brows it's too time consuming the Lumix cameras again just have awesome inbody image stabilization and this is right up there with it I haven't compared them yet but I will be doing that so stay tuned for that on a future video but that was the first and foremost reason why I ended up getting this particular camera body secondly this camera is also capable of shooting 4K 50 or 60 uncropped and it can shoot all the way up to 4K at 120 frames per this was one of my favorite things about the fx3 which made it my main Studio camera for a very long time before I replaced it with the S5 MK IX which is actually over there this is just a

5:29 standard S5 Mark II the auto focus has also been improved on this camera I can tell already it's way more sticky than it was on my fx3 fx30 and A7 S3 and we get more tracking modes as well so it's a massive improvement over what I had before it's very similar to the autofocus modes found in the S9 it's funny how far Panasonic have come the autofocus I actually prefer it in some ways on the S9 and obviously on the Sony it does excel in other ways and we'll talk more about that moving forward forward but the autofocus is definitely improved it's way more sticky than I'm used to and if you are trying to track a human or an animal or whatever it's way above where the A7 S3 was so yeah I can already tell there tracking modes are just on a different level let's talk

6:14 about my alternative so I was really looking at three cameras the E1 which I ended up buying the Z6 Mark II which is a great camera from nickon I really like the idea of that camera but I don't currently own any lenses and I'd be starting from scratch and it's an expensive Journey doing that so I thought you know what I'm going to stick with Sony because I already have a few of the lenses now I also really enjoy shooting with the Fuji cameras but from what I've seen online especially the xh2 and S I think they've got problems where the firmware is coming out and then the autofocus performance is getting worse at least with this Sony camera I know the autofocus is good I know the stabilizer is good and while Sony don't have the best track record for firmware updates at least I know this is going to be what I want straight out of the box and it was cheaper

7:00 than all of them so I got this for a really great deal and I'm really happy with the price I paid for it online so at the end of the day this was the best camera for the job because I already had and kept some lenses some of my favorite ones like the Zeiss 55 mm f1.8 the 24 mm f1.4 G Master some vrox lenses and I've also got an apsc lens down there as well so I'm looking forward to showcasing this camera in lens reviews moving forward let me give you my first impressions of this camera body so far so so this grip here is really cool one of the small downsides to the S9 is I had to get a grip for it so yeah I had to buy a grip to get some purchase on the camera this has a really great grip built into it and yeah I have no problems with the physical size of this

7:46 camera it's quite small and light all that kind of thing the grip itself feels really nice in the hand it's got this sort of like rubberized feel there I know some people were complaining about these things digging into their hand but I haven't noticed it whatsoever I got quite large hands too and the way I hold this it's just nowhere near this so yeah no problems whatsoever I love the microphone array here it's just something very different obviously it's not weather sealed because of this but it is what it is unlike the S9 we've got a hot shoe here so if I want to use this with an XLR adapter or whatever I can do that as well which is cool one of the stars of the show here is this three-way toggle switch so it easily allows me to switch between photo video and snq mode one of my biggest complaints about the fx3 and fx30 was you couldn't tell what in unless you were really paying attention here I can look down at the

8:32 camera and know exactly what mode I'm in the only thing that kind of feels a bit cheap here is this Zoom rocker definitely doesn't feel as good as the fx30 or fx3 but it's there which is awesome the back wheel feels amazing I'm really shocked how high the tension is on here so yeah I don't think you're accidentally going to knock this if you glance it with your thumb which is great another thing that really surprised me about this camera over some of the others that I've owned especially the a7c is how high tension this LCD screen is it feels great it locks into place nothing's creaking and doing anything weird you know some Sony cameras things feel a little bit loose I've used the headphone jack on here it doesn't feel anywhere near as sort of I don't know

9:18 fragile maybe as some of the older cameras from the system so I'm sort of glad they fixed that or at least it appears to be fixed down here we've got a headphone out and there's also a micro HDMI which I was using before now the cool thing about this camera is you can output the signal to HDMI and I was using it throughout the entirety of this video without it overheating so far so that's cool and here is the fullframe sensor so yeah it's an fx3 sensor in the body of this arctic white zv1 let's wrap this up I'm just going to give you some food for thought here based on my own ignorance so at the time the zv1 came out I just missed it I couldn't understand it I was butt hurt that a camera came out with more features than my fx3 and A7 S3 at half the price that

10:06 was also a bit of a kick in the guts but in hindsight this is great because it allows people to get into a professional look at a more affordable price so there's really no downside to this if you work within its limitations and these limitations were things I was completely looking at from my own use case would this ever replace my S5 MK IX out in the field or gh7 no no way it would overheat in the Sun so it's not the right tool for that job but would it be a great b-roll camera or a lens review camera where I'm just shooting short clips or maybe even using it on a gimbal from time to time absolutely it would be awesome in those situations so I was looking at it from a very narrow perspective and again if you're looking for a b camera to the fx3 or A7 S3 this would be great I don't see any downside to it so yeah so far so good I'm going

10:53 to test out more of the features moving forward but again sometimes you've just got to step back and think what might not work for me might work for someone else and I was guilty of not really thinking about that at that time my perspective has completely shifted over the last year or so anyway thanks for watching my name is Shane I will catch you soon see you