It’s ironic that so-called affordable cameras need to be outfitted with expensive rigs, cages, hand grips and accessory viewfinders before they can be properly handheld. The PXW-FS7 is different. It was designed from a clean sheet of paper to rest comfortably against your chest or sit well on your shoulder. Zoom, Start/Stop and Assign controls are carefully located on the sculpted, telescoping smart grip. Sony supplies a proper viewfinder that’s perfectly offset to the left with a huge range of fore-aft adjustment.

High Frame Rate shots can turn everyday actions into slow-motion ballet, a visual feast of elegant movement. The FS7 delivers a maximum of 180 frames per second (fps) continuous shooting in Full HD. If your project plays at the cinematic 24 fps, you get beautiful 7.5x Super Slow Motion. There’s no sacrifice in bit depth and no “windowing” of the sensor. So there’s no crop factor, no loss in angle of view. The camera also performs Slow & Quick (S&Q) motion from 1 to 180 fps in 1 fps increments. So you can alter the narrative by selectively speeding up or slowing down the action.

Long-form programs need media that’s both reliable and affordable. As specified by the CompactFlash Association, XQD™ memory cards score big on both accounts. Reliability comes from in-camera recovery. You get very low cost per minute compared to CFast™ cards. And robust communication between the camera and the card’s controller enables read/write speeds up to a sizzling 600 Mbps.

Long-form projects shine with Sony’s XAVC™ L (Long GOP) recording system. Here’s the superior grayscale rendition of 10-bit High Definition, plus the uncompromised detail of 4:2:2 colour—all at budget-friendly data rates of 50, 35 or even 25 Mbps in HD mode. You can also record on-board 4K (4096×2160) at cinema standard 24p*, 59.94p, 50p, 29.97p, 23.98p or 25p. Other formats include the same XAVC I (Intra) QFHD (3840×2160) and Full HD (1920×1080) recordings as Sony’s high-end F55, well-accepted MPEG HD 422, the Apple ProRes 422 codec (with XDCA-FS7 extension unit, sold separately), and even outboard RAW recording (with XDCA-FS7 and outboard recorder, sold separately).