Chris's Christmas Shopping: Sony uber-cam

This is the high-definition camcorder that George Lucas shot the Star Wars prequels on, the Sony HDW-F900H. It's the only 24 frame-per-second progressive-scan hi-def camcorder in the world.  I'm picking this HD camcorder as my ultimate Christmas Crave gift. It's my greatest extravagance yet.

Let's get serious for a minute here. Forget the Canon XL2 or the Sony HDR-FX1. In fact, smash their lenses mercilessly, unreel their tapes and taunt their ancestors. If you're deadly serious about filmmaking you need this -- a 2.2 million pixel per colour, 1920x1080 camcorder.

For any video filmmaker, the holy grail is the 'film look'. The more your footage looks like traditional celluloid, the more involving drama becomes. There's something dream-like about the 24 frames per second of cinema film, and the F900H can simulate a whole variety of frame rates, including 24fps.

More importantly though, you can use Panavision and Zeiss Ultra Prime lenses with this camcorder -- giving you similar depths of field to a traditional movie camera. One of the big give-aways that you're not using film is -- aside from tonal range -- the absence of a tight depth of field. The F900H solves this problem completely.

WIth the F900H, you can capture footage at the video equivalent of 300ISO at 24fps and 1/48 shutter speed. These are remarkably impressive stats, which make the most expensive consumer camcorders look as sophisticated as a flip book and a pencil. So how much is the F900H? An impressive £59,807 including VAT. You can buy it from Libra Professional Broadcast. If you've ever wanted to find out how much your credit card can actually take in a single transaction, now's your chance. -Chris Stevens

Chris has already bought these items:
Apple Power Mac G5 quad-core 
Q-BE MP3 Player
BMW Z4 (for a day)

And this crazy item from Santa:
Sony HDW-F900H 

He has £2,419 to spend before Christmas Day. Click here to find out more about Crave's Christmas shopping spree.

• Share:
• 
• 
• 

• Tags:
• Sony,
• Canon XL2,
• Sony HDR-FX1,
• camera,
• HD