hello and welcome to this review of the Sony AX53 camcorder now I got this
camcorder you so there's there's no unboxing here it just came like this
this is all that came with it had a little adapter step-up adapter that came
with it but I've taken that off so you can see this is the camcorder
it's a 4k camcorder it's also very good HD camcorder because it records at 50
megabits per second it's got great zoom it's really nice to
use and it's got some really good features so let's go over those features now
battery is removable and it's a big battery we've got a viewfinder that
tilts up we've got mic input and we've got micro USB here
charging Jack here and down the front we have a headphone jack as well we have a
ring here it's not an aperture ring but it's a control ring and we have a manual
button here we have night shot it takes SD cards and memory sticks got button here
that cancels out your voice for when you are talking cancels out the rear
recording we've got HDMI out port and this here is a touchscreen so it's a
very capable camera you could hold it easily in one hand record and zoom one of
the problems I found because this is a big camcorder my fingers aren't quite
long enough to reach the zoom rocker so my fingers just aren't long enough to
reach the zoom rocker which means one-handed operation if i zoom is a bit
tricky camera can be turned off by either pressing this button here closing
the LCD down or pushing the screen back in you'll noticed when I open the screen
the iris that protects the lens opens up and you'll notice here if I remove this
about you can see that the lens is moving to compensate that's because this
camera has very good active stabilization here we have the
microphone and the microphone records in 5.1 surround sound but I don't really
think that's particularly useful picks up audio from right front left and
behind as well and like I said you can cancel out the audio being picked up
from behind we've also got night shot and here we have a little IR lamp that
gives out IR radiation for use with night time filming another feature that
I'm not sure how useful it is is this comes back and reveals a flash hot shoot
this can use flash for photography this is a proprietary system so I'm sure you
can use Sony's accessories I generally don't bother
I used a rode Wireless go this is a bit flimsy and seems too
come off fairly easily yeah you can record external audio and you can host
your microphone here we're now going to see some of the shots and some of the
autofocus abilities so now we've got the ax53 on a tripod I'm just going to look
at 4k and HD footage just with XAVC-s and I'm going to use the mannequin to do
some image comparison so I've also turned steady shot off simply because
some people have said that the footage moves about a little bit when placed on
tripod when you've got steady shot on so I turn that off as well
while I have everything on auto if I want to I can quickly access my settings
here so if I press this in it brings it up and this is set for focusing if I
press it once it goes to manual and the ring then controls the focusing if I
press it again it goes back to auto I tend to leave this in auto focusing I
find that's the best if I hold this down I can then change what the ring and button controls
so here we've got zebras which indicate a hundred percent
clipping or 70 percent of clipping so I've set the camera to show where
it's 70 percent and also I've got focus peaking on which is shown by the red
line there this camera can record up to 50 P I'm in
the UK so I'm in the PAL region so it can record frame rates of 50 or 25 we
can record AVCHD X-AVCs in 4k or in HD and if we go to 4k you can see in the
record mode we can pick 60 megabits per second or 100 megabits per second so in
XAVC-S we can get data rates of 50 megabits per second so you can see I'm
recording at 25 frames per second the records are 50 megabits per second which
is very good we can record an AVCHD but I don't really like that codec and the
data rate isn't as high so I generally avoid that we have a 24P mode as well
one thing to note with the 24P mode is that it reformats the SD card so you may
want to either use a new SD card for that it's not ideal so we've got control
over white balance metering focusing exposure iris shutter speed white
balance we can turn low-light on we can put cinema tone on and we've got our
steady shot and we've got digital zoom you can see now in steady shot we've got
three levels of steady shot standard active and intelligent auto and if we
put it in intelligent auto we get some clear image zooming turned on in HD
filming which is therefore HD recording with this camcorder I leave everything
in auto apart from shutter speed I set it to double the reciprocal of the frame
rates and then everything else I leave in auto we have some extra features
like we can take photos we can take time lapses we can do slow motion recording
you can connect wirelessly with a mobile and we can do live streaming which is
good
so all in all it's a very good camera it's really good for getting high
quality footage that's easy to record like I say I just get this out when I
want to use it I just get it out open the screen and press the record button
and I can record with very stable footage either in 4k or very high
bitrate HD