I unpacked my brand new XA10 last Friday night about 8pm. Purchased sight unseen on the web.
My fist impression was that it was small and light for a professional camera but ergonomically it felt fine and all the buttons, as few as there are, were in the right place. I spent the evening setting the clocketc.and playing with menu items while reading the manual and generallygetting the feel of it.
While many of the manual settings are by software, the menu structure was, to me, very logical and easy to follow and adjust. I charged the battery overnight and had about 10 minutes maximum in the garden the following day. I only reviewed what I shot on the 3.5 inch touch screen. That was my only experience that day.
The next day I went into Christchurch city to have a last visit to the earthquake damaged Cathedral and shoot some video. I am really happy with the results.
Some of the good features I discovered are, in manual focus, as soon as you touch the focus ring, focus assist comes on and expands the full HD 1920 x 1080 image to native size on the 1MP display allowing accurate manual focus.
Another great feature I played with was the powered image stabilization. While the normal optical stabilization works very well, push the powered button and the image is rock solid, within limits, even on maximum zoom.
All the footage I took was hand held in a packed Cathedral Square, about 20,000 visited that day, so I was bumped on the odd occasion and often couldn’t find good vantage points. I am veryhappywith the image quality although I since found that the camera was not on the highest quality setting. The camera was operated in manual mode using the Programmed AE setting in 1080p.
The video downloaded at about 4 X speed using USB and the bundled software. The AVCHD files dropped into Premier Pro CS5 and in about a couple of hours I had the finished video as below.
I am looking forward to trying all the other manual features and will post some more videos to Youtube.
Have a look athttp://www.youtube.com/v/XBZ-F7OnFE0?
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