I Bought a Sony FX30, Here’s My Experiences & Thoughts…

Just to make this abundantly clear, this isn’t a review of my Sony FX30. I’m not a camera reviewer, I don’t have the tools, methodologies or experience to give you a genuinely useful review, so I’d appreciate if you can treat this for what it is: a nerd who bought this thing, and this is my experience with it over the last three months of near daily use. With that delightful little caveat out of the way, let’s begin, starting with why I bought this thing. That’s actually two questions in disguise though, so let me answer the first, why did I buy another camera? I already have a Panasonic GH5 that I’ve been using for over seven years now. It works great, the Metabones speed booster and Tamron F2.8 17-50 lens all work pretty great, so why buy this FX30? Well, it’s mostly a purchase of convenience and efficiency. Having two great cameras means I can leave one – the GH5 – set up to film A roll (the bits where I film my pieces to camera), and that leaves the FX30 free to stay mobile and film B roll (the product shots). That saves a headache and an ADHD barrier-to-entry for me to actually go film something, be that A or B roll. I got stuck in my own head pretty often trying to work out the most efficient way to structure my day, like I’d film multiple videos worth of A roll, then move the camera to film multiple videos’ worth of B roll. Now I don’t need to choose. Just turn either camera on and start filming. It’s also just really useful to have a good quality second camera for multiple shots and angles. I haven’t experimented with that too much yet, but the ability to do it is really handy to have in my toolkit. 

So that’s why I bought a camera, now why did I buy this FX30? Well that was a bit harder of a decision. Initially I was going to buy the BlackMagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2, or maybe at a stretch the Pro. I really like what BlackMagic does with their cameras, the open standards, the generic batteries, the easy storage configs. That’s all amazing, and I’m a sucker for that sort of stuff. The problem for me is that they just didn’t really fit any of my requirements. If I was gonna get a second camera, auto-focus was a pretty key requirement. While I (still, even with the FX30) manual focus everything to make sure it’s right, having a good autofocus system onboard for filming moving shots of myself, or products, or cars, all of that, it’d be really helpful. Up until right after I bought the FX30, the BlackMagic’s basically didn’t have an AF system, and obviously not much can keep up with how good Sony’s offering here is anyway so that was a strong pull to the FX30. Lenses were theoretically in the BlackMagic’s favour as at least the 6K models use a Canon EF lens mount, which is what I have a couple of and what I know in terms of available options and stock etc. The problem is I don’t have another suitable lens to use with the 6K, so I’d need to buy one, and if I’m buying lenses who cares what lens mount they are because I basically never swap lenses. I’m a filmmaker of convenience, not an artist, so a single one-size-fits-all lens is all I need anyway, so that wasn’t a draw away from the Sony E mount cameras like the FX30 and the A7 range. The last thing I’ll touch on here is why I went FX over A7. In short, I only ever film videos on these cameras. I do not take stills, so a body that’s focused on that really helped sell me on this thing over an A7. My friend has an A7 III I played with a little and I’m definitely glad I went for the FX instead. Oh and why FX30 over the FX3? Easy. Price.

While there was plenty more that went into my decision making, we’d be here for hours if I let my autistic need to explain my decisions any more loose than it already has been, so let’s move on to what I’ve got here. I got the bare FX30 body, along with a Tamron F2.8 17-70mm lens. That’s a full frame lens though so in practice it’s a little tighter than that rating suggests, but still. I got the body new, but I actually got the lens used for just under £200 less than MSRP which is pretty nice. The camera was £1,700 – £100 more than it is currently, but I’m fine with that as it’s a business expense. Still, for a little over two grand, including a couple of higher speed rated SD cards I think I got a pretty good deal. I did also get another tripod, which was also what started off this dual-setup crusade in the first place. I was minutes away from buying a Manfrotto NitroTech 608 mail-in-order-return from Wex for like half price when it was snatched out from under me, so I kept looking and found an ebay listing for this, a NitroTech 608 head AND the accompanying 645 tripod. Amazing. I submitted an offer for £380, and the seller accepted and shipped it out. Then, when it arrived I was initially dismayed because the latch that lets you mount and unmount the camera had been snapped off in shipping. Luckily, first, the missing bit was still in the bag so I super glued it back on, second, Manfrotto will happily sell you replacement parts at pretty reasonably prices so for like £30 shipped I bought a replacement latch, and third, THIS ISN’T A NITROTECH 608, it’s the considerably more expensive 612! I got the deal of the century on this thing! This whole assembly was nearly £1300 new, and I got it for £400. Dayum. Nevermind the fact the 612 is arguably way too much head for this rig – a sentence I never thought I’d say – but still I’m happy enough. 

Ok, we’re however far into this rambling mess of a video and we still haven’t really talked about the titular subject beyond what you can read on a product page, so let’s get into it. This is an amazing camera. Despite ‘only’ being a 4K camera, when there’s a widening crop of 6K and higher cameras on the market – hell 8K and 12K options being relatively affordable is crazy to me – this punches well above the specs would imply. It’s crisp and sharp, easy to use, and generally a purchase I’m very happy with. The lens was the perfect choice for me, it’s long enough to fit my limited filming space, but wide enough to fit basically everything I could want in frame. I’ve actually been using it at F4.0 rather than wide open as I get a bit of bloom I don’t really like at F2.8, although some finer adjustment might help with that. I do need to get a macro ring though so I can film really up-close bits like SSDs and chips on motherboards, but on the whole it’s a great fit for my usage. 

One thing I was surprised to find out was the continued support Sony offers for their cameras. The FX30 isn’t exactly new, but Sony is still rolling out new firmware updates to fix bugs and add features. When I tried to set up the shutter to be listed as shutter angle rather than fixed time values, I realised it wasn’t supported in the firmware the camera shipped with. Once I updated, which at the time was quite a pain, having to use the Sony Creators app to do it rather than downloading the firmware file to an SD card because the download button was disabled on Sony’s website at the time, I now had that option – and an option I very much prefer especially having so much experience using the GH5 with that enabled too. There are a bunch of new firmware features apparently on their way too which is really cool – as is their repair manuals. They provide fully detailed guides on how to disassemble the entire camera, so if you ever need to replace anything in there, you’ve got a guide for it. As someone who has taken apart cameras to fix bits inside – I took my GH5 apart twice to fix a broken power switch – this is invaluable. 

Getting used to the controls took a little while, but even the default mappings were really intuitive. The menu wheel on the back controls shutter, the dial at the top of the back does ISO, and the dial under the shutter button does aperture. You’ve got two record buttons, assuming you don’t count the regular shutter button too making three, and big bright lights to make it clear you are recording. Something I only found out when writing this script is that the joystick on top next to the primary recording button is set to, by default, if you hold it down, autofocus – regardless of your AF mode setting. I.e. if you set it to manual focus, but hold that joystick down, it’ll autofocus while you hold it. That’s actually really useful and handy! By the way, I’ve been saying “by default” a lot here because most of the buttons are all configurable. On the back of the camera you’ve got six configurable buttons/inputs, the top has five including the main record button, the front has that secondary record button, if your lens has a button on it you can configure that, and of course all three dials are configurable too. Hell, you can even configure all twelve options on the FN menu with basically anything the camera can do. This thing is yours to make as you please. 

While it isn’t overly relevant for me, the camera does have a remarkably decent microphone built in – a stereo mic no less – although should you want to you can just run audio into the mic jack on the side. You do have a full size HDMI port there, along with a headphone jack for monitoring, a USB C port for charging and data, and a micro USB port that I’m still a little lost on its purpose. The USB C port though has been a bit of a pain in the ass. See, the camera doesn’t come with a battery charger. Sony expects you to just plug the camera in to charge it. That’s fine, I can handle that. Except, the camera is really picky on if it’ll charge or not. If you use a proper USB PD supply it’ll charge no problem, but from a basic power brick it sometimes charges and sometimes doesn’t. There’s a charging indicator LED next to the USB C port, but that’s deceptive. Using my little USB power meter you can see that when you plug it in, the current spikes a little, then it drops down to like 30 milliamps – AKA enough to run the LED. Sometimes it then kicks up to a couple hundred milliamps to actually charge the battery. If you have any idea how I can make this more reliable, please do let me know. When the camera is on though it just sucks as much power as it can to run the thing, around 800 milliamps at 5V seemingly, but that doesn’t normally charge the battery at all. Oh, and the camera does have a fan built in, but it runs whisper quiet pretty much no matter what I’m doing, so that’s really not a problem especially if that means it can run until the SD card is full or the battery runs out – which it can. 

I should mention about the auto focus, which for all intents and purposes is amazing, but there is a bit of a catch. For faces and even stuff like hands it’s great, but for objects it isn’t quite as good. I think it prioritises things like hands over the products which makes it a little annoying to work with as a product photography camera. This shot of the AKKO mouse I reviewed recently is ever so slightly out of focus on the mouse, despite it being the majority of the frame. I’m sure part of that is the f-stop, being F4.0, but still I find myself manual focusing quite a lot. That’s not a big problem, especially because it’s just a software switch to change modes and I’d rather have it right where I can, but it’d be great to have some more control there. Actually, thinking of it, there’s probably four million options in the menu for autofocus I just haven’t found yet. I haven’t done all that many handheld shots to really test out the IBIS stabilisation, although I do leave it on “Standard” even for the tripod shots. I still often have to use warp stabiliser to smooth out my pans, although at least the better tripod lets me do other moves like tilts nice and smoothly too. I also haven’t used the high speed modes yet as my other Sony camera, the RX100 VA, gets more use there at 1000 FPS. 

From what I have used this for though it’s been great. I don’t bother shooting in log format as while I do apply colour correction in post, it’s generally a blanket grade for all footage per camera rather than spending a lot of time trying to get it ‘perfect’ (whatever that means anyway). What I get out of it it a little flatter than I want so I pump it up a tiny bit, but otherwise what you see is what you get really. And of course, what you get looks great. I’m really happy with the FX30 so far, beyond my charging inconsistency issues, and I hope that translates into more, and more better, videos for you to hopefully enjoy.