When you are looking for a camera on a budget, like I was, there is a threshold of professional features vs. cost that you inevitably run into. Sometimes its easy to think of a camcorder as a camcorder, but the difference between prices often means a difference in features. Going lower on the price chain means giving up some of those features. When you’re in a situation when you need some of those more pro features for your production, it can get frustrating.

Enter the Sony HVR-A1U. The HVR-A1U is a really interesting little hybrid camcorder that makes it great for DiY productions. For me, it really does a fantastic job of packing in some great features into a little body and a substantially lower price. Let’s take a look at some details.

Higher End Features All Packed In There

The HVR-A1U has got a much lower price point than most of the “pro-sumer” camcorders out there – you can get it on Amazon for $2,360 and you don’t have to give up a lot of the features that are going to make your life easier on a shoot. Here are a few of them:

2 XLR Inputs

My camera before the HVR-A1U was a Canon GL1, and anyone who used that breed of camcorders knows that hooking up a decent microphone was always a problem. The only audio input was a 1/8″ mini jack. You could attach one of those XLR adapter boxes, but those were a few hundred bucks. Most camcorders at the $3,000+ level come equipped to handle the much more professional and robust XLR audio input, and the HVR-A1U has them as well.

Since the camcorder body is so small, these come on a little “stalk” that attaches to the cold shoe of the camera. This makes it a little off-balance when using it handheld, but I find a big battery helps out a lot.

Responsive and Comfortable Focus Ring

Many people are very picky about their focus rings, and you can get a number of different opinions on how a focus ring works with the touch of a particular person. To me, however, the HVR-A1U focus ring is fantastic. Instead of that awful rubber mystery ring on a lot of camcorders you get a textured metal one with a very smooth and uniform turning motion. I shot a documentary that was almost entirely handheld on the A1U, and I was able to keep manual focus on the entire time and really hit the focus panes I needed to in critical situations.

Audio Separation Controls

The HVR-A1U has two XLR inputs, and you have a lot of control over the different level or each input. Similar cameras might tie together the left and right channels limiting your options when recording audio. The HVR-A1U adds in the nice separation controls (as well as phantom power, a big plus) to make it an appealing audio package for a camera of its size. You can also monitor the audio levels separately on the LCD screen, which can come in handy many times.

It’s the Little Things

There are some little thing that bug me about the HVR-A1U, and some that I love. After two years with it, there are certain things I could do without and certain things I wish every camera had.

Button/Control Placement

One scene I shot in a documentary involved following two people from the daylight into a darker post office interior. The light temperature didn’t change, but the light level did. I’d used a number of other cameras in a similar situation before, and it was sad to look at the switch afterwards. I was either fiddling with an exposure wheel or some other device, and the transition looked choppy. However on this shoot, I had the advantage of the A1U’s great exposure level and the exposure change is smooth and clean – I was really happy when I reviewed the footage. Instead of a clumsy wheel, the A1U has a great incremental level that you push up or down, and can also be used to control the AE shift (although you have to go into a menu to switch the functionality).

You’ve got easy access to switch manual and auto focus, and a few other buttons that honestly I never used. The zoom is different as well. Most of us are used to the one button zoom where you push one end or the other. The HVR-A1U has an interesting level-like zoom that makes it very easy to pull off a rapid zoom or a slow one. It seems a lot more inutitive to me.

The focus ring can also be used as a zoom ring, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as using it for manual focus. It feels clumsy and unresponsive.

Lens and Filter

The HVR-A1U has a 51mm thread for filters, and a removable lens shade with a built in lens protector you can switch on and off. Sounds great right? The problem if you can’t use both at the same time, because the lens hood covers up the threads. So if you want to use a UV filter and the lens hood, you’re out of luck unfortunately.

The built in lens can is vital for shooters like me who constantly lose little pieces like a lens cap, and hate the dangling of one tied on there with a string. Great feature.

Image Quality

The HVR-A1U uses one 1/3 inch 2.97 megapixel CMOS sensor. That means one chip is doing the work that three would be doing on a higher-end camera. This affects the picture quality slightly, but in my experience the HVR-A1U is capable of producing some amazing looking shots with vivid color. Its two weak points are how it handled darkness and a large grouping of similar objects from afar (like a corn field), but with the right handling of the camera controls, you can turn those weaknesses around to create something that looks like it was made with a camera twice the price.

The HVR-A1U shoots in 1080i, as well as regular DV, and can output to either. It does not do 24p, but it has a few Sony-invented 24p simulations.

Sony’s Bag of Unusable Goodies

My big gripe with the Sony HVR-A1U is that it is a Sony, and they like to pack their cameras full of useless crap left over from their lower end camcorders. Scene transitions, cinematone, blah blah – they are just distractions when you are trying to create something that looks professional on screen. My advice is use the HVR-A1U to shoot raw and play with the color later. There are a whole bunch of these “features” that just get in the way.

Big Feature Set, Little Camera

You can find a list of features for the HVR-A1U here. There are many more great features that are too numerous to get into here, but if you’re looking for something in particular you can check out the tech specs.

After buying a camera, the tech specs float away though and what you’ve got left is a camera that you need to use in the field day in and day out. After doing that with my HVR-A1U for a couple of years I can report that it is a great camera for someone looking to get into something with a more pro-like feature set for a much lower cost. The HVR-A1U comes highly recommended.