I was emailed by one of my regulars Mike Beckett who told me… “Just a word of warning, I tried the 37mm version of this fader ND on my NX70, and it vignettes at wide angle, and doesn’t fit under the hood.A real pity, because it’s a very nice piece of kit.”

This got me thinking and today I had a good look at the NX70 lens hood, here are my findings and exclusive customisation.

This is the NX70 with a 37mm Polarising filter screwed onto the front unfortunately as Mike commented the filter will not allow the lens hood to fit on front of the camera. This is because of one design flaw in the Sony lens hood and that is two bars of plastic that extrude to hit against the filter itself.

The answer is to grind the two plastic bars down as they seem to serve no purpose other that to exclude filters being used. The lens hood has 8 screws, 4 on the front…which you can remove with a small jewellers screw driver.

Then you have to remove a further 4 screws as shown…

You are finally left with the back plate…

Turning it round you can clearly see the 2 offending plastic bars that extrude but seem to serve no useful purpose, using a small cordless engraving tool I grinded down the plastic bars as shown above.

Hey Presto an NX70 lens hood that can also accept a screw in filter behind it…Note : My 37mm Polariser did show some vignetting to the right of frame at the wide end.

As of yesterday I have passed my thoughts onto Sony about the poor fuinctionality of the Rocker Switch on the NX70. As I own two NX70s which are great camcorders I have the right to speak out on behalf of not only myself but everyone world wide who has noted this problem. Quite frankly this should have never passed quality control but with all the problems in Japan we were lucky to get NX70s at all.

Adam Welz from New York :

“I’ve been considering buying an NX70 to use alongside my NX5 – but the sample unit I tried out at B&H in New York a few days ago had a very unfriendly zoom rocker. It was impossible for me to get an even or slow zoom.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not stop the zoom from jumping in speed as it went through the range. It also went from zero to 60mph in no space at all.”

Sony are good listeners and the good news is the up and coming firmware update due in early 2012 if there is anything Sony can do to fix this via software you can bet your bottom dollar they will. To get round this I use a set of mini rails from Genus and attach a Manfrotto 521i lanc zoom control to the left side of the camera, this by passes the use of the rocker switch but it’s a workaround and one I would prefer not to have to do.

UPDATE : John Knight (DVINFO.NET)

I am now looking through all the footage deciding wether to do a bumper review or to split the footage into two reviews, give me your thoughts if you have feelings either way.

UPDATE : Having cut my FS100 review of the camcorder and its features it lasts 9 minutes alone so I have decided to cut 2 reviews as it would be far to long to include both cameras.

The pictures from both these cameras at 1080 50p are better than cameras 4x their price, they are drop dead gorgeous. The best thing about both these Sony camcorders is that they down-convert to 720p, now you may well ask why drop to 720 when you have such wonderful footage. FCP-7 does not have the ability to edit 1080 50p as yet but you can down-convert from 1080 50p to 720 50p and the pictures look great.