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.
Philip, excellent modification! I’m not sure I have the courage to start hacking at the lens hood just yet.
I should add that I have used normal B+W UV and ND filters behind the hood without any need for surgery.
Great post though, thanks! 🙂
Thanks for this wonderful fix-it solution. It is annoying how SONY and other manufacturers get horrendously proprietary. I suspect SONY wanted to sell “their” polarizing filters, but since when was that the major part of their business? Like maybe 1/20 of a % of their profits? Frankly if I were the dictator in charge of foreign trade and imports, I would require the Japanese and other Asian electronics manufacturers to make all their recording media, batteries and accessories interchangeable, regardless of brand. If they didn’t it would not be allowed to be sold to the USA market. Furthermore, I’d have American workers make the supplementary accessories, and put more Americans back to work. I would just say NO to the Chinese for importing more stuff (accessories and trinkets) into our market.
I’ve got several filters for my NX70 – all of them have, without modification, worked perfectly. I think it may be time to try a new filter before hacking away at the lens hood?
Hi Philip and fellow reviewers!
Thank you for your postings. I really need to buy a new camera and I’m warming up to this NX 70.
However, I have read that it might give proplems importing the AVCHD files, for apparently Final Cut Pro ( I still have Final Cut 6) cannot ingest the full hd 1080/50p AVCHD files natively.
I was surprised because I was able to log and transfer other AVCHDs and my FCP 6 converts it into Apple Pro Res 422, 25fps.
So I have to ask, do these problems mentioned on this link
http://www.linuxjournal.com/forums/transcodeimport-sony-hxr-nx70-108060p-avchd-prores-fcp-mac-lion
only count for Final Cut X? Or also for FCP 6 and 7.
Thanks in advance and once again, thank you for your reviews.
Esther
P.S. I saw somewhere else on this site that downgrade to 720 was mentioned, but the thing is, to me as well , 1080 is holy …