I have been using the Sony EA50 this week on and off, it’s probably the busiest time in my schedule work wise and fitting in a video review is very tricky to say the least. My good friend Zulqar Cheema has also just spent some time reviewing the Sony EA50 and gave me a good tip…the Z test.

Interestingly the Z test is not for the faint hearted but if you think about it an essential bit of knowledge for all of you thinking of buying the camcorder…so what is the Z test.

Simple…you let the camera record for 30 seconds then pull the SDHC card while still in record mode…why ? This gives you some interesting critical information about your solid state camcorder thats worth knowing, for instance…

If your battery fails will your precious footage still be recorded as we all know horror stories of lost footage and corrupt cards.

Between us, Zulqar and myself christened the Z test as he was the first pioneer to try this test and here are our combined results for the Sony NEX-EA50.

1. Up to 30 seconds if your battery fails in the EA50 you will not have any footage on the SDHC card.

2. 40 seconds will give you 38 seconds of footage with a recovery message pressing the OK button, this is very impressive.

It seems the EA50 buffers up to 30 seconds of footage at any one time which explains the total loss up to the 30 second mark but the good news is that if the battery fails and you power up the camera you get a recovery message, by pressing YES most of your footage give or take 10 seconds will be saved to your SDHC card.

This alone makes the EA50 a great wedding camcorder as you can confidently film knowing that after 30 seconds your loss will be contained to a maximum of 10 seconds of lost footage.

I had a spare set of rails thanks to GenusTec which I have added to the EA50 meantime, this also allows me to use my matt box with my 24-85mm Nikon lens and MTF adapter. I have also installed the GenusTec 77mm vari filter to the Nikon lens.