XA10 not as hot as you may imagine...
Hi all, first post so big hullo
I've a 5D MKIII, mainly use it for stills but the video I've shot with it is very nice. I also recently bought the XA10 filmakers kit from Ted's and it's a dog of a camera. I don't know if I got a lemon or what.
- The autofocus & facetracking is seriously flakey, total hit or miss stuff. One example from a vid I shot recently the presenter filled a good portion of centre-frame yet the AF decided that instead it should focus on an inanimate object in bottom-left of frame.
- Focus in general is pretty iffy. Whole scenes just go soft as if nothing is really in focus for no explicable reason. One recent example is a great one... had a lock-off on the presenter, focus was acceptable. Needed to do a dissolve for a 'here's one we prepared earlier' type thing so presenter changed outfit, I swapped around the prop in centre frame, shot the post dissolve piece just a few minutes later. Light was basically the same (natural, exterior, overcast), camera hadn't moved or had settings changed etc etc yet the post-dissolve footage was all 'soft' or almost grainy with no true focus. Only thing that had happened was camera had been powered down & then back up.
Problem is that you don't notice these issues until you've got the footage up on a big screen to edit.
The camera also seems incapable of coping with strong natural light if even just normal levels of contrast are present. Highlights just blow-out big-time as I said even just in situations that I would describe as normal exterior light.
The quality of the audio from the bluetooth mics that comes with the kit is pretty dodgey too. Becomes very muddy if there are any unwanted external sounds, even just quiet background noise like normal suburbia. It's like they 'flood' and muffle the presenter. I've a set of Sony bluetooth mics & their quality is massively superior.
Worst part now is that Ted's won't give me a refund on the camera & Canon after having it in service for a month insist there is nothing wrong with the camera & their only advice was to not use any settings except auto. Yeap, that's right Canon... I paid 2k for a feature-rich camera so I can't use anything but P&S right?
So now I've got to take Ted's to consumer affairs/fair trading to try & get my money back for a faulty camera.
In short... be aware that there are faulty XA10's out there (my story isn't unique) and that you likely won't get any support from Canon if you have a problem with the camera. I had a similar scenario as this with a 1DMkIII I owned that suffered with the widely reported AF problems & Canon just refused to acknowledge the problem leaving me with a dud of a camera.
Anyhows... sorry to be such a bring-down for my first post but thought the feedback may be handy.