Can the Sony FS100 Still Handle Real Interview Work?

The Sony FS100 records 1080p to 8-bit files, has no built-in ND filters, and is well over a decade old, yet plenty of filmmakers relied on it for documentaries and corporate interviews. Cheap used cinema cameras like it raise a fair question about how much of a good image comes from the camera and how much comes from the person running it.

Nigel Barros traces his love of short documentaries back to a film about a boxer that Philip Bloom shot about 13 years ago. That film also got him interested in the Sony NEX-FS100, and he returns to the oddly shaped camera to see how it holds up. Sony built it around a Super 35 sensor with a 1.5x crop relative to full frame and gave it the same E-mount as its NEX mirrorless cameras, so lens options are wide open. You get two XLR inputs with clean preamps, a headphone jack, plenty of manual controls on the side, and power from the NP-F batteries most video shooters already have piled in a drawer. Plenty of current hybrid bodies still need an add-on XLR adapter to match that audio setup. He finds almost nothing about the FS100 ergonomic. The top handle sits at the front of the body and fits maybe half your hand, the top-mounted screen is dim, and there are no internal NDs, so you're back to screwing a variable ND onto the lens. There's no 3.5mm input either, which means a small on-camera mic or wireless receiver won't plug straight in.

Barros limits himself to a single lens for the whole video, the TTArtisan 23mm f/1.4, which gives roughly a 35mm field of view on this sensor and costs around $115 new. He did it partly to push his own creativity and partly to show that you can get away with a lot on a cheap lens. The FS100 turns out to be lighter than he expected, and once the accessories come off, the whole kit fits in a backpack. Slow motion is one button away: S&Q mode jumps from 24p to 60p and slows it down in camera, though it records no audio. At 60p, set the shutter to at least 1/125 s to keep motion blur natural. Barros also suspects the camera has an optical low-pass filter, since moiré and aliasing stay well under control.

Sony's E-mount has a flange distance of 18mm, short enough that almost any SLR lens can be adapted. Canon FD, Nikon F, M42, and old Pentax glass all mount with inexpensive adapters, and lenses tend to outlive the cameras they're attached to by decades. Viewed that way, an old cinema body becomes a low-cost front end for glass you may already own, and the money you save can go toward lights, audio, or more days of shooting. If you're weighing a used camera, check three things first: whether the mount adapts easily, whether the batteries are still common, and whether the audio inputs match the mics you have.

Barros was a little nervous about grading, since he'd heard plenty of stories about how hard the camera's footage is to grade and how poor its skin tones are. The FS100 has no true log profile, but another FS100 user worked out picture profile settings that resemble S-Log2, and Barros shot the entire video that way. From there, he uses FilmConvert's CineMatch to convert the footage from S-Log2 to V-Log L so he can use his V-Log LUTs. He thinks modern plugins like that do make the FS100's 8-bit footage easier to grade, and he found it much less difficult than he'd feared. He also sets up a mock interview with a modest lighting kit. The priciest piece is a Photek SoftLighter, an umbrella-style modifier that bounces light off its interior and diffuses it again for a soft, book-light look. He expected the FS100 to handle interviews well, and he thinks most clients would be more than happy with the image it produces.

Barros' closing case for skill over gear is in the video above.