Vortex Media PMW-EX3 Field Guide

With the plethora of different cameras around, each with their own little foibles, it is increasingly hard to keep up with them. Especially if you have to use different cameras belonging to different production companies throughout the week. Even if you own the camera it can be hard to learn all of the features, and quite often you can be thrown in at the deep end with a new camera.

For this reason Doug Jensen over at Vortex Media has come up with some field guide booklets for the Sony PMW-EX1 and EX3 cameras.

Printed on solid heavyweight paper with full colour illustrations these field guides are a handy, easy to look up reference guide to using these cameras. If you become stuck in the field and cannot remember how to set something up they are invaluable.

So why not just take the instruction manual? Well, for a start the instruction manual doesn't give you the benefit of an actual users experience giving you advice on what is best to do. Further more the field guides are printed on much stronger paper and are ring bound so they are less prone to damage. The print is nice and large and easy to read when you are in a hurry. The full colour illustrations are also a much better reference than anything to be found in the original instruction manual.

As a bonus these guides come with a high contrast back focus chart. I found this to be more effective then the charts that come with many ENG lenses. Whereas before I struggled to get my EX3 to nail the back focus, it managed to do it first time, even with some other clutter in the picture, using the Vortex chart.

Overall I would say that these field guides are a great reference.

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