Bill Drummond - European Product Manager, Sony UK
"Today we have launched the new HVR-Z7E, which is a new tape-based compact camcorder. It follows swiftly on the heels of the new EX1 and really choice is what its all about. And choice is a good thing.
We've got lot's of difference customers working in lots of different fields and all want to work slightly differently. So the EX1 offers them rich content - 35 mbps and very quick ingest into non-linears. THe Z7 offers a tape-based infrastructure so they can use their existing tape-based non-linears but it also offers the ability to use compact flash, maybe for the first time. So it introduces a new set of customers to work in a non-linear way.
The main difference in the media is really one of speed. Obviously you've got 8GB Compact Flash cards and 8GB SxS cards so they actually store the same amount of content but really its the speed of the ingest that's important. SxS is obviously a very very fast media, its a plug-in media - it goes straight into your IT - whereas Compact Flash uses USB."
