Me and my family recently spent a week driving around North Wales in my wife’s van. Me being me, I wanted to take a lot of photos. I also took a lot of cameras. 3 more than I actually used – which is unusual for me. The ones I did use were a Hasselblad SWC and a Pentax 110 auto film cameras, and the subject of this article, a Sony ZV-1 compact digital.
The Sony ZV-1 is punted by the brand as a “vloggers camera” – as such, it is supposedly designed more for video blogging, or in simple terms selfie-video. In fact, shooting video is what I bought it for, though not for me, but for work, and not for pointing at myself. As a creative agency producing a lot of video content our team has greatly expanded in the last year. We’ve bought some new kit too. A couple of new lenses, a drone and this ZV-1 have increased our capabilities. The Sony ZV-1 was specifically bought to capture little off the cuff mini-interviews at events. It’s small size makes for a camera that isn’t as threatening to people we point it at, meaning we can get little snippets and sound bites out of more nervous people as well as capturing people who have less time etc. We also bought it because unlike our bigger cameras which top out at 100fps for 1/4 speed slow motion, the Sony ZV-1 does 1000fps for when we want to capture something much more fast moving etc.
Of course, before I could give it to the team, I felt I needed to try it first. In short, I decided to take it on holiday. Not for video, I should add – though I did take a few slow-mo clips that I’ll never likely do anything with – but for snaps.
