Full disclosure: I was sent this camera on loan for review. I have not received any other compensation for this post. I plan on a full review at some point later.
Before I go any further, if you haven’t seen some of my posts or random live streams, you should head over to my LinkedIn Profile and follow me.
Today, I did a 2 hour stream all about the new BirdDog X1 camera. And I’ve got some thoughts.
At $995 USD, this is a compelling purchase for a house of worship or small AV production team… if you’re okay with one limit it has.
Unboxing the camera was easy. BirdDog took a page out of Apple’s book. It’s a joy. Everything is packed with care.
I did have to reset the settings (it is a press demo, so I’m not surprised) before it was detected on my network. I didn’t see a dedicated hard reset button on the unit though.
After plugging the camera into PoE and a reset of IP settings, it showed up just like any other NDI device - right away! And it was in vMix a few moments after that.
I’ve been wanting to try an NDI|HX3 camera for a while. The onboard settings allow you to set whether you want h.264 or h.265, and the transmit bitrate you want, maxing out at 80 mbps.
And this is where my biggest, loudest complaint comes in.
The ethernet chipset on this model is 10/100. Not gigabit.
Why is this a problem? Well, if you’re like me and you set the bitrate to “YES” (i.e. as high as it will go), if you’re not on a multicast-enabled network, you’ll get one stream out of the camera. The others will stall hard.
However, if you’re on a small network, this might not be an issue for you - especially if you’re sitting at a more reasonable 40 mbps and only consume the video feed from vMix or OBS.
The camera gives you plenty of control over shutter speed, aperture, white balance, and the usual advanced image controls. The web UI also has PTZ control, which seems to work a bit better than Studio Monitor. Out of the box, this camera had a large dead zone on the virtual joystick - when it did respond, it was almost too fast. But that’s minor.
The picture quality is good - I think the X1 punches above its weight here. At 25+mbps, I couldn’t notice much grain or noise. Under 10, and it gets quite grainy and noisy - which is to be expected. Even in lower light, I didn’t see that much grain.
I haven’t tested latency - this tends to be the downfall of many past HX cameras. It seemed fine for my purposes, but again, a full test is to be done later.
The encoder seems to be quite good - only a few frames arrived “late” (>17ms after it should have), and could be down to my measurement software. But probably the best behaved HX source I’ve ever seen.
What would I like to see in a version 1.1?
- Gigabit ethernet. It needs gigabit.
- PTZ speed adjustment. Settings only seemed to impact the web UI.
- I don’t need wi-fi or a remote.
- A physical reset button.
- It runs a little hot for my liking - perhaps it could use a fan.
For the price, this is a great little camera. I’m looking forward to putting it into a production I’ve got coming up soon for a full test… and I want to test it against the P400.