What is the Sony VG-20?

by Sebastian WöberAugust 24^th, 2011

After the depressing review of the Sony A77 earlier today, here’s another camera worth a good look. The Sony NEX VG20, successor of the VG10

So what does this camera do? And why is it better than the VG-10?
First of all it is said to have a highly improved image sensor which should get rid of the noise issues and overall bad low light performance it’s predecessor had.
Of course it also has that high compression AVCHD 2.0 codec Sony is so proud about that it has implemented it in all the new cameras we’ve seen which allows it to record 50 or 60p (and 24p by the way) in “full HD”. That’s great, but remember that our Canon EOS babies still have a H.264 codec that does 38 Mbit/s at 25p/30p while the AVCHD 2.0 is also a H.264 and does only 28 Mbit/s at 50p/60p.

That fact put aside there could still be great potential in this camera that is yet to be evaluated. It is an unfortunately fact that there is no usable footage of the camera at this time. The only “review” about it comes from the same people that did the A77 “review” and I will not burden you with more of that unspeakable stuff.

So until Sony provides that camera for testing, or someone else does a good evaluation on the device we have no chance to see if moiré and aliasing issues as seen on the VG10 have been corrected.

Notice that the Sony NEX-VG20 is available as “body only” which the VG10 was not.

The camera is $1599.99 and said to arrive by November.

Here’s the official promo video by Sony: