Three 1/3" Exmor CMOS sensors with a total of about 2.07 million effective pixels (16:9) independently capture red, blue, and green light. This, combined with the camcorder's Full HD 1920x1080 resolution, high-sensitivity, and wide dynamic range, delivers vibrant images with accurate color rendition. Noise reduction and anti-shake is provided to assure high image quality in a variety on shooting conditions.


The Sony G lens has a 25x zoom range with a 35mm equivalent focal length range of 26mm to 650mm. This makes the lens versatile enough to handle a wide range of shooting situations from wide-angle to telephoto. Independent manual, zoom, and focus rings with end-stop and iris control are provided, and a slide mechanism on the focus ring enables easy switching between auto and manual focusing. The focus indicator can be displayed even when focusing manually.
XAVC technology is based on the efficient and high-quality H.264 standard. XAVC Intra using intra-frame compression, meaning that every frame is encoded independent of the other frames. This provides a better quality picture, but requires a higher bit-rate. With a Long GOP codec, only certain frames are encoded individually. This allows the codec to squeeze the video into a much smaller bitrate than Intra technology. XAVC Long GOP files require less storage space than XAVC Intra files. When recording in XAVC, it uses the MXF file format, efficiently compressing Full HD 1920x1080 resolution using the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec. Image sampling is 4:2:2 10-bit with Intra-frame compression at 112 Mbps or high-efficiency Long-GOP compression at 50 Mbps, 35 Mbps or 25 Mbps. In addition to XAVC Intra/Long GOP, the PXW-X180 records in MPEG HD 422 at 50 Mbps, MPEG HD 420 at 35 Mbps, AVCHD, and DV.