Helmut Kobler, Los Angeles Cameraman

You can shoot faster and cover more ground with an ENG camera like the Varicam. The camera is very steady when mounted on my shoulder, so I can often shoot without carting around a tripod. And with a 13x zoom lens (26x with lens doubler engaged), I can quickly frame up a variety of shots. If you want more coverage in less time, then use the Varicam.

The Varicam records four channels of audio, compared to two on the C300. Another nice touch is that I've installed a two-channel wireless Lectrosonics SR receiver in the camera, which lets me do many jobs without more audio gear or crew -- for instance, I can put lavalier mics on two people, plug in a boom mic on another channel, and record a fourth channel to my camera's on-board mic.

The Varicam does things to streamline and enhance your workflow. It can embed custom metadata into footage, including custom clip names ("interview_whitaker"), program title ("Modern Marvels"), shooting location ("San Francisco"), crew names, shot markers, etc. All this helps your editors find shots quickly in post. The camera also records proxy videos of everything it shoots, which you can easily email to producers or transcribers so they can start working asap.

The Varicam produces a beautiful HD picture, but it does feel a bit "soft" when compared to the C300's crisp, razor-sharp image. That's absolutely fine for some projects — i.e., some broadcast and a lot of work aimed at the internet — but for projects aimed at a big screen, I'd probably want the C300.

If I want to use a dolly slider or crane to boost a project's production values, the Varicam's bigger size and weight means that I'll have to use a bigger, heavier slider or crane, which can take significantly more time/effort to transport and setup. I can easily carry and setup a dolly slider for my small C300, but would need a production assistant to help carry around and setup a slider or dolly that could handle the Varicam.

The Varicam's 2/3" imager is perfect for handheld reality work where you want to keep things in focus easily, but when you want the background out of focus (for interviews or typical narrative work), it's harder to work with. My C300 can pleasingly blur a background that's just a couple of feet behind my subject, but the Varicam would need several feet to do the same thing…and the location may not have those extra feet to give!