RichST

It may or may not be, the wording from the RX 10 is "Sony brings out the full potential of Full High Definition (Full HD) movie recording... by utilising every pixel from the image sensor at accelerated speed". For the A7s they say this about the video: The world’s first full-frame sensor capable of full pixel readout*1 without pixel binning for movies and 4K*2HDMI video output If the RX10 were generating video the same way the A7s did I think they'd be bragging about it, but they're not. I think they're just using every pixel in the binning process on the RX10.

Given the very large buffer of the E-M1 I'm wondering if the "4K" mode is just a short burst video, sort of like Nikon's Motion Snapshot. It wouldn't require extra hardware, it would just throw as much 4K footage into the buffer until it fills up, then processes it as it would process a bunch of stills, just compiling the frames as a video instead. It would essentially be a gimmick and even with a huge buffer it would fill up in a few seconds, but it does get you a little bit of 4K footage without worrying about hardware or heat; that could be where this rumor is coming from.

Had a feeling the rolling shutter was going to be bad, if Sony can't get it right on a smaller 1" sensor then asking more from a full frame sensor is out of the question. It's all about how fast the camera can scan the rows, and the data coming off a 1" sensor will get scanned faster than one coming off a full frame sensor all other factors being equal, that's just simple physics. Sony will really have to improve their scan rates for good 4K. The GH4 looks better all the time, I'm wondering what's keeping other companies from using Aptina's 1" sensors for 4K?

From the way they're explaining it they'll get 1080p in APS-C mode by scanning all the pixels in the APS-C window then downscaling, just like a camera would take a jpeg picture, downscale it, and save it at 1920x1080. I DON'T think it will use the RX-10 method, which I think is binning, albeit binning without column or row skipping. If you read the fine print of Sony's description of the video mode on the RX-10 it says they "use" every pixel for their video, that's carefully and cleverly worded, they've never said the RX-10 takes a full sensor scan then downsamples that for video. What I think the RX-10 does is use a fine binning mode that incorporates every pixel into it but at the end of the day it's still binning. For instance a red pixel would probably get binned with 3 surrounding reds to get a summed readout, etc. It's faster and easier than getting a discrete reading from every single pixel, and if the RX-10 were doing it that way Sony like the a7s does they would have been shouting it from the rooftops like they are now.

Reading the fine print some more it does indeed sound like Sony is only using every pixel in the binning process. In their interviews I never hear them say that they read every pixel as a discrete value like a still frame and then downsample it, rather they just use every pixel to generate video. Technically this is what the  5DIII probably does to get its video mode so I don't see that much to write home about other than reduced moire and aliasing. Resolution will still be poor.   For "true" 1080p there are pretty much two ways to do it: A) Sample the entire sensor then use the jpeg processor to downscale to 1080 or 2) take a cluster of 4 pixels, bin the two greens, and read the red and blue values to get a kind of "superpixel" that has R,G and B values. This is what Canon did for their cx00 cameras.    I find 2 to be the most unlikely since that method works best with about a 10-12mp sensor. One advantage to this method though is that the power is already there if you use processing chips from camcorders that have 3MOS sensors. I think Sony would be shouting from the rooftops that is what their new camera does if this were the case. And I don't think they're using A either since the number crunching involved is still massively staggering, much higher than a simpler, fully binned readout would require.    What you might expect to see in the first consumer "4K capable" camera is one that is not done in realtime; i.e. about 5-15 seconds of 4k footage is taken from a full sensor scan (24 or more full size images per second), thrown into a buffer and then processed into a video file. It may lock the camera up for a few seconds while it's converting to video but the quality would be fantastic. This is basically what the Nikon One's so-called "4K" mode is, it just spits all the frames out as individual jpegs instead of a single movie file, but that's trivial to change. I've tried it in the store and the V1 can do the whole burst shooting, downscaling, jpeg conversion and writing to the card very quickly, especially if you select 1080 as the resolution. When the One debuted I had high hopes that was what the Motion Snapshot mode was going to do but unfortunately it didn't; I guess Nikon didn't want to spend the extra few dollars (if that) for a larger buffer or it was protecting its lucrative videocamera market segment (sarcasm). If its buffer could have held, say, 240 images you could have had 10 seconds of 24p footage, 4 seconds of 60p footage, 6 seconds of 30p etc.  

I'll believe it when I see it. If it does do true 5K readout to the engine processor and then uses the downscaling engine most cameras use when you set them to lower resolutions the video should be razor sharp, the difference would have jumped out at Dave and he would have been gushing all over the look of the video. But he didn't because I don't think the camera can do it - the dead giveaway that it isn't really doing this is that it should offer a limited 60 fps burst mode like the Nikon One cameras, but all I see in the specs are 10 fps. Now maybe it's using a binning technique that utilizes every pixel on the camera but I don't think it's discreetly sampling every pixel for its video mode.   A bit disappointing but hopefully we won't have to keep waiting too long; Aptina says it will have 1" sensors with accompanying processing engines capable of 4K ready next year. It's not that I want 4K - I don't - it's just that I want a 1080 mode that has been derived from an entire 4K image sample. JVC's PX10 was the first camera to do this but it threw away so much fine detail along the way it ruined the usefulness of it. Their conversion processor probably wasn't up to snuff. Hero did better, I don't know about Samsung's Note.   The reason you're seeing these fast smaller sensors is because it's a lot easier to bus the incredibly high numbers required for video off of smaller sensors than it is for large ones, that's just physics. That's why the A7's video is probably not going to be anything to write home about. For the smaller sensors I imagine the bottleneck right now is getting processors fast enough to take 5K worth of data and downsampling it to 1080 in realtime like you would for a smaller jpeg image, then encoding that to mp4.   

Here's another interesting snip from the article about its video:   Perhaps more intriguingly, Panasonic says that the better image sensor means that it need only bin four pixels to create each pixel in the final movie, rather than six pixels as in the G6. The mixing is performed in 1 x 4 pixel lines, rather than 2x2 blocks, and the image processor performs low-pass filtering on the resulting data as it comes off-chip.   I'm not sure how they would bin in 1x4 lines, I'm wondering if it improves horizontal resolution in video. I'm also not sure how they could bin 6 pixels off a 2x2 block. The low-pass filtering of the data coming off the chip may have been how Panasonic has been getting relatively moire-free video for years now.

We've suspected all along that their cinema DSLR used the 1Dx sensor, if you look at the speed it can do at full frame and crop it just a bit you can get to the magic 24fps number. What I didn't think, though, was that the 1Dx had the extra horsepower to handle 24fps coming off the sensor and converting all that data to mjpeg in real time, that's a serious workload. I had assumed all that extra processing power needed to pull such a feat off was what made the camera expensive. Hmmm

Very interesting, I wonder just how Sony will improve its video capture ability? Best case scenario is that they do a full sensor scan and downscale it. But I just don't think that's possible at that price point. A c300 type readout would also yield excellent results but again I think that's too high end. Perhaps they've figured out how Panasonic grabs the video capture from its GH sensors and will use something like that.

Hmm the app was probably written more for the n8 since I haven't had any problems with it crashing

Andrew I just dropped the $3 for the CameraPro app for the n8 (which is supposed to work for the 808 as well) and it allows for much more control, including bitrate for video, audio, frames per second (any number from 1-30), etc. A summary of all it can do is here: http://www.tequnique.com/wb/downloads/Manual_CameraPro1_4.pdf

I really wanted to get an 808 to replace my 1st generation iPhone that I've had for 5(!) years but considering on how hard I am on phones (I drop them every couple of months) I opted for a used n8 for less that $200. It's only 12mp with no oversampling feature but I've been very happy with the quality and now that I've gotten used to the different user interface (it's certainly no iPhone in that regard) I can definitely see myself moving up to an 808 in the future. IMHO Nokia would do well specializing in high-end cameras with phones on them (oops I said that back backwards.....or did I?). Future improvements could include features like a one-shot HDR mode that makes use of the oversampling feature. Also, while putting an optical zoom might be impractical, I wonder if two lenses could be put in the body and moved by a slide or wheel in front of the sensor. The sample videos I've seen looked pretty good, virtually no moire and good detail, do you have stabilization enabled on yours? I wouldn't be surprised if someone releases an app to increase the bitrate, there is an older app called CameraPro I think that lets you change the compression settings for the jpegs, including an uncompressed mode. Oh and by the way get the Symbian version of Opera for the camera, much better than the included browser. I'm still trying to find a good alternative to Google Maps, which only works when you're connected to wifi (like that does you any good on the road)

[quote name='EOSHD' timestamp='1342920630' post='14294'] Will the new mount be the basis of a C100 affordable digital cinema camera, following the strategy of Panasonic and Sony? [/quote] That's a joke right? I mean this IS Canon we're talking about. I'll be surprised if they even fix the moire issues that are apparently still there on the t4i. But hey at least they got the sensor size right, more than I can say about Nikon. But don't get me started about the One system, that has probably been the biggest blown opportunity in a long time, that camera could have been insanely great given the speed of its sensor but they either completely blew it or more likely the One team is purposely being deprived of oxygen Saturn-style (to use a car analogy) by the rest of the company. So many of us are desperately waiting for something to come along that is a game-changer - the technology is there - but I just don't think the established camera companies have the least interest in thinking outside the box. You're also dead on about smartphones; the tiny, cheap, slow lens, pocket-sized camera's days are definitely numbered. In fact it wouldn't surprise me if a smartphone maker were to come out with the next breakthrough camera (you know digicams are stagnating when Nokia (!) rolls out one of the most interesting products of the year). Smartphones have the advantage of being more like a "real" computer and specific apps can be written for them.

Looking at comparable videos it does seem like the EM5 is as sharp as the GH2, just with more moire. I don't know how Panasonic filters out the moire but however they do it it works well. But congrats to Sony for the excellent sensor, I don't know why they haven't used a similar video implementation on their APS-C sensors. If I had to do it over again I'd definitely get an EM5 over a GH2 since I do more still photography thesedays and have never been enamored with the GH2's stills. And most videos I do take now are handheld, another reason to choose the EM5

I really doubt the camera could be doing a full sensor scan 24 times a second let alone 60; look at the Nikon One cameras, their sensors can do full readouts 60 times a second AND take simultaneous stills yet their video mode is just above average at best. There are pretty severe technical limitations to doing full read scans of even 8mp sensors for realtime video let alone 24mp (much less at a consumer prices), it's probably more realistic to expect a sharpness similar to the NEX-7 with this new camera. The problem lies in the hardware outside of the sensor (though I understand the physically larger the sensor gets the harder it is to do). JVC is the only company that has even attempted it - with the GC-PX10 - and they had to make pretty severe sacrifices to IQ in order to get there. A C300 type approach that skirts around the Bayer demosaicing might be more practical in the next few years but that would be more optimal for a camera with 10-12mp and would require the addition of processing chips specifically meant for camcorders.