Although the Canon 24mm F1.4L and Samyang 24mm F1.4 are superb lenses, the Canon is $1500 and the Samyang $800. Here EOSHD goes hands-on with 4 more affordable fast wides for the 5D Mark II. They are especially cheap if you pick them up used on eBay.

On full frame, watch out for vignetting and distortion

Nearly all fast wide angle lenses on full frame have more vignetting and distortion than the Olympus 12mm F2 on the 1.86x crop GH2.

Why? A large full frame sensor is more demanding on optical perfection, whilst on a smaller sensor a lens can distort and it won’t be as noticeable. In the case of the Olympus 12mm F2 some of that distortion is even corrected in-camera digitally. Not so on the 5D Mark II.

Distortion is rarely noticeable unless you have straight lines shot dead-on running right through the frame, like the edge of a train platform from the passenger’s point of view or the doorway to a building at street level. Here any barrel distortion will curve your shot downwards at the edges and upwards in the middle, and it is very ugly.

Vignetting is a darkening of the image at the corners. Since the 5D Mark II crops the top and bottom of the sensor in 16:9 video mode, it is less of an issue in video mode than still mode, but much more noticeable than it would be on a smaller crop sensor.

How wide is wide?

28mm is considered a wide angle on full frame whereas on a crop sensor it is a much tighter field of view. I prefer the more dramatic 24mm. It is more ‘Kubrick’. Anything wider than 20mm on full frame usually has a more limited purpose for me. 35mm is still wide on the 5D Mark II and though more versatile than 28mm is not as dramatic for certain shots involving an extreme use of perspective (for example a narrow corridor where close-by walls run from infinity to close up, or a cliff face shot from the perspective of the climber). With a 35mm wide angle objects in the distance will appear closer than at 24mm. This is ‘depth compression’.

The contenders

• Tokina 11-16mm F2.8 AT-X PRO DX
• Sigma 24mm F1.8 EX DG
• Samyang 35mm F1.4
• Samyang 14mm F2.8

Tokina 11-16mm F2.8
eBay value: $650 / £400 [Find it now] 

A truly fantastic lens. Though it may be the most expensive piece of glass in this round-up at $650, for the money you’re getting two lenses in one so it represents somewhat of a bargain. It is a fantastic fast wide zoom on APS-C where it can be dramatically wide or the equivalent to 24mm on full frame (at 16mm).

On full frame it works as a 16mm F2.8 prime. Wider and it vignettes. The image is very sharp and very dramatic, with full sensor coverage.

However make sure you turn off peripheral illumination correction in-camera. The profile it loads for the Tokina is designed for the EFS mount and APS-C sized sensors and it gives a ridiculous halo effect on the 5D Mark II when enabled. This is a glowing circular flare that wraps around the corners of the image.

Here is the image at 16mm:

At 11mm it does not cover the full frame sensor – of course!

Here is the halo from dodgy corner brightness compensation on the 5D Mark II. Turn it off!

Sigma 24mm F1.8 EX DG
eBay value: $400 / £250 [Find it now] 

I recently compared this lens to the Samyang 24mm F1.4 and it is not quite as good.

What it does give you though is fantastic value for money and – for stills – AF. To be honest, corner sharpness aside the Sigma is in the same league to the Samyang despite being almost half the price 2nd hand.

In the centre of the frame image quality is fantastic for the price. It has a very fast aperture, is sharp even wide open, has less distortion than the more expensive Samyang and even a little less vignetting. The weaknesses are: it isn’t as bright (both in terms of maximum aperture and real t-stop), it is very soft in the corners at fast apertures and the focus ring has a very short travel, feeling less precise than on most other lenses.

Here is the look it produces at 24mm on the 5D Mark II:

Samyang 35mm F1.4
eBay value: $500 / £350 [Find it now]

My original review concentrated on the Samyang 35mm F1.4 for crop sensors (GH2, 600D). Read it here

No matter what camera you use this on, 35mm F1.4 is very versatile. You can use it as a portrait lens on the GH2 or a moderate wide angle on full frame, which is what it is designed for. You get a shallower depth of field than at 24mm but of course it is not as dramatically wide.

Flare is a weak point of the Samyang – when a light source is at the edge of the frame you tend to get a burst of flame like flare curved around the centre of the frame and it isn’t the pretty kind.

Although construction relies a lot on plastic, the actual mechanics of the lens are excellent. It is internally focussing with a very long travel on the manual focus ring. No moving front element like on the Sigma 24mm F1.8.

When stopped down to F5.6 or narrower apertures the field of view will zoom slightly whilst racking focus during a shot. This is called ‘breathing’. However since the background is creamy bokeh at F1.4 the effect isn’t as noticeable wide open.

Very good value for money considering the optical performance is similar to the Canon and Nikon equivalents.

Samyang 14mm F2.8 [Find it now]
eBay value: $300 / £200 

Distortion is hideous on this lens. Yes it is cheap, but I don’t like it. It is an extremely wide lens verging on the fish eye. Unfortunately I’d rather have it either one way or the other and this lens doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. It isn’t distorted like a fish eye, but it is WAY more distorted than a standard lens. Just compare this shot at 14mm (on the right) to the same shot taken at 16mm with the Tokina 11-16mm F2.8 on the 5D Mark II, left.

I don’t like the distortion profile at all – it is like a broken standard lens. Fish eyes are more cinematic.

Samyang do a great fisheye for APS-C, and a very sharp full frame 24mm F1.4 and 35mm F1.4 which are superb value for money considering performance and specs. Although the Samyang 14mm F2.8 is the widest and cheapest lens in the test, I’d rather have a 16mm fisheye like the $150 Russian Zenitar F2.8 or pay more and get a decent prime in the 16-20mm range, with far less distortion.

Canon Rumors have confirmed some of the specs and the release date of the long awaited 5D Mark 3. The leak is given their highest CR3 rating.

The 5D Mark 3 is to be announced next Monday, 28th February… Just 6 days away at time of writing. The initial specs look promising but there is a lot we don’t know yet especially regarding the video capabilities.

• 22mp
• 61pt AF
• 100% VF
• 3.2″ LCD
• Dual CF/SD Card Slots *
• $3500 USD

It is great to see the 5D Mark 3 maintain the same megapixel count. This is a sensible move.

How much video has improved will depend on the speed increases brought by both the new sensor and new image processor and the will to give us those improvements on a stills camera now they have the C300 out.

The new Rebel meanwhile is finally getting video optimised AF and a new kit lens with silent AF motors. Not that exciting since these have been around on mirrorless bodies since 2009 but it will also feature the new DIGIC 5 image processor. Little else is known about it. The announcement is expected in early March.

Now the 5D Mark 3 is not a very affordable camera for the masses. $3500 buts it significantly ahead of the GH2 at $800 or even the old 5D Mark 2 at $2000 so my advice is to not pre-order for video use until you see the first proper sample videos.

The 5D Mark 3 is likely however to be a real power house, both in terms of stills AND video. In one body.

I am always reminded when I use the 5D Mark II what a beast it is, despite the obvious shortcomings on a 3+ year old camera body.

Compression wise hopefully Canon will also put the ALL-I compression of the 1D X in there and not be tempted to use a consumer friendly bitrate like 24Mbit, as everyone else seems to want to do at the moment with H.264 and AVCHD.

With the newly released GH2 1.11 hack, the small GF2 is now also hackable. This camera also does 1080/25p inside a 1080i wrapper, and features a similar image processing chip and encoder to the GH2. Could it be a bargain GH2 alternative? EOSHD takes a look.

Meanwhile Magic Lantern continues to improve. There’s current a brute force testing approach which according to Alex of Magic Lantern may “unlock many things that previously were thought to be impossible or very hard” like anamorphic preview and clean HDMI out.

GH2 1080/25p at 88Mbit AVC-Intra

Today I tested a new version of my patch settings for 88Mbit I-frame AVCHD on the GH2 with the newly hacked firmware version 1.11.

The good news is that the camera does seem to apply this patch to the new HBR 1080/30/25p mode of version 1.11.

This means there will be an update to the GH2 Patch Vault soon which European shooters may find useful!

Also Japanese / NTSC GH2 owners who live in PAL countries or indeed any GH2 owner who travels can now shoot in both 30p or 25p depending on their region. Sure enough the PAL / NTSC switch Vitaliy installed in the GH2′s menus alters the HBR mode on my Japanese body from NTSC 30p to 25p. It no longer just affects the 1080/60/50i manual movie mode.

A big thanks to Vitaliy for his efforts, once again.

Magic Lantern Unified improvements

I’ve been using the Magic Lantern Unified hack on the Canon 5D Mark II recently and it is now working very stably.

The team behind Magic Lantern say that most of the features (like FPS override and focus peaking) were enabled by changing DIGIC registers… These are parameters in the firmware which change the behaviour of the camera.

Some brave testers are now required to go through all the registers in the firmware and alter them one by one to see what affect they have. This brute force approach is needed because obviously no hacker has access to the code documentation at Canon HQ or the programmers responsible for it, so are working on exploring it mostly blindly by trial and error.

Magic Lantern say that the following features may become possible by changing registers:

• Clean HDMI out (or at least shrink the black bars a bit)
• Moving the recorded box around in crop mode (digital panning)
• Custom curves applied to image
• Anamorphic preview (LiveView image can be rescaled without altering recorded image)
• Peripheral correction for manual lenses
• Flipped or mirrored display
• Maybe also custom video modes (FullHD crop mode)
• etc.

If you are technically astute and don’t mind risking your camera, you can join the effort and discover the new features. Click here to find out how.

Panasonic GF2 now hackable

Video wise, the GF2 is basically a GF1 with a more up to date image processor. Although the sensor is not up to the GH2 standard, either in terms of scaling the image in video mode or high ISO performance, the camera body is dirt cheap.

I just picked one up for £150 on eBay UK which when you think about what it could be capable of with the hack is amazing. If you need a few b-cameras for your main DSLR on a very strict budget, especially if you already have a load of lenses for your GH2 – the GF2 could be a great option. As a crash-cam too it is very small and cost effective. And of course for existing GF2 owners – your number has come up for better video quality.

The NTSC model does 1080/30p and no 24p. This isn’t great, but happily for PAL users our pain suffered with having to use 24p on the GH2 instead of 25p for so long has resulted in some karma, because the PAL GF2 does 1080/25p!

It only recorded at a lowly bitrate of 17Mbit – and now with the hack – who knows?

Mine is on the way and it will be interesting to see how it performs. No it is not going to be as good as the GH2 but how close can it get for 1/5th of the price?

Grab a GF2 on eBay here before the prices rocket

Vitaliy Kiselev has just released a new version of the GH2 hack, PTools v3.64d for the new Panasonic V1.11 firmware.

The latest version of PTools also supports the GF2, adds more AVCHD related patches and brings improvements to certain existing GH2 patches.

It is good to see Panasonic allowing further hacking and not battering down the hatches on their new firmware update.

1080/25p is still in a 1080i wrapper with the hack but bitrates can be increased, which is good news for PAL shooters.

All the other patches are ported to the new firmware and should work.

The latest firmware also includes enhanced noise reduction.

It will take time for any new features of the hack to be developed since testers need to delve deeper into V1.11 – it is a continually evolving process of discovery.

It is yet again an interesting time for the GH2.

Stay tuned for a hands-on look at the new hack.

You can download the hack here http://www.gh1-hack.info/wiki/PToolSoftware and the latest Panasonic GH2 Version 1.11 firmware here

For a guide on handling 25p in a 1080i wrapper see this EOSHD article

As good as Canon’s renowned 24mm F1.4L? From Samyang? Maybe the title of the lens gives us a clue… AS IF.

In turns out those misguided initials aren’t such a bad omen but the lens – at $850 / £550 has some price competition from the much cheaper Sigma 24mm F1.8.

Contents

1. Resolution, sharpness
2. Distortion
3. Vignetting, light fall off
4. Focus, breathing
5. Flare
6. Value for money
7. Conclusion

I am reviewing the Canon mount version. You can get it now from Samyang’s official worldwide dealer based in Europe. The DSLR video version has a de-clicked aperture ring for smooth and silent adjustment during a shot. Both lenses are the same price (for Canon mount).

Buy it now – DSLR video version
Buy it now – standard version

The first things you notice about the Samyang 24mm F1.4 is that it is quite light for a full frame lens (there are no AF motors) and that the transmission of the glass is faster than other lenses at the same F stop.

The Samyang 24mm F1.4 is closer to T1.4 on a cinema lens in terms of brightness than most other lenses.

There is a considerable difference in brightness when set to F2 relative to the Sigma 24mm F1.8. Below I’ve overlaid a cut out from the Sigma shot on the left onto the same area in the Samyang shot on the right – as you can see the Samyang is brighter by quite a noticeable margin!

One of my favourite cinematic looks is at 24mm F1.4 on the 5D Mk II. Wider than 20mm is too extreme for my tastes, 28mm not quite dramatic enough. Shallow depth of field at wide angle is never shallower than on full frame. I recommend the Samyang 24mm F1.4 for the 5D Mark II and Nikon D800 / D4. On the GH2 the closest equivalent wide angle is the Olympus 12mm F2 and the (mostly unavailable) SLR Magic 12mm F1.6.

The Voigtlander 25mm F0.95 and the Samyang 24mm F1.4 give a similar feel on the GH2 since they are of similar focal lengths but really the lenses have different purposes on different bodies. The Nokton is an ultra fast portrait lens for Micro Four Thirds and the Samyang a fast wide angle for full frame.

Resolution, sharpness

Once again Samyang have produced a lens with Canon L style performance in terms of sharpness and resolution.

In the centre there isn’t much between the Samyang and Sigma but in the corners the Samyang is extraordinary! Big, big difference.

Below is the centre sharpness… The Sigma is pretty good here. F1.8 on the Sigma shows none of the usual signs of a lens being wide open, and the performance is almost identical at F2 which is why that shot isn’t included. The Samyang is softer at F1.4 wide open as you’d expect for F1.4 but has the edge at F2 as well as being brighter in terms of the real T-stop (light transmission of the glass).

There is however an important factor to bear in mind here.

Soft corners may not be aesthetically bothering for some shots and can enhance the feel of a image. Soft corners and a slight vignette are part of what gives the Voigtlander Nokton 25mm F0.95 such a dreamy look wide open.

With the VAF-5D2 anti-aliasing filter, which brings far more benefits than negatives, you will get very soft corners with either lens, so the Samyang’s advantage is cancelled out. If you don’t plan to use this and you want sharper corners for stills as well, the Samyang definitely has a sizeable advantage.

Distortion

As you’d expect there is barrel distortion, a little more than the Sigma 24mm F1.8. It is nowhere near as good as the Olympus 12mm on the GH2, but it isn’t bad and most of the time you won’t notice it. But I feel distortion is an area for Samyang to improve on.

Click image to full screen it:

Vignetting, light fall off

Vignetting is slightly worse on the Samyang 24mm at F1.4 than the Sigma wide open at F1.8 but both are very similar at F2. I have to say this isn’t a factor in my choice of lenses. In most normal shooting you will never notice it and the shot below represents the absolute worst case scenario where vignetting would be most noticeable. For me a bit of vignetting and light fall off in the corners actually adds to a cinematic image and all lenses have it at fast apertures. It is unavoidable.

Focus, breathing

Whist the minimum focus distance is not as close as the Sigma 24mm F1.8 achieves, it is still very good.

Mechanically though the Samyang definitely has an advantage. It feels better with a longer, more precise travel and is better suited to a follow focus.

The Samyang is internally focussing, with only the rear element moving. The front element does not rotate or move back and forth like the Sigma and most other lenses.

Breathing is reduced compared to Samyang 35mm which was pretty bad in this regard. It does still breathe noticeably when stopped down (the background and framing will zoom slightly) but it is no worse than the Sigma 24mm F1.8 here and you rarely notice it unless racking some extremely fast focus changes at F8.

There’s no AF on the Samyang, and this is part of why the price is attractive and the lens is light. However if you are interested in racking focus with an Oki USB follow focus or the Magic Lantern hack, you can only do that with the Sigma.

Flare and contrast wide open

Coating is improved compared to the Samyang 35mm F1.4 which has pretty crazy flare wide open. Contrast is also better wide open when a very bright light source is in the frame.

A very good performance – and it needed to be improved to be honest!

Value for money

The £500 / $850 Samyang 24mm F1.4 bucks the trend for Samyang’s budget prices. The Samyang 35mm F1.4 was extremely popular at £350 / $550, likewise the 85mm F1.4 and 14mm F2.8 before it – both around the £250 / $400 mark. However as the $1500 / £1000 price tag of the Canon version shows this is a premium optic, and it is not easy to design a good 24mm F1.4. This is a more ambitious optical design than anything Samyang have done before.

There are not exactly manufacturers falling over themselves to do an affordable fast wide angle for full frame. The Samyang 24mm F1.4 costs half of what the Canon does BUT the Sigma 24mm F1.8 costs half of what the Samyang does! (If you pick one up on eBay). That Sigma is currently the cheapest fast wide angle lens with full frame coverage.

If you can justify the Samyang’s extra cost for better corner sharpness, a faster aperture (and t-stop) and don’t mind losing AF then the Samyang is the one to choose. For those who want more of a bargain, the Sigma is the one to get.

Conclusion

There is no doubting that the Samyang 24mm F1.4 is a better lens than the Sigma equivalent.

Affordable 24mm F1.4 lenses for full frame are relatively thin on the ground to say the least so if you want to look above the Samyang you have to step up to the mighty Canon 24mm F1.4L at double the cost.

Is it worth it? Probably not. Though I’ve not tested the Canon and Nikon lenses, the Samyang is so good that it is hard to see what the extra money will get you optically, apart from maybe less distortion and less flare.

So if you can justify the $850 – half the Canon but double the Sigma equivalents – the Samyang is definitely recommended and worth the money. It is a fantastic look on full frame.

The Sigma however, is even more of a bargain if you are…

A) On a budget

B) Plan to use the VAF-5D2 anti-aliasing filter with a 24mm wide angle on the 5D Mark II for video

C) Don’t mind a bit of corner sharpness and can sacrifice the faster aperture and better manual focus ring on the Samyang

D) Really need AF for stills

Minimum viewing recommendations: 40″ TV. Download the MP4 file.

The NEX 7 is a beautifully designed high end mirrorless camera with probably the most advanced CMOS sensor Sony have ever produced. As a stills camera it is superb (if you don’t mind adapting glass and manually focussing – because the current E-mount lens range is somewhat limited).

But does it topple the Panasonic GH2 and Canon 5D Mark II for video?

I was very enthusiastic whilst shooting with the NEX 7 about its capabilities. Getting the footage back and grading it was a slightly different story.

I felt that the flat image profile I used for the footage above negated some strong points of the NEX 7 and the footage fell apart terribly when grading. So a lot of the colours are very muted and I haven’t tried to push the grading very far with the footage above. When you shoot in Standard or Sunset, colour is rich out of the box with high tonality. More on this in a moment…

Firstly it is easy to understand why the Sony NEX 7 is so desirable.

Finally a mirrorless camera with a metal body designed for pros and enthusiasts who – shock – want a camera. It marries next-generation technology with the seriousness of a professional DSLR. It is not a gadget.

When picking up the NEX 7 you feel cold steel painted black, not painted plastic. The LCD flip-up mechanism is preferable to the sideways rotation of the GH2′s screen, whilst it is also double the resolution. It is a very nice piece.

That screen is good but it is nothing compared to the OLED TruFinder. When you look through this you see an image with more lifelike colour and better contrast than any EVF you’ve ever used or the main LCD itself (which is plain old LCD, not OLED). And of course you can shoot video through it.

The camera packs more features into a small space than a hamster does in its cheeks, and they are useful features not gimmicks. Peaking for manual focus, a daylight mode for the LCD making it clearly visible under bright sunlight and a flat image profile. I find that even without peaking the TruFinder EVF alone is a great manual focus aid, as good as the Zacuto EVF. I didn’t find myself using the it much on a tripod because you can’t angle it upwards and you really have to press your eye against the camera body to use it risking shake – but for handheld run & gun documentary or news with the bare minimum of rigging, and for stills, it is so much fun to use.

Above: the NEX 7 with Metabones EOS adapter that should let the lens communicate with the camera body – sadly it doesn’t work with the NEX 7 and needs to go all the way back to Hong Kong for a firmware update.

Almost all of the on-train stuff in the video was shot handheld with the camera held to my eye.

Dials rather than buttons dominate the control layout of the NEX 7. Again this is very positive in terms of usability. On the GH2 you only have one very notchy plastic dial, but on the NEX 7 you have 2 very high quality alloy ones on the top and a further (more delicate) wheel on the back. I have ISO assigned to that and it makes changing it a breeze, you can even do it after the shot is rolling if you need to make some ad-hoc or last minute changes to exposure without having to stop and start the recording.

Both aperture and shutter speed are on the Tri Navi dials at the top, which are not configurable – unlike the rear dial, four d-pad directions and 3 soft keys. It is safe to say the NEX 7 is pretty configurable!

Video quality

The NEX 7 is a real mixed bag. At times it has wowed me with a dynamic range and colour that seemed to be the best on any DSLR video mode including the 5D Mark II. Other times I felt the GH2 and 5D Mark II would have produced nicer results.

But it is certainly in the top 3 for video. It is preferable to a NEX 5N, 7D or 60D no matter what you intend to do with it.

With the test video above I’ve mixed in some rogue GH2 footage shot with the same lens – a Leica R 50mm F2 and lovely Iscorama 36 1.5x anamorphic in 1080p mode. If you don’t spot the GH2 footage and feel they intercut with no obvious difference in resolution then the NEX 7 may be for you.

Just be aware of its weaknesses.

The NEX 7 is let down by middle-of-the-road compression, an encoder that smudges fine detail and a downscaling method from 24MP to 1080p that introduces too much false colour.

Also, I was excited to shoot in the super flat picture profile offered on the NEX 7 but it is a disaster.

At first glance it is so flat I was shooting in twilight at the same ISO I was using during the day – ISO 200 and the camera picks up far more in the shadows than the GH2. The image profile in question is called Neutral, dialled down to -3 across the board – contrast, sharpness and colour.

The NEX 7 has fantastic colour and I thought I could get it back again from the flat image profile.

Wrong!

It grades very poorly from a flat image.

Don’t dial down the contrast on the NEX 7, don’t flatten the image in video mode! Preferably choose Sunset for velvety gradation and use manual white balance – and practice getting it spot on. Adjusting it afterwards in post just does not work.

The footage does not hold up to heavy colour correction in the same way that the 5D Mark II, 7D or GH2 does. You may ask what is the point of shooting flat if you get better results from selecting an appropriate ‘normal’ picture profile on location. It is like shooting with CineStyle but not being able to being the pizazz back into the footage afterwards with a LUT / different curve.

Also at certain levels of exposure the blue channel can completely break up – sometimes even in-camera let alone in post. This clipping can be mitigated with manual white balance, and the Sunset image profile.

Here is the ungraded flat image.

Below is what happens when you try to grade it (1:1 crop view). The sky is completely breaking up, not just in terms of all the macro blocking due to compression but there’s a lot of clipping of the blue channel and the tonality looks like something you’d get out of an 8bit video game from the 80′s. Not very realistic.

The GH2 with the hack does far better here and wouldn’t smudge the fine detail of the trees below the cranes.

This all conspires to create an end result which, whilst cinematic with 80% of shots, can fall down badly at times relative to the opposition with certain shots and you lack something as gradable as CineStyle.

Both the GH2 and 5D Mark II resolve more fine detail from the sensor and because of stable bitrates exceeding 50Mbit (with their hacks) can keep hold of it.

Aliasing and moire

The NEX 7 appears to suffer from quite a lot of electronic manipulation to cover up aliasing and moire. As a result extreme moire patterns don’t appear very often, but you do still get a lot of false detail. Speckles of red & blue mixed in with real detail.

The issue on the 5D Mark II has changed dramatically with the VAF-5D2 anti-aliasing filter by Mosaic Engineering. With this the 5D Mark II exceeds what the NEX 7 is capable of video mode in terms of the cleanness of the image and yet still holds onto more fine detail with less visible signs of compression. All that false detail, rough edges, moire, speckles and unattractiveness almost disappears. Meanwhile the GH2 has barely any of that in the first place.

On medium close-ups of actors against a blurred backdrop at fast apertures, these artefacts are far less of a problem than in wide shots with a deep depth of field.

For wide angle I’d recommend a GH2 or 5D Mark II and if I was cropping the image in post or recording in 720p, the GH2 would appear of higher resolution than the NEX 7, all else equal.

The GH2 doesn’t hold onto as much in the lows as the NEX 7 but when you view both on a good TV it really helps to reveal the smoothness of tone in the lows that these cameras are truly capable of. This is particularly noticeable if you try viewing my Zen video in Shanghai (below) on a laptop screen and then plug your laptop via HDMI into a decent TV… Compare the two results on the shots inside the temple. Very different.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Never are these weaknesses of the NEX 7 – like all DSLRs – more evident than on a monitor or a MacBook. The NEX 7′s footage does look far better on a projector and when sat at a reasonable viewing distance, than it does on the harsh pin-sharp screen on a computer.

So I think what the camera offers in terms of the whole package and your individual needs, are more important than the image quality quibbles it has in video mode when pixel peeped. The sensor is APS-C and 1080/60p is present, there is peaking, TruFinder, better build quality, more robust mount than the GH2, great screen, which is wider than the one on the 5D Mark II and articulated. These are all worthwhile factors to consider when choosing which camera to shoot with.

Rolling shutter is there – although similar to the 5D Mark II and GH2 – possibly slightly worse. Avoid passing trains and whip pans!

I recommend to avoid the dynamic range DRO expansion features of the NEX 7. It seems to lead to a wider dynamic range but a very compressed colour gamut resulting in less tonality and weird colours (which only get weirder when you do colour correction in post). DRO optimisation also has the side affect of adjusting on the fly the brightness of shadows and highlights during the first few seconds of a clip, so effectively the first few seconds of your recording is imperfect with it.

To summarise – for best results don’t use a flat image profile in-camera and disable DRO. If you do that and don’t alter the footage too much in post, colour, gradation and tonality is superb on the NEX 7.

Conclusion

The NEX 7 is such a strong camera in so many areas.

It is only in terms of the downscaling of the sensor in video mode,  the baked in flat image profile being slightly useless and the high compression that it is weak. If you want a great B-camera to an FS100, the NEX 7 has the same mount, same sized sensor, the same recording format and 1080/60p for slow motion, all in a body a fraction of the size and cost.

Faced with the 5D Mark II and Panasonic GH2, the NEX 7 is a better stills camera than the GH2, ergonomically superior to both for video, has great colour and tonality in the standard picture profiles, but is not up there in terms of resolution and compression.

The pros and cons I’ve separated not just into general positives and negatives but also versus the immediate competition. There are quite a few things the NEX 7 has that the GH2 and 5D Mark II don’t offer. It is important to bare these in mind and not just let the video mode image quality quibbles effect your purchasing decision.

Pros over the GH2

• Larger 1.5x crop sensor over 1.86x
• Full 1080/60p slow motion compared to (admittedly very detailed) 720p/60p on the GH2
• 2.42MP OLED EVF compared to 1.3MP LCD EVF – a clear win
• Metal body and better manual control dials
• 920k screen compared to 480k – a clear win
• The sensor is far superior in stills mode – almost a different league here!
• Live peaking for manual focussing

Pros over the 5D Mark II

• 1080/60p slow mo compared to nothing
• Wider 3:2 aspect ratio screen which is articulated up and down avoids the need to add a monitor or EVF when shooting minimally
• Far smaller and lighter
• AF in video mode with E-Mount lenses
• Built in EVF usable in video mode, 5D’s optical viewfinder isn’t
• Full 1080p HDMI output with no delay / switch to SD resolution upon recording (though there is a gamma switch like the GH2)
• More features like peaking out of the box ** The 5D Mark II now has peaking and extensive manual audio controls as part of Magic Lantern

Cons (in general)

• Video mode doesn’t quite do justice to the sensor
• Compression in video mode smudges fine detail
• Lacks the high bitrates of the GH2 and 5D Mark II
• Resolution in video mode not as cleanly resolved as GH2 or 5D Mark II with VAF-5D2 anti-aliasing filter
• Convoluted adjustment of picture profiles, white balance, etc. involving use of almost every dial to navigate
• No dedicated movie mode means JPEG stills have to be set to 16:9 for accurate framing of video

The sensor and EVF show a clear investment – to the tune of billions of dollars – by Sony in cutting edge semiconductors. Video is not an afterthought but it hasn’t been given quite the focus that Panasonic lavished on the GH2 in terms of the encoder and downscaling process. If only Sony and Nikon would do what Panasonic managed to do in a $800 consumer camera – we’d have a Canon beating Nikon D4 and a NEX 7 that would be the bargain of the century. Whether it is intentional on Sony’s part to keep the video mode of the NEX 7 below the FS100 or done on an engineering basis and to necessitate the much lower price point we’ll never really know. I suspect it is to preserve compatibility for consumers (SD cards, editing, TVs, set top boxes, etc.), maintain reasonable battery run times and to avoid cooking the CPU and sensor.

If you are shooting for Vimeo, where most of your audience will watch your material close up on a laptop screen, in full screen the flaws of the NEX 7′s video quality will be apparent over a modified GH2 and 5D Mark II.

Funnily enough if you are projecting your footage on a big screen these micro-flaws are less noticeable.

Future NEX 7 and Iscorama 36 articles at EOSHD

There will be further coverage of the NEX 7 here, with a low light test versus the 5D Mark II, NEX 5N and GH2 which should be very revealing.

I’m going to be writing about the Iscorama 36 separately as well. I bought it from Roman Königshofer at Christmas and this is the first footage I’ve shot with it. It truly is a spectacular piece of glass.

Further reading and more footage in my NEX 7 First Impressions here

A rumour surfaced today (which was given the 2nd highest rating of plausibility by Sony Alpha Rumors) that Sony have a new NEX video product to come before NAB.

Sony have confirmed they are strengthening the NEX range more than intended this year on the back of very strong sales.

So as well as new lenses on the roadmap will we see a new video camera?

I don’t think it will be a direct replacement for the recent NEX-VG20 since that has only just hit the shelves.

However there is a gap in the market between the NEX-VG20 ($2000) and NEX-FS100 ($5000). Furthermore the VG20 does not offer better video quality than the $800 NEX 5N and sales have been poor for the VG line. Anything Sony come out with at NAB this year has to be better than that.

The Japanese electronics giant has seen a massive loss this year due to stagnant TV sales and camcorders are an important driver of those. The small chip point and shoot camcorders compete in a very tough market and the gimmick of 3D has not boosted sales or given anyone a competitive edge. So now Sony and others will look to ‘add value’ in other ways which – hopefully for us – means better image quality and not just more gimmickry.

Specs wish-list

Here is EOSHD’s wish list for an enthusiast’s NEX-Semi-Pro video camera, bearing in mind this would be a consumer / semi-pro offering and not an F3!

• Faster version of NEX 5N sensor optimised for video, a lovely clean 1080p image like the GH2
• 1080/60p/24p and PAL / NTSC switchable
• Just H.264 at 50Mbit 4-2-2 (no AVCHD standards crap thanks! And I don’t care about 10bit, LOG, external HDMI recording, etc.)
• Electronic follow focus capability using silent AF motors of E-Mount lenses to rack focus seamlessly with optional Sony electronic follow focus wheel
• Switchable SteadyShot Inside for legacy lenses as well as OSS on the E-Mount lenses
• Articulated 5″ LED backlit monitor, thin and lightweight but cased in aluminium
• No aliasing or moire – achieve it with optical low pass filter if it brings cost down
• Similar form factor to DSLR (I do not like the FS100 or F3)
• Manual audio control, no XLR (consumers and most enthusiasts don’t need the robustness) but higher quality internal circuitry please
• High resolution stills
• Price point of $3000

Above: Joy Ride shot on the Nikon D800 streams in full 1080p so make sure to view full screen!

The long rumoured and leaked Nikon D800 was officially announced today. This is Nikon’s equivalent of Canon’s upcoming 5D Mark 3 and is a very attractive camera which brings almost all of the Nikon D4′s pro DSLR features down to $2999 (£2399 in the UK) but sacrifices cutting edge low light ability for crazy resolution.

Talking of Canon, the 5D Mark 3 (like the Mk II before) is expected to bring the image quality of the mighty Canon 1D X (like the 1DS Mark 3 before that) down to a consumer price point.

Nikon has now done this with the D4 but they have decided to put a Sony 36MP sensor in it. This resolution is almost useless for video but it can have one nice benefit which is a finer grain of noise.

But only if the downscaling to 1080p is advanced. A first glance at internally recorded 1080p suggests that it isn’t. More on the external uncompressed HDMI below.

By ways of example the 24Mp Sony NEX 7 has finer noise over the 16MP NEX 5N but on the 22MP 5D Mark II the basic downscaling and compression removes the fine grain of noise where the 16MP Panasonic GH2 maintains it.

In terms of low light performance the D800 won’t be as good as the D4 for stills at high ISOs – but in video mode good downscaling and 3D noise reduction as seen on the Panasonic GH2 can make a hell of a difference. The GH2 is awful in stills mode at high ISOs compared to the 5D Mark II, but cleaner and more detailed with a fine noise grain at ISO 3200 with the hack compared to the 5D Mark II in video mode at ISO 3200.

A good video mode can overcome the limitations of a compromised sensor. Also if you compare the amount of dynamic range in 5D Mark II JPEGs – it is insane – to the amount that survives in video mode, it is a big difference.

So the sensor isn’t everything.

Despite low light performance not being the D800′s strongest suit (unusually for Nikon), there is no doubt that at $2999 the D800 is great value for money. Compare that to the D4 or indeed a mega-megapixel Hasselblad back!

The Sony-produced sensor in the D800 is 36MP and could be the same as the one to be featured in Sony’s as yet announced 2012 full frame model.

Clearly this is one hell of a sensor, and very speedy. I’ve noticed zero rolling shutter in footage so far. Sony have put a massive amount of resources into producing their own sensors lately and that investment is really beginning to show. The sensor in the NEX 7 is also absolutely on the bleeding edge of what’s currently possible. (Full review soon – just editing the footage)

Now I don’t quite understand why Nikon isn’t making full use of video when they have such capable sensors.

The Aptina sensor they had commissioned for the Nikon J1 outputs the full 10MP at up to 60 frames per second. That is 4K video right there on the sensor.

Clearly 4K video is now a very affordable proposition on the sensor side but in order to build a video camera around it you need a lot of expensive hardware and expertise – plenty of memory, fast processors, cooling and a very good encoder chip.

Nikon don’t seem to have the desire to play that game. They are a traditional photographic company when they could be a formidable player in the video industry too.

Above: moire – at least on the internally recorded 1080p – is not nice on the Nikon D800 and not a great improvement on the way the 3 year old 5D Mark II samples video

External HDMI and advanced audio on the D800

Audio support and HDMI are strong points on the D800 and it is clearly the best DSLR for that… on paper.

Now uncompressed HDMI image quality is a great mystery on the Nikon D800, as it still is for the D4, because Nikon thought that rather than to encourage pre-orders and actually demonstrate one of the camera’s headline features for video, they have kept it all hush hush and just let us view a ton of highly compressed 1080p streams on Vimeo and YouTube as being representative.

There are no files originating from uncompressed 4:2:2 HDMI on either Nikon so far and it is a massive fail on their side, certainly not the fault of the photographers they commissioned to shoot with it.

Uncompressed HDMI will avoid having a long-GOP codec which estimates between real frames. On unpredictable fast movement this causes a reduction in image quality. The 1D X and possibly 5D Mark 3 have high bitrate recording built in and the ALL-I feature of the 1D X gives you an i-frame codec which is much better for the kind of fast paced motion you see in the Nikon D800 Joy Ride video.

Above: the internal codec on the Nikon D800 is quite muddy, and I don’t like the harsh edges around highlights or the overall softness to wide shots (see below)

This stops contrast areas going all muddy and lends motion a more convincing and cinematic feel.

However apart from on the GH1 I have never been massively bothered by long GOP encoding of video since my style doesn’t go for a lot of fast paced action. As long as it is done properly with B frames and at a high bitrate long-GOP can be fine like on the GH2. Yes AVC Intra on my hacked GH2 definitely gives movement a very subtle extra ‘x-factor’ as opposed to having standard AVCHD with I-B-P frames and all that motion estimation trickery going on – but it is a VERY subtle difference.

The best feature of uncompressed HDMI on the D800 is all in the name. It is, erm, uncompressed!! This could seal the deal for a lot of people. To have 250Mbit ALL-I ProRes on an affordable external recorder which also doubles as a nice field monitor is very attractive indeed. But it is unlikely to fix the rather ugly way in which the Nikon D800 resolves detail. Resolution is sampled poorly on the D800. Colour is sampled at 4:2:2 via HDMI and 4:2:0 internally. Could resolution also be better sampled via the HDMI output? Unlikely, and removing compression won’t help, but it will be interesting to see.

The internal codec is quite basic and at a low bitrate of 24Mbit, far less than on the 5D Mark II especially with Magic Lantern. The image is not actually that much better resolved than the 5D Mark II (it seems from initial videos). In terms of aliasing and moire it is the same old story.

For me this is far less important when you are projecting the footage but on Vimeo and full screen on a laptop it isn’t pretty. Sadly this is how a lot of people view video these days, myself included most of the time. The internet is actually more demanding on having clean resolution that people think.

Projection (and large TVs for that matter) soften the edges of pixels like a anti-aliasing filter, unlike a pin-sharp computer display where you see all the ugliness close up. So the D800 footage will look superb on a good display when you are sat back from it.

But still it is disappointing that the D800 is stuck in the dark ages when it comes to this issue. The old GH1 still performs better than the Nikon D800 in terms of having less moire. Expeed 3 in the Nikon J1 has the same aliasing issues as the D800 and that costs just $399 so do I expect Nikon to fix stuff like this on a $2999 camera (let alone on the $5999 D4?). YES unequivocally and it is a scandal they haven’t.

A beautiful Canon C300 or hacked Panasonic GH2 image in terms of resolution and no artefacts you will not be getting from the D800 (unless the HDMI pipeline is rendered completely different – unlikely).

To pre-order or not to pre-order?

So if your finger is hovering over the pre-order button on a Nikon D800 today I really would very carefully consider the future. We are but 1 month through 2012 which is set to be the most jam-packed year for DSLR video yet. By Photokina in September we will have most if not all of them announced, chief amongst them the Canon 5D Mark 3, Panasonic GH3 and a new Rebel / 700D. There is also the new Sony SLT and NEX models and already confirmed is the very expensive 1D X but believe me when people see the video from this I expect their wallets to spring open like a burst water pipe. The full frame sensor in the 1D X is the fastest Canon has ever produced and is able to downscale the image onboard using far more of the original data, resulting in less binning, no line skipping and more sophisticated downscaling to 1080p. Reduced (practically to nil) moire & aliasing is Canon’s stated aim for that camera and there is a good chance the improvements will trickle down into the 5D Mark III and the new Rebel which both also feature new, faster sensors with inline A/D converters and a modern DIGIC 5 image processor.

With the Nikon D800 it is a case of being calm, wait and see…

UPDATE: De-clicked aperture ring is on the lens for video, according to 43Rumors whom I am sure can read the original German better than I can! Good news!

This came out of the blue. Cosina are releasing a sister lens for the 50mm equivalent Micro Four Thirds 25mm Nokton F0.95.

The new lens will be equivalent to 35mm on full frame and features the same incredible aperture of F0.95 for extra depth of field control and low light performance on the GH2 and other Micro Four Third (MFT) cameras.

43rumors today leaked the lens,giving it a middle-FT3 rating and since the initial image was so visually similar to the Nokton 25mm I initially didn’t believe it! Well it turns out (again) 43Rumors was right!

The lens will be available in late March for a hefty ¢1299. This is not the price I would have liked to see but since the Nokton 25mm F0.95 was handmade, mechanically superb, and almost constantly in demand at ¢899 I am not surprised at all Cosina feel they can charge more this time around.

I consider the Nokton 25mm F0.95 the best lens on the GH2, and it is the one I use the most out of the 30-40 I own. I recommend it in my top 9 in the EOSHD GH2 Shooter’s Guide.

Here are the full specs (translated from German):

I have the idea to make a tense but beautiful low light, budget thriller with the Nikon J1. It is ideally suited to it. It has the least amount of rolling shutter for handheld camera movement of all the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras, and the smaller sensor (2.7x crop) makes it far easier to focus at fast apertures like F1.2 for low light. At that aperture on full frame you will have a nose in focus, but eyes off! Not much good.

The video above, my first test of the Nikon J1, is just a bit of fun using tiny 16mm film c-mount lenses, set to a part of the sound track for Vertigo.

I used the Nikon J1 because all of the beautiful c-mount glass here just cannot be made proper use of on a DSLR.

I’ve used one very old 16mm Bolex lens for the wide angle shots which vignette slightly and wide open it is quite low contrast and dreamy, giving it an authentic 1950′s cinema feel.

This is the mighty Kern Switar 10mm F1.6 and it just about focusses to infinity on the Nikon J1. With a subject beyond 3m away you don’t need to touch the focus, even at F1.6 and it gives you a pleasantly restrained depth of field for normal medium-range shots – not ridiculously shallow. When your subject is close up within 1m you do get some nice bokeh but the background is not completely creamed out, all in a all a nice effect. Sometimes you want to show what is behind your subject – be at iconic scenery or a shadowy figure creeping up with an axe.

I’m using Ceicio7′s adapter (pictured bottom right)- made by himself in Poland (Buy it now). It is solid, precise and actually very affordable for just $35.

The other primes I’m using (to the left and right of the Kern Switar above) are Computar video lenses which are like the modern Cosina Voigtlanders of CCTV lens world. Impressivly sharp even wide open, very fast apertures (both F1.3!) and focus to infinity. I am not sure if they do so out of the box though. Mine are modified for infinity focus on the GH2, and actually go slightly past infinity on the Nikon J1. The modification involves removing a small screw under the rubber focus ring grip so that the focus ring turns past infinity.

The Computar 25mm F1.3 and 50mm F1.3 are made in Japan and mechanically are pretty good too with a 100% metal construction and smooth de-clicked manual aperture ring. They are TV lenses actually (not CCTV) so you can happily adjust the aperture smoothly during a shot. I never do that for my shoots but for run & gun it can be helpful when moving around an area with a lot of varying lighting conditions.

If you want to take stills or movies with the J1 and c-mount you have to make sure the camera is set to M (manual) mode. Anything relying on auto exposure like P, A, S won’t work and the camera will just display a message crying about its lens being lost.

Believe me you will want to lose the kit lens if you are doing low light stuff. Almost all the c-mount glass you can adapt to the Nikon J1 are brighter than the Nikon CX lenses available, it really was a crummy effort by Nikon there.

Above: this photo was taken with Fuji X10 (best compact I have ever owned… Review soon)

This camera is very cheap and simplified for Latte Mums but you DO get full manual control in video mode. However less well heeled is the manner in which the camera handles Europeans. It handles us with about as much tact as a burly German bouncer at a night club. There only frame rates are 30p and 60p, and the camera requires the shutter to be set at 1/100(!) otherwise you get terrible flickering / strobing with PAL electric lights. The GH2 has this too in 24p but not as bad and you can use 1/25 and 1/50 to get around it on all but the most stubbornly European of lights. 1/100 isn’t much good for low light and natural looking motion blur is it Nikon?

1/60 is the minimum shutter if you enjoy flickering lights. In America and Asia you can use 1/60 just fine – most of the time.

Above: Computar 50mm F1.3 on the Nikon J1

Unfortunately the camera doesn’t have 24p (NIKON!!!) – except for 2 seconds in a weird ‘moving photo snapshot’ format that works in auto-only and only with the kit lens

But image quality wise the J1 is actually pretty damned good. Not quite at the GH2 level for resolution and the beautifully resolved detail that camera (uniquely) can do, but it has less moire than on the current Canon DSLRs and nice colour, decent dynamic range. It is of course a much smaller sensor than that found in the NEX 7, and the GH2 but with c-mounts that is an advantage. On the NEX my Computar 50mm F1.3 vignettes. On the GH2 my 25mm does so slightly and the 10mm Switar does so wildly. On the J1 that 10mm is a usable atmospheric fast wide!

Surprisingly the Nikon’s sensor is pretty good in low light, quite clean even at ISO 1600 for video.

It is also extremely fast – it does 4K RAW stills at 60fps. Yes you read that correctly.

The catch? Memory and heat restraints mean that it does so for only 1 second, and 30fps at 2 seconds. It does however use a electronic shutter for 4K stills, which is quite an advancement for the breed – no mechanical shutter. This is one reason why the rolling shutter skew on the J1 is so minimal in video mode – the fast sensor output and optimised electronic shutter.

That this sensor (made by Aptina, not Nikon) is in a $400 consumer camera is pretty amazing. Now all it needs is to be backed up with some serious CPU power, large buffer RAM and better cooling – and you have your 4K video for under $2000, possibly even less. That would sell like hot cakes, but nobody in the world seems to have both the vision and the means to make one! Frustrating!

As it is, 4K stills at just 1 second burst is not a feature I’ll be using very often.

Advice for Nikon

The J1 mirrorless can be a better video camera just by adding a articulated screen and better firmware. Those minimum shutter speeds of 1/60 for NTSC and 1/100 for PAL need to be dropped. Take it down to at least 1/30.

Add 24p and 25p because 30p just looks rubbish. (I’ve Twixtored more than I wanted to in the above video just to get rid of the kinetic 30fps video look and to make it more dreamy).

Make it usable in P,A and S modes without a CX lens attached – or at least give us some proper fast primes.

Forget about 400fps – make it 120fps and up the resolution. The image is hideous and usable in slow mo video mode at 400fps. With such a fast sensor think how much more detailed the image could be if they dropped the frame rate by 3x to something a bit more sensible.

Give us a live HDMI output while recording. Not difficult in 2012!

And finally PLEASE put a dedicated ISO button on the camera. At the moment it is buried in the menus. I can understand the need to keep a low end camera like this simple, but Nikon could have at least made one of the existing buttons programmable like the delete key in the bottom right or have it on the F function key. Otherwise the usability and menus are spot on and really nice to use, as well as being some of the most responsive on a mirrorless or DSLR I’ve ever used. Build quality isn’t bad either, and the buttons and scroll wheel feel good to use.

I can see the Nikon J1 being kept for my Hitchcock low light thriller… If only to use those beautiful vintage c-mount lenses on a true 16mm sized sensor. It is something of a ‘speciality’ camera, and somewhat experimental, but it is nice to have the choice over my usual DSLRs and well worth such a low price tag.

Thanks mainly to the unexpected success of their NEX line of consumer mirrorless cameras, Sony are probably the only company to realise the truth about mirrorless and its future direction. Namely that it is the future, especially for video.

As a result they have invested in the right technologies at the right time. The NEX 7 has a better electronic viewfinder than the $16,000 Canon C300.

It is a 0.5″ panel (0.73x – as large as on a 1DS Mk 3), the same size as the C300′s EVF, but has a higher resolution of 2.35 megapixel, compared to 1.55 megapixel on the C300. Sony’s OLED technology with white organic EL layer gives it a very wide gamut – better colour accuracy and better contrast, with inky blacks and is optimised for video with no smearing. It is an absolute joy to shoot video through it.

Happily you can also connect an external EVF like the Zacuto EVF Flip and take all the text off the live view display and put them in a black bar at the side. Given that the camera also has adjustable peaking makes this is the best DSLR for manual focus and monitoring.

You get a live histogram and manual focus assist magnification in the EVF and over HDMI. When you hit record there is no interruption to HDMI but the histogram and magnification become unavailable on the camera (peaking carries on).

The NEX 7 has a Super 35mm (in cinema terms) sized sensor, a metal body, three dials, no less than 6 programmable buttons and 1080/60p. This is the polar opposite approach to a mirrorless camera than the Nikon J1. In PAL regions it has 50/25p which is good to see on a consumer camera.

Compared to the $600 NEX 5N, there’s plenty on the video side that is new and worth the extra cost (which is double).

What’s new over the NEX 5N?

• Newer 24MP sensor. To my eye Sony’s new sensor has better colour and a finer noise grain than the video from the 16MP NEX 5N. There were doubts about it in low light. We’ll come to that later in the full review.
• TruFinder OLED EVF – Sony are a leader in this technology and it shows. Unlike on DSLRs with a mirror, you can of course shoot video through the viewfinder on the NEX 7. I shot the video above entirely handheld through the EVF without a rig.
• CineStyle-alike flat picture profile – The NEX 7 has an extremely useful picture profile called Neutral that offers the flattest image I have ever seen in a DSLR video mode. Fantastic for grading, and no other camera holds onto as much detail in the lows as the NEX 7 with this profile dialled down.
• Beefier handling – To have shutter speed, aperture and ISO on dials rather than buttons is a real pleasure. Although I cannot seem to reassign the Tri Navi aperture control wheel for something else when the aperture control is on the lens which is a minor issue.
• Unlike the A77 / A65, there is no 20% FOV crop in video mode (but no Steady Shot Inside unfortunately)
• The controls and menus seem more responsive
• A new live view display mode with no text overlays on the image
• Standard 3.5mm mic socket and hotshoe (NEX 5N had neither)

Now video on DSLRS so far has been very hit and miss. Products like the GH2 have been astounding. Others very disappointing. The lack of exciting developments in Canon-land with DSLR video has nothing to do with putting clear water between the 5D Mark II and Canon C300. If there is a conspiracy (which I doubt there is) it is probably to do with protecting the consumer camcorder business. The C300 and 5D Mark II are aimed at two different markets. But in terms of what Canon started with the 5D Mark II – with large sensor video and interchangeable lenses – the C300 is exactly what I didn’t want them to do – build our dream video DSLR but price it out of our hands.

But there is clearly a massive market in-between the $700 GH2 and $16,000 Canon C300 full of people like you and I who want a decent super 35mm video camera for more serious creative shooting than a camcorder can offer.

In the 1970′s these were Super 8 people and there were 2 million of them.

Thankfully thing are very different to the hobbyist Super 8 days where amateurs were cutting home movies for the first time. Today the gap in capability between pro and consumer technology has never been smaller and the convenience, ease of use and speed that the technology has brought to shooting and editing is genuinely ground breaking. At its peak Super 8 was incredibly popular but almost all of these users gave up due to the difficulty of processing and editing film. This won’t happen with DSLRs.

If you had given someone a NEX 7 in 1970 they would have changed the world with it. Today it has tougher competition…

Compared to Panasonic GH2

I ended up using the GH2 in preference to the 5N (and 5D Mark II) – however the NEX 7 is a much tougher challenge for my Lumix. The sensor is clearly better than the one in the GH2. In stills mode this is most apparent. In video mode the same strengths that the NEX 5N had over the GH2 are apparent but more so…. Colour is richer and more accurate, gradation and tonality are smoother, dynamic range is greater, latitude (especially in the lows) is increased and a flatter image profile helps to give more flexibility when grading the footage. In fact there are almost double the number of picture profiles than on the NEX 5N and GH2 including a new ‘Night’ profile which more accurately represents low contrast colours.

The EVF and LCD are also better than the GH2 and so is build quality.

However, I haven’t yet used the NEX 7 enough to answer the big question – which is the best all-rounder?

In terms of resolution and detail they are close but the GH2 has less compression and cleaner edges to high contrast lines.

OLED EVF

Technical details at DPReview here

Since it isn’t an optical viewfinder that produces the final image, it seems to make more sense to look through the sensor.

The digital generation easily come to terms with this, since they are so used to handling live view. Some of the optical generation and those who are used to, say, 16mm film, really dislike the idea. A cinematographer using a light meter, someone experience with exposing film and someone used to the realism of an optical viewfinder will find any EVF a step down and the same goes for many professional photographers. Their position is understandable, since it is not until now that EVF technology has been able to do justice to what the sensor really sees.

The OLED EVF in the Sony NEX 7 is the first to really do that.

Clarity, resolution, contrast and colour are the best I’ve ever seen on a digital display – better than the main LCD. However you do get a loss of sharpness at the edges if your eye is not dead-on to the viewfinder. I hadn’t noticed that as much with the A65 but it’s a minor issue.

The EVF has a diopter (rather awkwardly placed) that allows adjustment for individual eyesight requirements.

The Fuji X100 has a very interesting hybrid optical viewfinder and an EVF as well. I have to say I prefer the OLED EVF on the NEX 7.

As for my 5D Mark II, old style optical viewfinders are a thing of the past. They have no future role to play for me. They don’t work in video mode. They are hopeless for focussing with on a DSLR and manual glass without a distracting focussing screen installed. They don’t accurately represent the final exposure.

Stills

The sensor is extremely good and this is most evident for stills. Even though Sony crammed 24MP onto the APS-C sensor which is more than on the full frame 35mm 5D Mark II, RAW at ISO 1600 noise is organic looking and has a fine grain. The quality of stills on the NEX 7 are astonishing and at the 5D Mark II level. It is like an APS-C version of that camera image quality wise.

Compared to the sensor in the Canon G1 X, Panasonic G1X, Olympus EP-3 – some consumer rivals for stills – the NEX 7 is way ahead.

Full review coming soon

Since I’ve only had the camera 2 days I’ve not yet put it head-to-head with the GH2 and 5D Mark II, which are the best DSLRs for video at the moment. Whether I end up using the NEX 7 more than these will be an interesting question and I hope to give you the answer and a lot of shootout footage in the coming days.

Consumer 4K is on the way, it is now as inevitable as the first 1080p stickers were on your TVs and cameras of 5 years ago. In an interview with DPReview, Nikon’s Tetsuya Yamamoto says that the Nikon J1′s (Aptina produced) sensor is already capable of a 4K horizontal resolution in video mode (although he doesn’t reveal the vertical resolution which I suspect would be lower than 2K).

I’ve been shooting with the Nikon J1 recently, using it like a digital 16mm Bolex. Since the sensor is a 2.7x crop, that is much closer to 16mm than the GH2 so more c-mount lenses can be used without vignetting, and it can go to a relatively clean ISO 1600 which you cannot do in Ex Tele crop mode on the GH2 without significant noise.

It certainly isn’t as good a camera as the GH2, NEX 7 or 5D Mark II but it has a unique purpose as a b-camera, artistic shot getter and as something very easy to focus with at fast apertures in low light.

I’ll have some footage online soon. The output is actually very nice but is somewhat hampered by a minimum shutter speed of 1/100 when shooting in PAL regions and the lack of a cinema 24p mode.

In the interview Nikon say they are also going to introduce some faster CX lenses. They don’t need to bother, you can adapt far better stuff already. I’m using some fast F1.3 c-mount lenses and a Kern Switar 10mm F1.9 which is roughly 27mm wide angle on the Nikon J1.

When to expect consumer 4K?

The first baby steps have already been made but these can safely be discounted. The real first generation of products are yet to properly arrive. Consumer 4K will first arrive in the 4K2K format and probably be delivered via HDMI version 1.4 and the new higher capacity Blu Ray discs. So the first 4K images most consumers will see on their new 4K TVs will be from DSLRs and Blu Ray. As with 1080p it will probably take an updated Playstation 4 and Xbox to help the general consumption of 4K go main stream. We can probably expect those within 2 years.

Canon are developing their own RAW codec for 2K and 4K video. In a patent filed in July 2010 and published yesterday, Canon describe a codec which stores raw sensor data from a 12bit high resolution RGB sensor with Bayer colour filter array.

The inventor is listed as Siu-Kei Tin (Milpitas, CA) for Canon.

It seems Canon intend to use CF card as the recording format for the RAW codec rather than SSD drives, so it could well be destined for a DSLR as well as any C300 successor.

Canon describe 4096 x 2048 RAW video at 12bit / 30fps as having a data rate of 2.8125 Gib/sec which is ‘too high for CF cards’.

Unlike uncompressed RAW, Canon’s RAW codec would reduce this data rate (whilst maintaining image quality).

From the patent -

“One trend in video capture is high definition capture. In this regard, the acquisition format is not necessarily the same as the delivery format. For an example in acquisition format, movie cameras can often support 4K capture or higher”

“As such, there are trends to support high resolution and high frame rate for video capture. By using raw sensor data output, however, data transfer rate and storage capacity of recording mediums can be limiting factors. Accordingly, there is a desire to output raw sensor data with reduced data transfer rate.”

“One conventional solution that has been implemented in some camera products is to use a form of data compression. Unlike rendered RGB data (e.g., sRGB), however, linear light sensor data may not be amenable to well known compression algorithms such as H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) or VC-1 (SMPTE 421M). Further, such compression generally introduces artifacts to the camera raw data, and these artifacts may be difficult to fix in the post-production. Thus, there may be a practical implication that, when shooting at high resolution such as 4K, one is limited to lower frame rate, such as 24 fps.”

“Disclosed [patent] describe devices and methods for recording successive frames of raw sensor data depicting a moving scene.”

The patent also describes a high resolution RGB sensor and colour filter array ‘which can correspond to a Bayer pattern’. Both DSLRs and the C300 use this sensor technology.

Thank you to EOSHD forum member Tungah for drawing this to our attention

PS

Maybe this is the testbed?

Nikon are taking pre-orders for the D4. But based on the sample videos so far, if you are interested in using one for video I’d hold off.

It puzzle me why Nikon would want to put out such poor quality files for prospective D4 owners.

I can’t imagine Nikon taking a bunch of  640×480 JPEGs and claiming these are representative of the amazing output of their new DSLR so why do it with video?

First it must be said I have some big doubts about this camera.

All of the footage so far shows signs of poor downscaling which is not the result of post workflows and heavy compression.

Nikon did not work with filmmakers to produce the videos, instead photographers – some of them with no clue about video – and some admitting that themselves.

Chase Jarvis had no footage… Thus far. Nikon themselves have been very poor at getting information about video quality out there in the open. They won’t explain how the sensor is downscaled despite being asked several times.

Now – if the stills output looked like the shot above, would you buy one? Does Nikon seriously believe that highly compressed 720p will help $6000 pre-orders flood in?

The camera has been on pre-order for a couple of weeks now. I cancelled mine.

The first officially sanctioned material that is put on the internet is important, but everything has been either 720p, or 1080p at very low bitrates.

Although the new D4 has the faster Expeed 3 image processor, downscaling also depends on the speed (and design) of the sensor. In fact downscaling is often done on the sensor side as well as on the image processor itself.

The GH2 has a 100% digital sensor with an onboard conversion from analogue signal to digital per line, so is very fast (partly in order to improve the speed of contrast detect AF at 120 impressions per second) so is able to downscale using more of the full sensor data from 18MP to 1080p.

The upcoming Olympus OM-D is said to have a newer even faster sensor allowing for better video output than the GH2 (although this is only a rumour at this stage – see 43rumors.com and it depends how it is encoded and processed).

You can always tell the difference between compression or poor transcoding, and poor acquisition quality on a DSLR.

For a start, compression doesn’t cause aliasing and moire.

Compression also does not diminish detail on shallow depth of field shots where 90% of the frame is out of focus, only on wide shots with a large amount of fine detail is a high bitrate required to maintain detail across the entire frame.

On the D4, even with a thin focus plane the detail is soft.

The D4 videos in 1080p I’ve seen are both softer than the old 5D Mark II and contain aliasing aplenty, not just heavy compression.

For instance, see the guitar strings and the circular pattern around the sound hole.

This is as ugly as hell and I have no idea why Nikon felt this was suitable marketing material for a $6000 flagship.

On wide shots like the one at the top of this article, the 1080p output of the Nikon D4 when viewed close up is atrocious, showing heavy aliasing and a lack of detail.

Again – apply the same to sample photos not video, and pros would be up in arms! Zero pre-orders.

At first I thought this was 720p upscaled to 1080p at a bitrate of 10Mbit.

So I experimented and upscaled my 720p GH2 footage to 1080p at a bitrate of 10Mbit.

And it looked far better.

Of course we can only go off the available samples so far. But again, post workflows on 5 separate videos from 5 different photographers cannot all have introduced aliasing and a universal softness of detail. In my opinion that is down to the camera’s downscaling.

Clearly these photographers are not allowed to talk too much about what the REAL quality of footage is like from the D4 – that is if they know what the real quality of video even looks like.

Furthermore an uncompressed HDMI output won’t make a difference if the sensor scaling is not up to the job. On the spec sheet Nikon list “1080p HD Broadcast Quality Video”. We’ve seen no evidence of that so far.

So it is either a huge marketing fail, a huge communication fail or a huge camera failing. Time will tell…

I fear the worst for the D4 but don’t take any of this as final until we have someone with an actual clue (and not signed up to an NDA) to pick up a D4, record some footage, and to tell us the truth.

So far neither Nikon nor the photographers they enlisted to shoot promotional video with have done so.

Until they do, they will no longer be getting my pre-order.

UPDATE: The lens is now available from Samyang’s international dealer based in Poland. Buy it now

The new full frame Samyang 25mm F1.4 ED AS UMC will be released in the first week of February according to Samyang’s official Facebook page, where the first samples images have also been posted.

Pricing is set for Europe at €599 for the Canon mount version and €625 for the Nikon mount. That is Samyang’s most expensive lens yet but if it is anything like as impressive as Samyang’s previous offerings it will be worth every cent. It is half the price of the Canon equivalent, and a 24mm F1.4 on full frame is a mouthwatering proposition. Here’s a good example of the Canon L version 24mm F1.4 in action on the 5D Mark II.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Samyang have release some sample images from the lens.

You can view these here but they are of rather low resolution.

South Korean optics have a habit of getting pretty close to Canon L glass for half the price. True, most of it is low end, but the Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 and Samyang 35mm F1.4 are notable exceptions, getting very close to the performance of Canon and Nikon’s equivalents for far less money. AF isn’t as good and Samyang’s glass is all manual focus, but that is not a problem for video.

Source: Samyang via JG Harding