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Honestly, I am a little confused. Why buy the ZR if you want an h.265 codec camera? The ZR will probably be my next camera purchase but I am buying it for the RedCode Raw/n-raw and 32bit float audio. I wish there were better 4K raw options but that doesn't exist so I'm going to deal with it, I won't buy it and then say... Nikon needs to fix the lack of 4K raw options in the camera that I already knew didn't have good 4K raw options. If I decide to shoot 4K for "lesser" projects, I'll just use the ProResHQ with n-log or even Nikon Flat for certain things. I don't mean to be rude, but there are so many cameras on the market that shoot great full frame h.265. Raw video isn't for everybody, nor should it be.

The FX5 is 5599€ here, the ZR is 2449€. I think most customers understand the ZR is not meant to be an FX3 or FX5 at half price.

As a person who is waiting for used ZR prices to drop a bit more before picking one up, this all sounds good to me. 😅

True, however I know several people personally who have bounced out of the ZR due to the same issue. My local dealer was mentioning that several ZRs are being traded in for the FX5. I know a fix is coming, but I'm afraid it will come when it's no longer relevant in the market!

Here's a preview, very early days yet but the idea is to have a wiki page for every camera that draws together all the trusted resources for that model onto one single page with a clean design, no spam, no tracking malware banners, and no clickbait. Within each page: A ranking system In-depth detailed info and specs at a glance. LUTs and downloads, such as links to firmware updates, colour profiles, etc. A box with only "trusted" high quality YouTube reviews sourced per camera. Links to the top 5 best quality written reviews, manually sourced by me per camera. That will replace DPReview and Google search results for camera models, both enshitified to the point of unusable now, with so much AI and clickbait.

Nikon are in trouble. Camera sales down 22%. RED suffering in the filmmaking downturn. Patent has lost the biased ref. 1-0 down and could be 5-0 by full time.

The ZR is a smaller and lighter body and thermal management could be the issue. The Z8 and especially Z9 have a lot of mass that includes heat sinks that help keep components cool. None of them have cooling fans. The Zf (the one with the dials) is another smaller and lighter body (compared to Z8; it is not nearly light as the ZR) and it's actually quite easy to get it to get hot in stills shooting. Nikon made a choice to keep the ZR design quite thin without a built-in fan, and to make long recording times available, they seem to have compromised on the shadow noise reduction algorithm to reduce processor load, the result is a h.265 codec which in log mode is soft. They have indicated that they are working on a firmware update with a higher quality h.265 in mind.

Ouch! I thought H.265 was fixed in the last update... I was wrong.

What I don't understand is the H265 is fine in the Z6iii and Z8, so it's not like Nikon hasn't figured it out yet!

The main reason these patents have been considered legit in the US patent system despite the so-called inventions being obvious to any technical person familiar with photography, is probably that the US patent office's main purpose is to protect the interests of US-based companies, such as RED, against foreign businesses. Rational arguments don't necessarily apply, if the case involves a US vs. foreign manufacturer and the litigation happens in the US. Now, since a Japanese company (Nikon) currently owns RED, it's quite possible the US position also changes (not because of Panasonic's arguments but because there is no longer a US-owned business interest for the US patent office to protect). It is difficult see how a Nikon lawyer would defend these patents with a straight face, so their arguments may be ineffective. Anyway, most camera manufacturers nowadays seem to have some raw video capabilities in their cameras so the issue is not that pressing any more. It made sense for Nikon to buy RED to gain expertise and a presence in the mid and higher end video markets, irrespective of any patent issues. What do users complain the most about the first Nikon video camera? That the raw video files are too big. So, why was there so much fuss about the patents anyway, if people don't actually want to use raw video recording in practice?

This has to be fixed! I'll ask Jarred about this (particularly about the possibility of a lighter R3D NE option) and see what he says (E. :- )

There is one important point here : ) A Japanese decision invalidating the Japanese patent does not, by itself, kill equivalent patents in the US, Europe or anywhere else (even if they belong to the same patent family). Patent rights are territorial and each national right has, legally speaking, its own existence within its own jurisdiction. So no, compressed RAW has not suddenly become free for everyone everywhere : ) What is interesting is something else: if the claims are substantially equivalent (and that is obviously the important bit), the reasoning used in Japan may well become useful ammunition in other validity challenges. That is why, for me, the really interesting question is what Panasonic (or anyone else) does next. If equivalent RED claims start falling elsewhere too (particularly in the US), then yes, we may be looking at a very different landscape. - E. :- )

You are totally correct, however a fair bit of what I (we) shoot is delivered at the end of the the day, and TBH I can't bring myself to delete OG files when our productions are in the six digits. I ended up buying two 1TB owc cards, but still download and backing up to hard drives for a client and or producer end of a shoot day and asking them to hang around for another 40 min after a 12-15 hour day is not pleasant. Also I've seen this a few times on set where they shoot Raw and convert over to PRR LT without utilizing any of the raw capabilities and then deleting the raw, which makes me always wonder why shoot raw in the first place!!!!

At this rate they will shut down for good in very little time. That's cool. Have fun! And while you're at it maybe copy-paste your GH4 review on DPR on your new site before it's too late! 😆

Yes! I'm pretty sure 90% of the slightly older gear serves perfectly well for high-quality video. There are some true gems out there that seem to be relegated to obscurity, being the most egregious example Olympus' E-M1X. In the DSLR front I'm also certain Nikon's D780 is more than good for most video situations, or even Canon's good-ol' 90D. This only makes sense if you're buying used, of course.

At least so it seems https://www.dpreview.com/news/panasonic-did-what-apple-sony-and-nikon-couldnt-overturn-a-red-raw-video-patent/

The FX2 makes a lot more sense than people give it credit for. If you actually need open gate, internal RAW, 4K120 or the stacked sensor, then sure: FX5. If you don't, you're paying nearly another $2K for features you may never use. FX2 gives you full frame, 4K60, S-Log3, proper AF and an EVF already built in. For a lot of jobs that's enough. Different job. Different tool.

That works for long-term storage, but there are really two separate problems here. Transcoding R3D NE to H.265 solves the archive size. It does not solve the card capacity, ingest time, temporary disk space or transcoding time. A more efficient compromise might be to keep R3D NE only for the selects that actually benefit from RAW flexibility, then batch-transcode the rest to H.265 in REDWideGamutRGB / Log3G10. So the weak internal H.265 still matters. The workaround is viable, but it moves the cost from storage to workflow.

The Forgotten camera! (I had myself!!)

Why does nobody talk about the FX2? Much better value for money!

DPR is telling me about care homes, maybe they think it's itme? That's the first fold on desktop of an article - 10% content, 60% ads, 30% blank spaces. Maybe if they want to stuff 60% ads down our throats on every page at every scroll position, giving some of that blank space over to useful content would have been a consolation prize but they didn't even do that, the stupid cunts. Scrolling further and it gets worse. It's like a malware site. Finally relieved to reach the bottom of the article, with just 4 ads here - unfortunately they are laid out completely at random as if sprayed on with a paint gun. The conclusion is that DPR is now dead and it may have well as been shut down. Everything that was usable and useful about the classic site has been eviscerated. In terms of the historical specs and camera info I'll make my own site that can replace some of it, like a Wikipedia for every worthwhile camera ever made going back to the 90s. It's actually under development now so expect to see it within the next few months.

Indeed. So much empty space reserved for ads, the content just looks completely lost and every single change they've made to every single detail and feature feels like a massive downgrade, their tools and feature comparison database for example... now almost unusable. Yet still they pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Typical isn't it!

It looks like a beautiful place. Glad you had a nice trip! Were you looking for additional feedback on the video?

I quite liked it, but do know that if you're trying to capture anything with sound, the fan noise on the raw is really obnoxious. The image was pretty nice, though!

If you have 20 mm and 60 mm as the equivalent focal lengths that are available, the wider angle makes sense for including oneself in the footage, and showing a bit of environment, which must be a common thing in social media. However, at least I would preferentially shoot with 35 mm or 50 mm a lot of the time. By starting with an 8K sensor, you can get more detailed crops that mimic those lenses at least in angle of view. Of course, you lose light in cropping so the quality won't be the same as using one of the native options, but it is probably less damaged than if you start with a 4K sensor and crop from 20 mm to (say) 50 mm. I'm personally perfectly happy shooting in 4K with a 35 mm full-frame mirrorless camera and doing a bit of cropping doesn't really bother me, but the camera that I use makes the 4K footage by downsampling from 8K resolution, so even in the 4K file (typically for me Prores 422 HQ), there is a better starting point for cropping than if I had shot with a 4K native sensor camera (due to the Bayer sensor not registering all colors for all pixels natively). I think 20 mm would be extremely wide to shoot everything with (that's what the DJI Pocket 4P's magical sensor produces, 20 mm equivalent footage), and I'd want to moderate the angle of view a lot of the time to something in the 35 to 50 mm range. Thus the sensor resolution is likely to play some role in the practical quality that can be obtained. Although I like the idea of a camera that has a gimbal and can be just taken out of the bag and used, and I commend DJI for bringing the long-in-development LOFIC sensor into an actual consumer product, neither of these cameras (luma ultra and Pocket 4P) are really for me as I basically never do videos with myself in the footage, and the 20 mm equivalent angle of view is just not what I want from a video camera. Cropping (to get an acceptable angle of view) from a small-sensor camera is going to make noise more visible and detail less clear. I think use of a gimbal on a heavy full-frame mirrorless camera is painful for the setup that is required. Eventually I think some good compromises will arise, with moderately light total weight, internal (optical) zooms that don't require recalibration after FOV change, better integration of camera controls into the gimbal user interface, and some digital signal processing that is optimized to reduce the gimbal motor noise from on-camera audio tracks (this will require work on the motors themselves and the processing) are likely to make things more practical for me, but for now most of the time my gimbal is just not being used. With regards to the dynamic range, I'm used to slide film from long ago and when using it (for still photography) it was essential to photograph in what we called good light, which meant light that was suitable for the material, with no exposure latitude whatsover, and I still try to choose where I shoot so that the subjects and the scene will look good straight out of the camera where possible. With my camera the top video dynamic range is 12 stops and I've not run into anything that would make that feel inadequate, given the starting point of acceptable conditions for photography to begin with, in fact it feels wildly liberating what kind of post exposure adjustments are possible today. I would argue that if there is a situation which requires higher dynamic range, then alternatives probably result in better quality: use lighting for the main subjects in the foreground. If the scene can't be lit then shoot in a location which gives better results without lighting. Post-processing has its limits and I would argue it is not easy to mimic really good lighting on a scene with high contrast but no light (or too little light) on the subjects in post-processing. However, if you can use and benefit from 17 stops of dynamic range, by all means use it if available. I think my life is easier by carefully choosing where the original material is shot.