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Yes, you're exactly right. Musing about this is interesting to us, obviously! Here's my rambling take. The Japanese engineers have long been pursuing a different path of imaging evolution, as they've been in "electronics" mode for generations. Their culture kept them away from deep considerations of what film does vs. what digital does. The Japanese simply have a different sensibility about image IQ. This reality in of itself is a fascinating dive, going all the way back to traditional feudalism culture, WWII, national pride, and their "High Increasing Stage" era of the mid 20th century. Their imaging tendencies emerged out of their unique cultural context. In other words, once their engineering IQ evolution preferences were set, there was not much room for it go off on tangents. ARRI took a different road and put people on the development team that understood the physics and chemistry of film and wanted that look. ARRI engineering cuts and adds different spectrums for very good reasons. Thus, as you say when you mention plugins, emulation of film behavior is the thing, the whole additive vs. subtractive thing, for instance. ARRI does their adjustments in camera. So cinema follows ARRI to chase the IQ they know best, and ARRI becomes the cinema standard. The phrase "color science" is amusing to me. Because, yes, the engineering is science, but ARRI is in fact making their cameras behave with purposeful (and insightful) aberrations. They aren't going for accuracy, they're striving for colors that evoke a certain perception of emotion by being "pretty" which could be considered an artistic pursuit in their engineering craft. "ColorArt" doesn't have the same ring to it though. It's all pretty wild. I mean, I'm on forums where there are darkroom alchemists chasing esoteric processes to heighten certain color dyes in film, and minimize others by changing their development chemistry -- which is weird as heck and an extremely hard way to affect an image (save that when choosing the stock or when doing the enlargement print imo) but hobbyists aren't rational, they're just playing. There's a whole sub culture of analog photographers that deliberately buy decades old expired film just to see what happens with the dye degradation. All in all, there are an infinite number of ways to achieve color rendition. But, yeah, I'm with you. Give me a decent camera and I'll affect the image with a plugin and get it in the ball park. I'm not positioned financially or emotionally to be chasing the refined fringes of things. I enjoy mulling it over in places like this, but none of this sophisticated color science could be a part of my career. I'm not nearly talented enough to indulge it, nor smart enough for that.

Samyangs at f1.4 are not cheap plus they are big and heavy. As far as I remember you don't like big and heavy. Maybe older sigma lenses from HSM generation as Anaconda_ suggested. Sigma 24mm f1.8, 30mm f1.4, 50mm f1.4 HSM. They are all under 200 E/$. Not small though. If you want smaller and cheaper lenses then you have to accept they start at f1.8, f2 and f2.8. Then you have lots of option and not only with Canon. You can also adapt vintage lenses to EF adding second adapter. With speed booster they become f1.4 to f2 both quite usable in low light on m43 in my personal experience. I was in this place more than 5 years ago with BMPCC 4K. Went trough speed boosters, calculating focal lengths, spending lots of time researching and trying to build decent lens sets both vintage and modern. My frustration grew with time as I realized this won't be cheap nor ideal to my goals. Went FF and never looked back. My decision was driven specifically by lenses. I realized the hard way a well-known truth: We buy systems not cameras and lenses are more important than cameras. If I want to use vintage lenses, cheap lenses, have access to the largest pool of lenses - FF is the right choice. I may change one FF camera system with another, my vintage lens sets stay, lenses have the same focal length and character. Same is true for Canon EF lenses. A FF system is no longer more expensive than m43, especially when we include the lenses. Example Panasonic S5 vs Panasonic GX85 + speed booster. Paradoxically a FF system (body + lenses) may even come cheaper due to large pool of lenses than m43 + speed booster.

There are a lot of great camera options right now, but I think the lens ecosystem and overall usability matter just as much as the camera body itself. A camera that fits your workflow and encourages you to shoot more is usually the better choice than chasing specs alone.

I worded my response badly! I meant that the $700 US price tag was "already there" in terms of 'exorbitant, ridiculous, and "this is just an action camera - WTF"' which Kye had just said in anticipation of the AU pricing. I should have chosen phrasing that made it more clear that I wasn't simply repeating US pricing that is already known. 😅

I love the sigma 30mm f1.4. When I was using the GX80, it was pretty much the only lens I used.

I bought an EF-MFT speed-booster, now I need some lenses! It's a VILTROX EF-M2II, and I tried my 50mm F1.8 and the AF was somewhere between functional and like it had a mind of its own. The focus ring on the lens has such a short travel that it's impossible to use as a MF lens (which it wasn't designed for so I understand). I'm looking for some interesting / fast / cheaper EF lenses that will be fine manually focusing. I'm especially interested in lenses F1.4 or faster but are still budget lenses. My thoughts immediately turn to the early days of cheap Chinese glass, but I can't seem to find any as any search is overrun with Canon AF lenses, or with new MF lenses that are for EF-M mount but are incorrectly labelled as EF (even Meike has a lens labelled as EF that is clearly a mirrorless lens!), and while EF was the only mount people never bothered to include that information and so things don't appear in searches. Laowa doesn't even let you browse their products by mount! Our new robot overlords suggested some options: The Samyang/Rokinon series: 35mm 50mm 85mm F1.4 Zhongyi Mitakon Speedmaster 50mm f/0.95 (nice but it's over AUD1000!) Zeiss ZE series: 35mm f/2, 50mm 85mm f/1.4 MEIKE 50mm F1.2 Anything else I should be looking at? I really thought there were more third-party options around than just those.

If you like.. the thread I linked to included a link to a comparison of dyes and the digital sensors all had significantly weaker dyes in the bayer filters, probably to increase the sensitivity to light, but it means the spectrums of RGB overlapped a lot more than film, which hardly overlapped at all. This has all sorts of implications on digital vs film, and I have been pondering it since linking to that, but I'm not really sure what it really means in the context of ARRI colour science or even good colour science etc, which is why I didn't mention it. One thing worth mentioning is that when it comes to additive colour (like light) the response is a cone that gets wider (more saturated) at higher luma values, whereas subtractive colour (like dyes) the response is widest at the lowest levels of luma. This gives you two cones where the additive one (which is any monitor) can't fully replicate the most saturated parts of the subtractive response. However, now we have much higher dynamic range devices (HDR displays) they pretty much cover the dark-and-saturated part of the subtractive cone, and considering that modern cameras also have this kind of dynamic range they also capture it too, so that problem is mostly solved, with the only wrinkle being that you have to compress the whole gamut when grading your footage for SDR displays so it all fits, which is why film emulation plugins are so useful because they do a great job of this.

The "Australia Tax" is definitely real. It's getting less now thanks to how easy it is to buy direct online from overseas, but if you buy locally you pay a significant premium to the local importer who has exclusive rights to set pricing and sell those goods. I've known people who needed to buy something significant for their work, so rather than buying it locally, they took the family on a weeks holiday to Singapore (or the US) and bought the thing there and brought it back in their luggage... and even including all the costs of the family holiday etc it was still cheaper! I also remember someone from tech company needing to download a huge database from overseas and with internet speeds at the time they ended up flying there, burning it to a bunch of discs, then flying home again, and if you divided the total amount of data over the entire duration of the trip it was still dozens of times faster, and might even have been cost competitive on the data rates too.

yer where you are... by the time it gets to here and converted to aussie $ then add a gst on top and whatever other hidden taxes there are and its not going to be $700 supposably there's a free trade agreement between you people and us... the reality is i suspect theres nothing free about trade.

Yeah the Fp stuff was my gateway to him 😂

What a gem of a find that Japanese ARRI user is. Lots of nice Sigma Fp stuff on his channel as well.

Ooooo, now we can talk about color dyes and developing? Anyone for a convo about silver-halide grains and subtractive color formation? Let's chat about how radiant energy is converted into the kinetic energy of electrons and how those electrons are then trapped by AgS contaminants in the AgBr crystal lattice. j/k. But if you want a rabbit hole, chemistry is a good one.

Apparently they can't even educate their own sales reps about their own products, so their ability to sell a camera that doesn't have the latest specs may be less than required. Emily said one thing in the video that was amusing, she said she had to hand it to Sony, as they have managed to brainwash their customers into thinking that larger sensors are better and that smaller formats aren't useful for anything. This is true, there is all kinds of misinformation out there that people are just constantly repeating to each other. The total amount of money spent on marketing must be absolutely unfathomable, but the thing is that companies will gladly pay for it because sadly, it works.

Their strategy is similar to the one that I've been taking for a little while now - I used to hard mount more things to the cameras, but now I'm doing more with nato mounts and arri rosettes, but still keeping things compact. I've also been experimenting a little bit with some of the newer locking quick swap stuff - hawklock from Smallrig and the spider crab stuff from ifootage. They're both alright. Their setup is really clean/nice, but if it's shown cabled up at some point, I missed it. That's the biggest problem I've had (and still haven't solved in a way that I find satisfactory) in moving away from hard mounting my rig/parts. That one is gonna need an HDMI going from the camera to the monitor as well as the power cable going from the battery to the monitor. Their short type c cable shouldn't be too intrusive when plugged in, but the rest of the cables can get/feel a bit obnoxious.

My understanding is that WB is Linear gain, so it makes perfect sense for it to be before debayering. The logic is sound - WB is a mathematical adjustment to the sensor read-out and needs to take place before any creative operations, which for ARRI includes the debayering operation itself. Photographers click the button and expect the file on the card to contain the RAW un-altered readout from the sensor, which they think is somehow pure and have all these rules about what you're meant to do that they all just parrot to each other without anyone actually testing them and actually learning anything. ARRI is light-years beyond this, doing all kinds of processing. As someone who learned photography and then learned video, my impression was that going from photography -> videography was harder and took far more work to understand than learning photography from scratch. I randomly found a thread many years ago where someone posted the five most expensive photos ever sold without revealing where they were from, and the reaction was complete derision, with people saying things like "out of focus" "not sharp" "wrong WB" etc. When the OP revealed these were sold for millions of dollars each the reaction was various combinations of "we are right and people don't know what a good photograph is".

The $700 price tag in the US is already there!

As a counterpoint, their marketing seems to be working, given that they are now reporting big delays due to higher-than-expected preorders. https://nofilmschool.com/panasonic-lumix-l10-delays Of course, that could also be marketing and/or indicative that they just didn't make many in the first batch to force Fujifilm-esque shortages. This is somewhat true, I suppose, but Sony is still announcing/releasing 4K full frame MILC cameras and people are buying them. Nothing says Panasonic has to release 6K or 8K in a tiny body. If Panasonic released a camera in the GM5 body with the sensor from the GH5 or GH5s for $700, I'd be all over it. In fact, GoPro is releasing an action camera with terrible ergonomics, a smaller sensor, and a 1" mount for $700 and there's all kinds of buzz/excitement around it. If GoPro can cool an 8K sensor in an action camera body, why not Panasonic in a MILC body with 2x the volume? How long can the new GoPro bodies record 4K without overheating? Bet it's "until the battery dies."

Interesting that WB is placed before De-bayer. Photographers call it "white balance scaling" and prefer it not to be done by manufacturer, since its digitally boosting channels, which is irreversible process. After all its not like all things they're doing is science. Some decisions are just an engineer thinking its the best compromise.

Great to see it's still being used at this level. Looking at the linked image from above, I much prefer the handheld setup! I really wish someone would revive the same form factor and Kodak CCD sensor. Is it really doomed to be a one off? Can the same look ever be revived with a modern CMOS sensor? I have my doubts!

I have a GM5 and I'd love Panasonic to update it but the market usually always chooses "more features" over "tiny size" when given the choice. The Sigma Fp got slammed for no EVF, no IBIS. The Panasonic S9 gets passed over for being too limited, even though it's a similar spec to the S1H, with better AF! And with their 1 inch stuff like the LX15, nobody really bought it... all preferring RX100 VI etc, despite the fact the LX15 is one of the best compacts ever made with an F1.4 lens. If Panasonic made a mistake with the L10 it's the lack of a prime lens version to go after the X100 crowd. I also sense the age old marketing problems again with Panasonic. In Berlin, my local camera store (a very significant and long running one) has a Panasonic rep who is there very frequently, almost on a weekly basis. Panasonic have not even briefed him on the L10, let alone got a demo unit out for him to show to customers. Camera companies need to learn the marketing basics. If your strategy is to build hype around a big orchestrated online launch, have the camera in shops the next day, strike while the iron is hot. Why do the launch and actual release months apart and have nothing to sell?

I’d also make sure not to skimp on storage speed - having a fast NVMe drive for your active projects and cache files can make a surprisingly big difference to overall responsiveness, especially when working with larger footage formats.

Emily talks about the L10 and MFT small cameras: The main point I took from this made complete sense to me. New cameras need to have new specs, new specs means current sensors and they need more power (both for the sensor and also processing much more data), and therefore there is more heat and larger batteries are required, therefore the chassis just needs to be larger. I note that camerasize.com now has the L10 in their database, so that means we can get comparisons! It is larger than the LX100, but not by a crazy amount... Emily did note that it's not pocketable, but also that after carrying it around Japan for 10 days she didn't feel that it was heavy or bulky at any point, so I guess there's a distinction there between pocketable and it feeling large / cumbersome / etc. It's also interesting to compare to the S9: Obviously the S9 needs a lens (unless you're an abstract filmmaker!) but the purpose of the comparison is that the S9 is a FF MILC camera with IBIS and the body is slightly narrower(!) than the L10, and the same height. So, I see no reason there couldn't be a GX100 in the S9 body as it would be the same except with a smaller sensor. Obviously the depth is different, but that is lens dependent, and anyway, if it's not pocketable then it's down to how large it is when it's in use, and at this point it seems the L10 grows more than Pinocchio running for President: I'm sort-of hoping for a GX100 as it would be extremely tempting, and also hoping it won't happen, as it would save me from being extremely tempted, and draw my attention away from my GX85 that (apart from it gradually turning into a film camera) I am remembering how much fun it is to use!

Distinctive vocal, nice guitar work and live:

Yeah, there are differences for sure. Some situations show larger differences than others. One theme is that the Panny versions are much more saturated in skin tones than the Alexa. Coming from the kings of colour science, this has got to be deliberate, so even ARRI aren't trying to match the Alexa. I think that instead of asking "are they identical", the better question would be "does this impart some magic". I mean, everyone agrees that ARRI has the magic but their cameras don't even match each other between sensors, so it makes no sense to have a higher bar for the Panny version than we'd apply for ARRI themselves. My impression was that the ARRILogC profile and the ARRI709 LUT is the most like the Alexa, with the V-Log -> CST -> ARRI709 LUT not being as good. This makes sense as whatever colour / gamma secrets ARRI applies in-camera can be put into that profile as it's customised to the Panny sensors and also safely locked inside the camera away from prying eyes (unlike anything they put in their LUT). However, the Alexa also responds differently in the spatial dimension, with the far-red response including a more spatially distributed response from skin tones. We also know that Alexas process the image spatially in-camera due to their texture options and processing. Who knows what is going on with texture in there. IMHO the texture of Alexa images is right up there in importance as their colour response. None of this includes temporal aspects either. While I struggle to think of what processing might be occurring in-camera between frames, there might be some (we can't tell), and that's beyond the possibility that the hardware itself has some sort of secret properties that contribute to the image. FDTimes did an entire episode on the Alexa 35, with interviews of over a dozen people and 100+ pages: https://www.fdtimes.com/pdfs/free/115FDTimes-June2022-2.04-150.pdf Here is the image pipeline in the Alexa 35 (page 59): To give some idea about how stunningly out of our depth basically everyone on the internet is who talks about this stuff, starting on page 116, Dr. Tamara Seybold talks about Textures.. "For example, the debayering already needed to obtain the full color image doesn’t only generate RGB values but also influences the perceived sharpness and grain rendering. And many more steps influence the clarity and grain that are important aspects of the texture of an image. So we, in the image science team, pushed hard to obtain the best results by really optimizing each and every step in the image processing pipeline, not only for the best color rendition but also for the best texture, as we call it. We did that in a holistic way, optimizing steps in the beginning of the pipeline together with later steps so that the overall result would be best. At some point, this came down to having more than 30 parameters that we had to optimize together—a huge amount. We specifically had to build a small “texture grading machine” to be able to optimize all these parameters together." (emphasis added) I don't know about anyone else here, but I would struggle to even list 30 parameters, let alone identify all the parameters, isolate the 30 that matter, then find the sweet-spot (or sweet spots) in a 30-dimensional space. This is regarding the Alexa 35, but I remember reading in there somewhere that the innovation of the Textures feature is that you can choose different profiles on the new camera, whereas on the old ones you only had the one, and that on the previous models they had chosen a texture configuration that was their best attempt at a one-size-fits-all. So the inference was that the previous cameras were also doing this kind of processing. By implementing their colour science inside the camera, they could be doing all sorts of stuff. They could have things that analyse the image and then apply different treatments depending on the scene the camera was capturing. They certainly have a team capable enough and a camera with enough processing power to have a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand, LUTs or algorithms inside it and be changing these things based on context or WB setting or sensor temperature or whatever the hell else they found was useful. The sheer depth of knowledge that has gone into their image science is incredible. In 2009, Glenn Kennel joined ARRI as their CTO, which was a new position at that time, and in 2010 he was promoted to President and CEO. Glenn had previously worked for Kodak from 1980, and worked on various things that involved the gradual digitisation of the pipeline, including things like telecines and film scanners etc. My understanding is that his contributions at ARRI were pivotal for the development of the Alexa, which was the first digital camera to gain wide acceptance within the industry and did so due its film-like response. A bit of searching revealed some interesting discussions we already had during lockdowns..