Andrew Reid

Peaking, zebras, etc. are for enthusiasts. Remember the difference between us and the rest. We care. They don't. So it is time to say to them, fine, keep your smartphones, maybe some of you will come round to the idea of having a proper camera and some will not, but in the mean time we are not going to make any money persuading you with touch screens and wifi shit.

I think if it were wide gamut and colour management they'd see less saturation not more. Maybe it is just taste. Bad taste. Liking stuff to look flat and grey. Who knows. That is in fashion at the moment after all.

Compression is bad in that sky. Looking at the uninspired-as-ever samples from the paid up press junket on the web, the focus speed on that CameraLabs coffee cup video is all over the place. Zero consistency. The rack to the background is nice and slow. The subsequent racks are jerky and too fast. What's up with that? I assume the AF sensitivity wasn't changed between the different racks in the same clip. I won't be getting an A6500. Seriously guys, get the X-T2 or G85 instead. Also people need to realise that to actually make use of this touch-screen AF on the A6500 you need to invest thousands of dollars in Sony lenses as good as the Canon equivalents you probably already have. I found it took long enough to build a Micro Four Thirds collection of any use, let alone going out and spending $1000+ on a Batis. If you stick with the manual focus stuff on a budget, then all this fancy AF technology on a consumer camera is wasted. I personally hope the GH5 comes in around $1500 and has phase-detect AF approaching Dual Pixel AF standard working with EF lens adapters, then we will be getting somewhere...

NOOOO. It is not going to make any difference. It doesn't matter if the camera connects to Facebook and prompts you to upload on pain of death when it detects your presence in the house, like a camera-style HAL... The will of the people just is not there. They have their smartphone for that. They do not know or care about F-stop, lenses, mounts and least of all separate devices that cost extra money and need an extra pocket. What's more they certainly don't care about the Sony PlayMemories store or the WiFi pairing and crappy touch screen implementations and a crappy OS you can't even bring up Facebook on. NO. NO and NO!! It. Will. Not. Make. Any. Difference.

All these things are nice. USB charging, wireless file transfer, etc. However they will not save the consumer market one jot. What average joe with a smartphone wakes up in the morning and says to himself "today I will run eagerly to a camera store and buy a Sony because it has Wifi, USB charging and a touch screen menu!!" They are just not interested. SO Let them bugger off is the crux of my article.

Although there's fake news on both sides of the political spectrum, I found in the UK during Brexit that there were a far greater number of people accusing the BBC and our prime minister of scaremongering, than the number of people reading fake articles... That's the bigger problem. People no longer trust the mainstream media and government, even when they are telling the truth. Now all the scare mongering turned out to be right and the pound is worth the same as 1 monopoly note.

Can you take a picture of your screen? I am convinced people have their saturation crazy high or something. Nope it is same on default levels. I find the X-Pro 2 and X-T2 absolutely great for places, things and buildings. It is just the people part this is the problem and I never remember having the same skintone issues with the older Fujis. I did a professional photoshoot with the X Pro 2 and the JPEGs were not great for skin. I should have mentioned it in the review but this was about video not JPEGs. Also I forgot to mention something else... the way you enter video mode is fiddly. You have to slide a lever through 5 positions and it is really tricky to turn, impossible in fact with one hand because it is far away on the left-top side. I still maintain though that this is going to be the best APS-C 4K mirrorless camera for most people. The skintones are probably fixable in the grade. I haven't tried because I switched to the 1D C for the photo shoot with the X Pro 2 rather than having to spend hours in post fixing the raw files.

I just wish the people who organised these PR events could think of more original subjects than live action sports, animals and bands. As for the A6500, the overheating, poor ergonomics, bad colour, bad white balance and terrible rolling shutter would be acceptable had it not been priced at $1500. Also the 5 axis stabilisation is way better on the Panasonic GX85. I encourage people to get that instead. OK I get that Sony want to drag the AXXX series out of the dying consumer market but this is not the way to do it. The body should have been redesigned to resemble the X-Pro 2 if it is going to cost this much.

This blog is in response to Tony Northrup Death of the Consumer Camera and the ideas in it. Read the full article

The BBC must be feeling a bit silly now. They basically gifted Amazon a trio of their best presenters and one of their top hits due to mishandling the show in the lead up to Clarkson losing his temper with the producer, and mishandling the fallout from that in the worst politically correct way possible. But more of a problem for the BBC is that almost all their 2016 output aside from Planet Earth 2 has been pretty shit.

Indeed, that's why politicians campaign in poetry and rule in prose. The reality of a Trump establishment will be very different to what his supporters voted for and he will have difficult decisions to make that will be unpopular no matter what choice he makes. There are good ideas on both sides of the political left and right, I just wish people would vote for good PRACTICAL ideas and not hyperbole. And no matter whether you are a conservative or liberal, good economic policy is good economic policy. Trump is an economic novice and his businesses have underperformed the market. True. But clearly a poverty of the mind is developing in the US and UK. Artist David Hockney - "One time, I was walking in Holland Park (I was sitting for Lucian Freud), and I stopped to watch some black rabbits playing. So I sat on a seat watching and then some magpies came down, black and white birds, and they looked rather good. I was sitting there having a cigarette and three girls come running by, jogging and see me and come: “Ow, ow… ” [wags finger]. And I sat there and thought: “They think they are very healthy, but they haven’t seen the rabbits.” And I thought: “Well, I’m healthier than they are." I think largely the Trump thing is a reaction to the sanctimonious liberalism and political correctness that I hate about Clinton and the left, even though I myself am centre-left in many of my political views. Trump is a big fat steak as opposed to a wet vegan salad. Exactly why it was important to have a decent voter turnout, there just wasn't enough passion for the wet vegan salad.

Let's have it out!!! Following on from Ed's thread about Trump here are my thoughts: 1. How's this for cruel irony - Both Trump supporters on the far right and Bernie supporters on the socialist left believe the same thing. That Hilary Clinton and Tony Blair are war criminals responsible for massive civilian death tolls in the middle east and the rise of ISIS. Actually the war started because of dictatorships there and were escalated under two US presidents both with the name Bush, furthered by decades of repression and poverty in places like Afghanistan. If anything Obama and Clinton tried to deescalate it from the Bush eras. Much as I love him, Bernie depressed the turn out for Hilary Clinton more than anyone else. His wide support is the primary reason Trump is in power, ready to join forces with Putin and accelerate the bombing of civilians in Syria. Young liberals eat up paranoid conspiracy thoeires and fake news just as much as those on the far right because we're living in a highly partisan post-fact virtual world where the truth is too complicated for a Facebook headline. 2. There is nothing wrong with democracy and here's why. The majority of people are now politically ignorant. They cannot be bothered with it. Therefore it follows they should get a president of the United States who is equally as politically ignorant. Look at this from the New Yorker magazine - "A voter with more knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal deficit. Voters ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic, more suspicious of market competition and rises in productivity, and more wary of foreign trade and immigration"... Which camp do you think Trump and his voters fall into? Trump is economically as ignorant as you can get. Despite employing immigrants he sees immigration as bad for the economy and despite making things in foreign countries and importing from them, he sees foreign trade as bad for the economy, and despite being married to one he sees immigrants as bad for the economy and despite being born to one he is in favour of mass deportation. The US economy is going to go to shit. Could it be that Norway has a more politically astute population? They have a good economy, stay out of wars, are more tolerant on social issues, less punitive about crime and accept higher taxes.... It all comes down to how much interest people take in politics, instead of snapchat. 3. All Trump supporters right now -

Astia Soft.

OK, people voted for him because they just LOVE racism. Joking aside, I think our western society is verging on having a dangerous love affair with celebrity and consumerism. That's why, when a well known blogger insults your favourite camera brand, people flip out. People need to realise that it's ok to disagree. I was watching the US election closely and know exactly what happened. Trump won due to a depressed voter turn out for Clinton and a wave of popular support in the rust belt states from mainly working class white voters who felt left behind and distrustful of the mainstream media to give them objective information. So they sourced their information from a Facebook echo chamber instead and from fake news articles, all the while believing Clinton was corrupt and Trump as a 'successful' businessman = the answer to the US's economic problems. If anything it is they who are painfully oversimplifying the world and politics, not me. And it is the same with cameras. I can give you my opinions, and the facts, but people already have their own conspiracies of information from the pro-Sony or pro-Canon echo-chambers online, and it is becoming increasingly hard to put good information out there in the face of such indifference. Click-bate and heavily biased camera review sites would not exist if the audience wanted for better, or knew any differently, and it is the same with Trump.

The Samsung NX1 and Sony A6300 have been warned. Fujifilm has arrived! No really. This time they mean it. The X-T2 shoots the best 4K I have yet seen for $1500, with a great lens range, pleasing colour science, less rolling shutter and a different approach to ergonomics to Sony. Read the full article

To those critics in this thread - that you see my opinions as unworthy because I'm not inside the film industry doesn't surprise me, because most of the same people just voted for a US president based on how rich he was. It's a bit of a sad situation in 2016 where such a consumerist mindset exists that only pros shooting paid gigs are considered experts. Time and time again in Berlin I have turned down paid work to focus on my own creative projects and self-employment. It's my choice. EOSHD has been a success. I could have been slaving away, climbing the ladder professionally shooting one advert after another and being bossed around by clueless clients. Again, I have chosen a different path. I'd much rather be doing my own thing day in day out. It doesn't take much to click through to Vimeo and see my last 5 years of cinematography and personal work. And even if that isn't to your taste, your taste is not the universal blueprint by which everything film-related is judged. This article comes from the heart. Maybe I didn't get across the capabilities of the 1D X Mark II in one go, maybe I'm rusty. The footage isn't my best. It is 120fps with a heavily stylised grade shot handheld on holiday. It isn't meant to be Citizen Kane. It was just to show the 120fps. The way some people are going on about the image quality of that video as some way indicative of the overall quality from the 1D X Mark II is really stupid. The 4K looks very different. That is coming next in part 2. I also have shot with the X-T2 and G80. Great alternatives for less money. The 1D X Mark II was meant as a replacement for my 1D C and it succeeds in doing that. I paid £5k for the 1D C used back at the start of 2015 and even though it came out in 2012 the image is still better than the A7S II, Sony FS5, etc. No it is not a £500 camera. I never said it was good value for money in that respect. Pretty obvious really. The skintones - I think side by side with the Sony picture, the Canon one looks too extreme and you cannot really judge either image from the web or blog post page. In isolation at full 20MP resolution on a large print or a large 4K monitor, the Canon looks more natural and true to nature, whereas the Sony looks dead. Also the Canon flatters skin, whereas the Sony exaggerates any imperfections even on a very good looking subject. See the following 2.8K JPEGs instead, full screen -

No problem. Some nice footage and shots on here by the way.

You need to be in stills mode. Use the Stills/Movie switch to put it into stills mode and then try again.

I did get an invite to the FS7 II event but couldn't go to Barcelona in the end due to getting ill. This is not about disliking one company or liking another. It is about liking one camera over another. You are free to have a different opinion about your cameras but it's a bit questionable attacking someone for being against your favourite brand. Is this the kind of hyper consumerist world we're living in now? Post-fact?

Not necessarily. It may be a Nikon design and Sony's factory just built it. The one in the X-T2 might be a Sony design, Sony built. Sensor looks very similar to the one in the A6300 to me. Who knows... All I can say is that the X-T2's colour isn't as nice as I expected it to be, with rather waxy skintones compared to Canon and Panasonic. It seems the few people who are getting crazy high saturation and crushed blacks on the comparison shot really need to dial down their displays, calibrate them to S-RGB or just plain upgrade.

Canon have made the biggest step forwards with their DSLR technology this year that we've seen since 2008 and the 5D Mark II. However it isn't the 5D Mark IV that has me excited so much the 1D X Mark II. This is a camera that will see out the next 6 years as the benchmark for others to follow. Read the full article

Metabones EF XL working fine on my Panasonic G80.

Hacked Samsung NX500 is shooting some very nice 2.5K. I wish Blackmagic would concentrate more on the consumer priced stuff again and give us a BMCC 2.0

This is really exciting stuff. 10bit will be great for the SD card Canon bodies in upping resolution while keeping the date rate under the max of the SD card slot. 60D now 1080p for 12 seconds! Will be interesting to see if it works in crop mode on the 5D Mark III for longer record times in 3K

It's a "big problem" for Nikon only if they are designing a camera by committee, with one half of the table saying one thing and the other half saying another, which I'm afraid it looks like they are doing, at least in terms of the product feedback from pros.