Andrew Reid

Maybe a bit off topic but I am keen to know how you're getting on with the GFX 100 II in terms of everything else! I absolutely love the design and feel of the body last time I tried it out. Is it a big step up on the GFX 100 OG in terms of video with all the extra crop modes and faster sensor? How's the 4K?

I find it very odd that there's still no rumours about Panasonic's next flagship stuff. There's absolutely no way I believe an S5R is on the way! Why would Panasonic give away 8K FF 16:9 30fps 25ms super-sampled in a mid-range / entry level mode?

Some worrying thoughts are occupying my mind at the moment so it might do me some good to let them out for a run... Here goes. In the 1990s I grew up with the early internet, it wasn't very media rich due to the bandwidth constraints and it only worked well on a big screen with a keyboard at a desk, so it suited web pages and forums. Written stuff, basically. Come the y2k and we began to see the early social media sites like Myspace and then Facebook but you still had to use these at a desk. Which lends itself to being able to type long sentences and create art. Come smartphones, they couldn't offer the full world wide web experience, on a pokey slow browser, but this changed with apps. So fast forward a bit to the 2010s... There has been a proliferation of apps into our lives, but it wasn't really until Youtube and Facebook Groups got some serious traction that things started to change. I used to be pretty confident in the EOSHD blogging days that if I sat down to write a review, or opinion, or do some proper journalism or get a scoop and break the camera news first it would get some attention and traction, now I am not so sure it will as it is a separate indie .com website outside of social media, and this is very bad news for the internet because we cannot let Meta and Google and a handful of other corporations OWN the entire web. So to the making a living bit... For creatives like photographers and filmmakers the internet was a real blessing, it allows you to setup stall with a website and get your work out there. You get noticed and then you get hired, that's how it used to work. There has to be a strong demand from industry for those positions as well, no matter how good you are it doesn't matter if the cinema industry is in a downward spiral. Cinema and photography have to compete with other forms of content too. Again it comes back to smartphones. Neither cinema and photography are well suited to a small screen and even smaller attention spans, they are supposed to be viewed on a large canvas and in a socially interactive way like in a gallery or theatre. Now with stuff like streaming, this works fine when everyone has a subscription to one or two of the same platforms like Netflix and are stuck at home with nothing better to do like during covid, but after a while there is a total oversupply of stuff to watch, and a total ADHD mess of an audience who is getting constantly distracted by social media content in direct competition to the long form stuff. So we have a meltdown at the moment in the filmmaking industry, and even in the commercial videography industry where it is now so easy to shoot something, companies may as well hire an intern to do it or have some staff do it themselves, because the bar is set by social media and that as I said works best with very short authentic bursts of home made content, where production quality or even the camera doesn't really matter. With photography, if you're an artist trying to compete for attention with all of that stuff you are going to be in trouble if you don't do double-duties as a social media influencer, which of course means making YOURSELF the story and front and centre. Not a lot of artists are all that comfortable with that. I'm not. So the business model now is that your content has to be free, and you merchandise it or earn from advertising and sponsorship due to your social media reach as an artist. And I REALLY hate that because it cheapens what it means to be a photographer or filmmaker. At the end of the day, the photos and films should be what matter and they should be paid for. PS Have you noticed by the way - that the AI bubble has completely lost people's interest, the content is all so un-compelling? Why do you think this is... It's because there is so much of it... And it is disassociated with the artist's own hand... And that is exactly what all this tech has done to use filmmakers and photographers... The accessibility of tech means that there's now too much content, and not enough demand for the next piece. A big economic correction is on the way.

Social media is destroying the internet as a medium and turning it into cable tv. I don't think people will realise what this means until a lot later, but now that print media is going away along with a lot else, including proper journalism, we're about to enter the find out stage. The internet as it was originally intended with net neutrality was the greatest invention of the century and we are really harming it by making independent .com websites bankrupt and the written word obsolete. It's going to become more and more of a problem. Maybe one day, blogging will make a come back like vinyl? I remember when a certain cat owner, who went by the name of Philip, switched predominantly to social media tweets and youtube, rather than blogging... his own site is now dead basically, and his content is now at the whim of an algorithm he doesn't own or have any control over... Anyway, he switched, and HE became the story - front and centre, private life out there for all to see, and it clouded out his actual work and images... and the other point I'm making is that he had no choice anyway because smartphones work better with YouTube and social media, the large in depth pages of the web just don't work well with modern attention spans or small screens with no physical keyboard, especially since most of the WWW these days is such a mess - so much poor content and horrific web design... you know, ads everywhere, popups, autoplay, cookie prompts, constantly scrolling by itself as new elements load. It's unworkable. I want us to come back to the founding ideas of what made the internet so special, before it's too late.

The strikes were not a great idea in retrospect.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj6er83ene6o Quite an eye opener on the recent decline of the film industry.

If The Stig is a tame racing driver then they are the domesticated pet camera salesmen.

I still think if the uncompressed true raw look is what you're after... get the Sigma Fp-L with an SSD and set it to 2x crop mode. Digital Bolex / Magic Lantern without the hassle!

The Ninja Star was relevant in the old days when electronics needed a larger box and more power simply to do a 1080p ProRes recording, Now we have such insane power in our portable cameras and even iPhone, the market for this has completely vanished. In fact it wasn't really much there in the first place because with the Ninja Star - yes you got ProRes - but no you still didn't look proper at work, because you'd be turning up with a tiny GH2 and no chonky cabled up gigascreen to pimp it out. So it didn't sell very well and that's what makes me think that the codec capabilities offered by Atomos were never the main reason for their original success... It was the $500 bolt on that gave a basic rig vague credibility on a hire.

The product is becoming irrelevant On the codec side, the camera does it all now. There's no gap for Atomos to fill, not even ProRes RAW. On the monitoring side, we could do with going beyond just 3.2" screens... So it's still nice to check focus on a bigger screen. This is an ergonomic benefit, but speaking personally I have always disliked the trade off... It feels like one step forward for focussing, 10 steps back for balance, size, handling, battery life, simplicity, stealth, reliability, weather sealing, robustness and weight. So I'd rather just eyeball the EVF instead. I am convinced that Atomos customers mainly bought into the product because it was the cheapest way to make a mirrorless camera look professional in front of a client. The actual practical benefits are very questionable in my experience. So can Atomos now pivot from the dying market, into a big growth area, or will Jeromy be captain of a sinking ship? It wouldn't be the first time he's been on trouble on a boat.

The whole shilling irony is that the main product they are shilling is themselves, it's not even about the brand... it's all about attention, and if shilling for Sony or some other big giant gains them that notoriety then it's all fair game. Whether or not this debases and devalues the entire medium, doesn't enter the conversation on either the side of the creator or the side of the following flock. So we have a situation now where the journalists are silenced and the shill has taken over, and the medium has turned into cable TV, with a few good quality late night niche channels, but the mainstream ones are just a big sell. Chris and Jordan started off in my view as quite objective, and all about the cameras, but have become more and more about themselves and spinning their cult of personality to a wider and wider audience. This is a problem the traditional journalist doesn't have, because he sits behind his pen and paper, the story is the notorious thing, and the writer gets to stay in the background. This prevents the kind of conflicts we see now between the clamour for attention and personal appeal, at the expense of the quality and honesty of the content.

I really enjoy this series at the french blockbusters

I'm genuinely interested to hear Atomos customer's opinions and feedback in the comeback of Jeromy. Good or bad? Indifferent? Their Apple recruit Estelle was treated extremely badly if you read what was reported in the media. In my opinion Atomos gear owners must feel a bit like those who have bought into the whole Tesla trend, spent $$ on a car, only to have Elon out himself as a drug addicted far right incel. It would make me want to sell it. Whether it be alleged substance abuse or bullying or sexual assault at the top of an organisation that relies on team work - THAT is a recipe for a serious downfall. Look at the declining fortunes of Red Bull's F1 team since the Horner sex abuse controversy. Staff CVs been going out all over, the team moral is on the floor. We of course only determine stuff second hand via journalism so I don't know what happened with Jeromy for sure other than the covid law breaking incidents that are a matter of absolute fact. None of us were there, but it leaves a very bad impression that he has been allowed back into the fold especially parachuted back into the most senior role there is.

The Xiaomi 11 Ultra, yes. Superb video quality. Superb sensor. It would be a very good candidate, but the ergonomics are never going to be great with a hefty (by smartphone standards) piece of glass on the front.

Leica have always walked a fine line between the money you pay being for the engineering and design, and the money being for the branding. They've got to be more transparent about when they are using software correction on a very basic cheap optic made in China.

An interesting mod, looks irreversible - but still worth it. The Xiaomi 12s ultra would be a good candidate for this too.

They must be involved in some way! Hopefully they'll be honest enough to admit that it wasn't entirely a "creative choice"?

$7K is an absolute joke. You are not getting a Leica, it's a Panasonic. The 28mm lens on the normal Q3 is really terrible, it's worse than a toy and relies on Panasonic's correction to get rid of the massive distortion and vignetting. Leica just need to be more honest... what is the $7K getting you in terms of engineering from LEICA? Cutting edge lens? No. It's very misleading marketing in my view. Leica Q 28mm RAW: With the built in software profile applied in-camera and Adobe Camera Raw:

4K/120fps but not much overall I don't think, the iPhone 15 Pro is better value now.

Sounds like you did the right thing and that's what matters. It's a pretty big red flag when mods of a site start to protect the manufacturers at the expense of their own readers and forum users, to act as cover for defects, which is the opposite of what journalism and community are about - to expose the truth. I could understand if you set out to criticise DPReview from the get-go and not Canon - but you were criticising Canon in a constructive way and campaigning for them to fix a genuine issue, much as I did with the R5 overheating malarky. So I'm sorry you had this experience with DPReview and yes... It is a dying site. Gear Patrol at the end of the day are in the business of advertorial not journalism.

I am curious how he came back to head the company? After all that's happened.

Fuji X-S2 or Sigma Fp-L For the most cinematic results. If you go even smaller, you have to make some compromises and go with a high-end compact camera... If you're doing that, it might be better to go with a high-end smartphone instead as the iPhone 15 Pro has an incredible codec now, and really good auxiliary lenses especially the 5x zoom.

I can see a Canon C80 type thing from RED / Nikon. I expect they'll follow the Cinema EOS playbook more closely than the past RED script. Being a corporate Japanese company now, and all that. Which means yes, mirrorless Z mount cinema cameras and hybrids.

It is crazy that they'd use a DOF adapter on a high-end production like this. The ground glass doesn't work very well and introduces all sorts of softness and corner blur. If that is the look they are going for, why the fuck are they using 50k ARRI primes? I can only assume it might be a specially modified iPhone from Apple with an interchangeable PL mount for modern Super 16mm lenses.

I seem to remember it doesn't work... It was designed to fit the Pocket sensor housing VERY snug. I have many a non-Pocket micro four thirds camera with war scars from putting that thing on it. The 0.64 XL T on the other hand should be much more flexible.