Andrew Reid

The Canon version is necessary as the Metabones adapter needs to electronically transmit the focal length of the lens to the body for stabilisation to work with a zoom lens. With the Nikon version and no electronic contacts on the Speed Booster adapter, you'd have to dive into the menu to set the focal length manually every time you reframed.

F1.2 is not F2.4 and never will be. A large aperture has a distinctive look, especially F1.2 or faster. This isn't about sensor size. Also the lens is designed for the sensor size so you're not cropping into the middle of a full frame F1.2, you get to see the magic happen throughout the image circle right into the corners of it, just like with a very fast super 16mm on super 16 It's a shame people only seem to think of crops these days and multiply the aperture, it's just stupid, there's more to the LOOK of a lens than just shallow DOF!

A5100 is interesting. Seems like a better deal than the A6000 to me but was overlooked I looked into the image quality and it seems identical to the popular A6000 but with that all important touchscreen for the phase-detect AF. Sony are really silly not putting a touch screen on the A6000 and A6300, especially for the YouTube vlog crowd. No magnification during recording on GX85 sadly. Hoping GH5 will have this.

I'm very happy with EOSHD being about gear, it's good to specialise and to have a niche to focus on. I love the tech, always will. From my own experience, I'm just not sure how much real value can be had from online articles about the art of filmmaking, it's something you're best off learning by actually doing it rather than reading about it. NoFilmSchool built a mainstream audience that transcended the gear community by mentioning Kubrick and PT Anderson a lot in clickbate headlines - the content was ALWAYS stolen and by someone else - the aggregation of material in a massive way. Poor original content creators make nothing from exposure at all whilst the aggregators gobble up ALL the traffic and sell ads around it, in the case of NFS they even had US venture capitalists funding huge online advertising campaigns, expert SEO and very very large social media followings acquired the non-organic way, I don't even consider them as competition to EOSHD any more, they are something different and I'd never go to them for camera advice or for a singular voice. The whole site may as well be computer generated. Despite my temporary loss of appetite for blogging and the need to get some inspiration back in my filmmaking by moving out of Berlin, EOSHD is very strong at the moment, the forum has never been busier, the cameras have never been better and the visitor numbers are still as good as ever. Don't forget, we were first or one of the very first blogs to capture the community. That's why it was such a shame that the cat man Philip Bloom stopped blogging, I really miss his longer posts outside all the social media stuff. I didn't go back to the site at all when he stopped (apart from his very occasional reviews) because his forum didn't pull me in like it does here, there's still plenty to read on EOSHD when I am away. I think the forum could go on the front page actually with the best topics in the sidebar. It's a superb resource! The internet has changed though. People's reading habits and viewing habits are changing. Some movie trailers even now have 8 second trailers for the trailer, because of Facebook. There is definitely a race to the bottom going on in the content world. There's going to be some big victims too. First one might be Twitter.... it now has such a low engagement per post because the feed is a mess and each tweet it like a grain of sand in the beach, significant stuff is so easy to miss on there, even whole conversations. Personally I won't be focussing much on that from now on. I think Twitter is going to get sidelined by a lot of people and will eventually be superseded by an alternative. Facebook is a monster, it will continue to hoover up half the entire internet and make it worse. Already there are very active camera discussion groups on there... why people would use them over a proper forum I have no idea... it's so viral though because of the newsfeed and sharing element. The danger is that Facebook ends up siphoning off a ton of traffic from the better independent sites and selling ads around them, just like NoFilmSchool does, as the main 'go to' source for discussions and news Philip Bloom is now much bigger on social media than he is on his blog... in fact blogs are being hoovered up by YouTube and Facebook. He has a massively high profile on Facebook and Instagram with very regular posts and I only ever update the EOSHD Facebook page when there's a new blog post - I think that needs to change. There's a ton of stuff I'm doing behind the scenes which could go on social media but I'm not enough of a narcissist to really take it to the next level So if forums will be superseded by Facebook groups and blogs superseded by YouTube channels and Facebook and news aggregators, it will be a real loss for the internet because there won't be a motivation for anyone to create long-form original content any more or proper communities like this one, it will ALL be about 8 second trailers for trailers, gimmicks, clickbate headlines and trolling. Very sad direction for the internet in my opinion. The thing I am most proud of over the past 5 years of EOSHD are the regular readers and the EOSHD Shooter's Guides. I get a bundle of inspiration from people and I try to put some back into the pool too. I will get my inspiration back soon enough and EOSHD will have a bigger presence on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram. Thanks to those in the thread who have posted messages of support! Means a lot and really does get the fire burning again.

The manual is a bit badly worded. The in-body stabilisation is 5 axis. You can also choose to use the hybrid electronic stabilisation in video mode. That's 5 axis too. You should not bother. The Dual IS is 5 axis - 3 axis on the sensor and 2 axis on the lens. Either way no matter what mode you're in... one will get full 5 axis stabilisation on the GX85, just like you do on an Olympus body.

Yes the IBIS works with any non-IS lens. It is like the Olympus 5 axis IBIS. If you have a Panasonic Power OIS lens then it will use that for axis Y and X, with the other 3 axis on the sensor. Either way it rocks.

You can do bigger, sweeping movements and even walk with the GX85's stabilisation, you can't do this with the Sonys. If the GX85 is 10/10 as good as it gets in 2016 then the A7R II is a 7... not bad, just more like a Canon IS lens than anything revolutionary.

AF focus point selection key does it when you're in manual focus mode or have a manual focus lens attached. However it first throws up the size of the box to be magnified. A press of the rear dial inward gives you a direct punch-in. And by the way, it's very good quality. Refreshing coming from a Sony!

I am sure if a system dies, adapters somewhere down the line will reverse engineer the electronics and make the lenses usable on newer systems. The Samsung 16-50mm F2.0-2.8 is pretty special and the Panasonic Leica 42.5mm F1.2 I can both seeing being future rarities sought after for their looks!

Damn I miss those high end CCD sensors... magic. F35, M8, Kodak (Digital Bolex) was probably the shortest lived golden era of digital there ever was!

I think the Y axis (and X) is useful for reducing handheld jitter and locking down a shot from the hand more than can be done with an OIS lens, but I don't think it can do much for the bounce of a walk with a gimbal, simply because the sensor would have to move a rather large distance to compensate for it! Interested to see some tests from others. I sold my 18-35mm Nikon mount for the Canon version, but Sigma also offer a mount-swap service. It's paid though! Interesting about the A5100, never realised it could do a phase-detect AF focus pull off the touch screen. I thought the A6000 was the first Sony sensor to get onboard phase-detect AF, and even then it didn't work very well in video mode.

Guest posts by email or proxy, no, because there are plenty of other blogs that do this and sitting at my emails all day isn't my idea of filmmaking fun.... but moving out of Berlin and getting a real team of talent around me, shooting stuff and producing EOSHD content together for YouTube... YES to that. One of the issues I've found in doing this though, is that nobody has the time or money, or the willingness to exit their day jobs to commit to doing so, because we're all slaves in an oligarchy.

That film is damned talented, a great find, pressing all the right emotional buttons with just images and sound alone, no words, just really nice audio/visual poetry. Loved it. The Digital Bolex also has one of the most 'emotional' images in the same sense... incredible colour, dynamic range and a sensor size perfectly matched to pre-1980's Super 16mm vintage lenses. I just wish the D16 cost $999 and was available in great quantity... but that in a way is not the point of it. It is a camera that has a habit of getting into a disproportionately high number of talented hands, which means they're building a really special community around it. Also, it's one of the few cameras you can shoot jerky handheld footage with and it still looks great, for whatever reason - the CCD and global shutter having a hand in that magic motion candace of course.

The crux of it is this - We are a community, a part of the larger photography city, inspired by cinema and hollywood. The DSLR revolution was truly a moment of magic, unleashing all kinds of passion. Passion is a motivation, it gets things done. What has happened to this community is that Corporate America and Corporate Japan have segmented it in half, like slicing a neighbourhood in half with a wall. We have the NewsShooter and Cinema5D managed communities on one side with their C300 Mark IIs and paid work, NoFilmSchool with their venture capitalist funding and team of staffers. On the other side we have the artists. Yes, artists sometimes make bank commercials!!! (Disclaimer) Anyway the point is, that EOSHD and the forum is a great community but it's really up against it now. The premise that anyone can publish gear-orientated opinion pieces has lead to an over-supply of content, much of it rushed, in order to make it timely, because on the internet and Facebook timeliness is everything and a 2 day old post is trash. The internet started as a resource base, a researcher's tool which acts like a big encyclopaedia. For better or worse, since it became mass market, the internet changed and evolved into an entertainment platform and a social network "CelebrityNet" In order to combine the two - entertainment and information, you need to present the information in an entertaining way, no shit huh!? But you also need passion to drive it. I'd like to think that in the DSLR video world myself and Philip Bloom have succeeded in doing this. But eventually I lose my passion and Philip dedicates himself to work. It's a shame, but it's on that path. What needs to happen is that EOSHD becomes a team of people rather than just me, and that it puts on a good show for YouTube, in the mould of Top Gear or The Grand Tour where presenters travel the world and shoot really beautifully entertaining short films, with the latest camera kit. It's exactly like driving a car through spectacular scenery and presenting the information with wit. I'm amazed nobody has done this yet, however when you consider this... This is one of the most expensive and time consuming form of content there is. I'm up for doing it. It's very difficult though and I don't yet have a team, I don't have the enormous amount of money and I don't have the platform behind me (like Amazon). Yet! Until then there's Lok at Digital Rev. I agree with you completely. Actually when EOSHD began, it was more of a 7 posts a week site and a few rumours too, sometimes from good sources, and it grabbed attention and inspired me to build the community and put interesting stuff out there, like a band of GH2 pirates fighting the Canon flagship. When you want to increase the quality of the content by yourself you have to spend weeks or months on it and then your 1 article per month gets buried under a ton of shit. The internet is just like that. You may have noticed some of my recent articles have also been shit, or lacking in inspiration. That's what happens when you try to compete with the internet.

OK so great value in shooting 30-90 second demo with new camera, I get your point now... Well isn't that similar to what I've done many times on EOSHD blog posts over the last 5 years, actually 4 minute videos rather than 30 seconds, so far too long for modern audiences!! I did enjoy doing this but it depends on having something interesting and instantly accessible to film, otherwise it is going to be ducks and cats Every.Single.Time. Also what I loved to do was to create mood pieces for any music of my choosing, but the whole Vimeo copyright match bullshit put paid to that 'artform'. No more haunting Radiohead music videos of Buddhist temples thanks to that. So now what you have to appreciate is that 1 - I live in probably one of the dullest cities in the world to shoot, my own fault I guess and 2 - the effort required to find actors and interesting subjects in Berlin at short notice for free to make a 30-90 second demo reel shot with a hot new cameras and published in a matter of days whilst still newsworthy just after the camera comes into EOSHD HQ.... well that effort is tricky to maintain for one person, not to mention overkill given that this time and effort would be better spent actually making a proper film? So I either maintain a passion somehow for continuing to walk into a shop, buying a GH5 or whatever, then using it in my work, shooting music videos for the bands here in Berlin and my own artistic projects, or shooting whatever is available on the day in order to get the YouTube video out before the competition does.... but if you are late in releasing the content even by a matter of a day or 2, nobody really notices it or shares it, due to it being buried under a thousand other videos about the same thing but made more quickly with less effort, which have now taken pride of place on the entire internet thanks to Facebook and Instagram. It's a race to be first to the bottom my friends. In fact, I don't know why anyone bothers to create anything these days, the internet just makes it a waste of time. Whatever you do, someone else will do it first

I think you might be getting the videos I made confused with the 30 second buzz unboxing video for YouTube there, which is what Aaron was referring to. As I said, people are pathetic They seek comfort and justification in material objects by watching other people buy the camera, open the box and say on YouTube "look isn't it great!" I am not in that market.

The camera which Panasonic can't decide what to call (GX80 in Europe, GX85 in the US and GX7 Mark II in Japan!) really excites me. It's the first time that anyone has put 5 axis in-body stabilisation in a 4K camera which exceeds the performance of the stunningly good Olympus 5 axis system. It's not quite as effective as a gimbal for sweeping handheld movement, but that pain-in-the-ass tripod you can certainly dispense with now, along with that Olympus 1080p mush too!! GRAB A CUP OF TEA, PUT DOWN YOUR F***ING IPHONE AND READ THE LONG ARTICLE!!

I'm just not interested in doing that... I think it's a pathetic attention seeking ploy

Yes the bargain super specced equipment can be a motivation, but without anything decent to film, that soon fades. Like I say, I need to get out of Berlin and start a new chapter... try to capture some magic somehow. Until then, I'll continue to update the blog, there's no chance of me stopping because this stuff is my life-long passion. I can't tell you how much I appreciate those who appreciate the blog and forum. Let's hope that the ugly competition to EOSHD and boring corporate mentality of other blogs and 'managed communities', as well as the sheer lack of good content out there doesn't bury the whole endeavour along with my motivation with it. Not a single day doesn't go by without emails in my inbox offering sponsored content and gear for review... it's soul destroying and debases the entire internet.

Nice sentiment but I am little bit confused why you think the problem revolves around money and monetizing the blog. The reason I haven't been writing as many blog posts recently is because I'm demotivated to do so. Slapping some ads up won't change that. The whole internet culture needs to change. Due to the sheer amount of content out there, slung out in a rush, completely taking away any motivation for me to add to the pile, for people to ignore the long-form content in favour of all the small bitesized chunks of shit. I haven't stopped blogging due to a lack of advertising revenue!! Never sought it in the first place. I am glad the forum is growing. In many ways, it's a good stand-in for the blog whilst I take a break. Got the first GX85 article coming soon BTW Yes I know that feeling. I believe that guys like me and Mattias are more of the cinematographer mould than the writer-director. Our strength is our feel for mood and our eye for the aesthetics of atmosphere, so when you're more of a cinematographer than an all-out filmmaker you're in need of good content to shoot, an interesting mood to create. Sometimes you might not have that content. Also I take a lot of inspiration from shooting the world immediately around me, which is why I live in an exciting capital city, however it's not inspirational to shoot the same location again and again over 5 years, especially not when that city (Berlin) has chosen to change into an ugly homogeneous gentrified hipster hell hole since when I moved here 5 years ago, and the light has been appalling due to climate change for the past 3, rarely any interesting light, weather or sunny afternoons for huge chunks of the year. What I need to get interested in cameras and blogging again is to take my ass out of Germany and go somewhere more interesting and more inspiring, perhaps back to Asia where I did my best work with the GH2 all those years ago. Sadly the blogging I want to do isn't as easy as just filming cats for YouTube and raving about image quality... if it was, I'd have an article ready by the end of every single day. It doesn't interest me. When I'm not feeling it as an artist, there's no point me blogging, it would just be shit! Call it cinematographer's block?!

Buy my books if you'd like to help Money isn't the problem though. As Eric said above, this isn't the internet any more. It's celebritynet. You just watch from now, things are going to go dark. Meaningful and independent long-form content is going to be an endangered species. If you want proof, then see what happened to DigitalRev TV's audience when they put the camera guy with no presenting talent (or even English talent) in front of the camera on their YouTube channel, with Kai seemingly moving to the UK and not appearing as much. Lok's a nice guy but sorry, this video was pure dogshit. So what happened to the audience? They stayed. Didn't go anywhere. Millions of views continue to roll in. The quality of online content is truly a race to the bottom in 2016... zero benefit from quality. It's celebritynet now. I don't think ads are the answer to helping my motivation to write more blog posts either... if anything that is a full time job in itself, I am sure Tony Northup has employees working behind the scenes on that kind of thing. As soon as EOSHD becomes "work" I am stopping it.

I actually think YouTube is the future of television, so I do have great respect for those in the YouTube review community doing a good job. The disingenuous ones hyping products and doing sponsored content I have no time for, unfortunately it seems a lot of people do though! It will all be unboxing videos and nothing else unless people start using more discretion and maybe the system could help them out as well by putting the quality stuff on a pedestal so it is right there to watch and you don't have to seek it out and troll through the shit to get to it. Sadly I think "not worth caring about a blog" is an attitude which has got us here in the first place, having a complete lack of good content online. If people did use more discretion in what they watched and where they got their information from, they would encourage the creation of more entertaining content, better quality and better researched information. It's because joe public just clicks on the first video he sees after typing "GH4" into YouTube or Facebook, that any old shit has been allowed to float to the top of the pile. Same is happening in filmmaking too, it used to be that the cream rose to the top. Not so sure now. Have you seen what's at the top?!

A massive part of the internet has gone mobile, which means people's usage and interaction with the medium has changed. I used to really look forward to spending hours researching a camera, reading an enormous Philip Bloom review with a coffee handy, or watching a nice long informative Camera Store TV review, truth is... how many people are now doing this on a phone, in the 30 or so seconds it takes to distract themselves on a commute to work? We glance and shim and swipe like hell through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It's really sad and pathetic actually. The internet should be much more than that. I want to find my passion again for the gear, but that too is a little dimmed right now. i enjoy reading a review from someone who's pumped up about a camera or lens, like Steve Huff always is, but more often than not I'm feeling increasingly cynical about this, that somehow it's futile because no matter what is around today, there's always something better right around the corner, eventually it becomes exhausting and really dulls your excitement for new releases. Plus all this gear is costing me an arm and a leg!

Hey Michal. I am glad someone has noticed this. I have all the rumors sites in my news feed and I visit some of the other blogs, the truth is these are majorly demotivating for me. It seems the general direction of the internet is going away from long form reviews and articles, into quickly thrown up deals and clickbate, along 2-3 minute quickly knocked up youtube video which are nice to have on in the background as you have a cup of tea in the morning, but contain very little actual useful information. If all the attention is going into the wrong content, so what motivation do I have to carry on with EOSHD? There's still some great stuff out there but it's few and far between, and getting worse. So I actually share your depression with the state of affairs. EOSHD articles I used to do are almost unviable today... the formula is broken... the amount of effort required versus the lack of reward in putting so much information out there for free. Geez. Thanks for the support... not. Facebook and Instagram content is where it's at, sadly. A finger swipe, 2 seconds, next. In the end the audience will regret allowing the internet to dissolve into a trivial social network where appearances are valued above substance.

I'd go for the 1D C. The only thing the 1D X II has in its favour is the AF. The 4K/60fps produces unmanageably large files and will be extremely difficult to edit on any current CPU, besides I'd rather shoot 120fps 2K if it were slow-mo I was after. 60fps doesn't really look that dramatic and there are a ton of cameras that can do 60fps at lower resolutions for a fraction of the cost. Moving onto the 120fps mush on the 1D X II, obviously just about any other cheaper camera shooting 120fps is a better choice for that, there's nothing special about the image in comparison to the A7S II's 120fps that I can make out so far. Any other advantages over the 1D C apart from the AF? Nope.