Andrew Reid

So far they've only managed a picture of Darren Aronofksy Too bad

Blackmagic micro cinema in good light would be sharpest and best dynamic range In low light A7S

Going to get mine on Thursday now, Sony had a delivery technical issue so they are coming in a few days late here. Looking forward to it. I do wish Sony would change their menus, ergonomics, skintones, colour, LOG profile, jello, banding, macroblocking, edge tearing, etc. quite a long list isn't it? You can be assured my coverage won't be a PR smoothie unlike ALL OTHER SITES SEEMINGLY IN EXISTENCE. Can I just say that Sony have some SUPERB PR people.

That was a little gem dude, loved it. Watched it finally behind the GEMA Wall of Berlin (VPN - Tunnel Bear, highly recommended, I use it for Amazon prime as well) I enjoyed it in a pulpy comic way which I think was the intention, the characters look great, love the choices made in shooting this. The edit is a pacy one, keeps the energy level up but I would have done something else with the pace I think, maybe give it an evolving shape from start to finish. Loved the idea, but the placements of the cassettes and some of the props is a bit too 'clean', I'd have liked to have seen more dirt and mud on them. Loved the seagull shock-horror mouth open towards the end, best seagull acting i have seen for a while Camera did well, looked almost too clean and crisp for the grubby seaside location and retro angle you had on it. What lenses?

GEMA is a total joke!

Sadly Canon are keeping the 1D C in the range which explains why the 1D X Mark II must be gimped even at $6k to be without one of the most important features, C-LOG, something the $2k XC10 piece of shit even has. At the BVE show in London I was at, Canon had the 1D C on the stand next to the 1D X Mark II, so clearly don't intend to phase it out any time soon.

Rolling shutter not much of a concern especially in 60p, but haven't tortured it yet. Will be interesting to see how it compares to the NX1's 1080/60p/120p which has hardly any skew. Viewfinder refresh is 85fps so not much of an issue in there either. For stills, the AF is more impressive than the A7S and high ISOs perfectly usable up to 12,800. Some of the film simulation modes even benefit from higher ISOs especially the black and white ones which tend to like 2000-3200. So it's a good low light camera.... Not quite full frame good, but good nevertheless. Going to get the 35mm F2.0 WR for it as that has more modern AF, snappy and silent like the 18-55mm F2.8-4, I believe. 35mm F1.4 is a bit rough. Oh and the screen is a thing of beauty... 1.6m dot, beautifully sharp, seems similar to the panel Nikon have used on the D5 and D500

Actually a mechanical shutter has everything to do with it. When we say the sensor has a rolling shutter, don't confuse this with a rolling readout. It is actually doing a rolling exposure. And unless you have a global shutter sensor (the NX1 does not), then any electronic shutter is a rolling one. Period. Whenever you use that instead of the mechanical shutter you will have to expose the sensor row by row and it will take a length of time determined by the speed of the sensor, to do this.... In the NX1's case 30ms to read out 24MP in 16:9, a bit longer to read out the full 28MP in 3:2. The top of the sensor will be exposed 30ms earlier than the bottom and you will get the RS skew. The mechanical shutter allows the entire sensor to be exposed at the same time, then the readout is done by passing each row through an A/D. No, the discarding of pixels is done on the sensor and it only sends a subset of them out to the image processor to display on the EVF and LCD. The NX1 only switches to a full pixel readout when you hit movie standby or start recording 4K. Then the image is scaled on the image processor (in a more advanced way probably using bilinear or bicubic filtering) from 6K to 4K and there's also a more heavily scaled version for the LCD. Processing overhead... not necessarily. There are many things which can cause a delay with an EVF, slow panel refresh rate, contrast detect AF changing the sensor mode briefly, interruptions to the image pipeline caused by design. It's too simplistic to say it is a 'processing overhead' and without diving into the specifics in the case of the NX1 you're just guessing really. What does that have to do with video or live-view? Nothing. It's an in-camera post processing aspect and off topic.

It doesn't group 11 into one though. It discards them. That's what binning means. They go in the trash. Fastest way to do it. NX1's live-view is a low power mode designed for fast refresh rates at 640x480 just for composition on the EVF and LCD. Only on a few cameras in video mode there is summing and averaging of groups of pixels into one. Not sure which ones do it, usually the ones that do cleaner 1080p like the Nikon D750 and 5D Mark II. I also think it helped explain why the GH2 had less moire and more detail than a 5D Mark II at the time which line skipped and didn't sum or average pixels together in an advanced way like the GH2. Because the noise isn't diluted by taking ALL pixels and doing a clever downscaling. Noise is amplified because of the pixel binning. Whole pixels become a spec of noise, rather than an average of a group of pixels where the signal would counterbalance the noise.

Funnily enough they discontinued Canon FD lenses in the 80's and they are still easy to get on eBay in 2016 so I wouldn't worry about anything NX1 related becoming 'unobtainable' any time soon, if anything it will just get cheaper, which is nice. The NX1 is by far the most pleasant to shoot with ergonomically. Feel in the hand is great. My hand and the A7S II have never got on very well. It doesn't quite feel as bad as clutching a bag of nails but it does feel like clutching a soulless badly designed camera body with fiddly badly placed buttons, for sure. NX1 fits like a glove and your hand wraps most comfortably around the most important controls. I even prefer it to a Canon 5D body and that says a lot. A6300 is cute, small, but still just as soulless and fiddly ergonomically as the A7S II. As for the image we'll have to wait and see... I am going to do a comparison with the NX1. I think for the money it is great. Unless you need the in-body stabilisation and headphone jack of the A7S II, then the A6300 will serve you just fine especially with Speed Booster and it can do 12,800 pretty comfortably from what I have seen of the early footage. I rarely go higher than that. NX1 meanwhile will give you better colour straight off the card, no fuss to grade, better ergonomics, top panel LCD, weather sealing and sharper 120fps... Super clean ISO 800. ISO 1600 ok. ISO 3200 starts to get bad. Your call

Here's the Velvia preset, which I absolutely love... First shot, crappy light but it has that 'x' factor Sony is nearly always missing, all without any effort at all in post... Look at the smooth tonality and balanced colour... By the way, here's what Velvia looked like without the 16-235 correction in Premiere... different to the JPEGs and on the camera screen, it had crushed blacks. However the codec has kept them! They snap right out when you correct for the dumb Quicktime RGB range clipping. Next shot a much more challenging one for dynamic range. Look how much you can get out of it with the most simple quick grade possible - just Fast Color Corrector in Premiere and zero else, not even a RGB curve change... First ungraded, 0-255 straight off card: Second graded, 16-235 fast colour corrector Oh and very important this...... in doing this correction to extend dynamic range notice how colour doesn't go 'weird' like with S-LOG Cheers for that vid Kaylee, fun to watch.... You can see how detailed the image is pretty well from that. I dial sharpness down -4 to take the edge of it and bring the blacks up a bit in post. Nice fast lens helps too, and Speed Booster. It is a really cinematic image with these adjustments.

Superb as long as you use the Fast Color Corrector in Premiere to remap 0-255 RGB luma range to 16-235 Playback the files in VLC or Quicktime and you get clipped highlights and crushed blacks. No idea why this is still a problem in 2016, maybe Fujifilm should talk to some Apple guys. Yeah, absolutely. It is just like having a Leica M rangefinder that happens to shoot better video than a Leica M rangefinder for 1/4th the price, with an EVF AND AN OVF, can't argue with that The X Pro 1 I also liked but ended up selling it at the time, lens range was rather limited back in 2012 and it was a dog slow camera. That was the biggest issue... the dreadful AF and even dreadful manual focus too. The X Pro 2 is mega fast and snappy, they nailed it. Also, viewfinder and body just seem higher quality this time round. Bit heavier, but amazingly built. Only weak points are the battery life and it is such a sharp 1080p image that when you do get moire, it is pretty noticeable moire. 1 out of every 10 shot has it, but depends on the subject. Not the kind of camera to shoot a lot of infinity focus shots of buildings with, but for actors it's rarely an issue... brief occurrence on clothing, that's about it. What is amazing is that although it is clearly a moire affected camera, it is wonderfully detailed for 1080p. I'd put the moire at a similar level as the 5D Mark 2 RAW without AA filter and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. It's not the worst but it does happen.

So I really didn't think I'd end up keeping this camera, especially as it is 1799 euros body only(!!) for just 1080p and no articulated screen. BUT this camera is a lesson to all the others... 1. May seem like a small thing to start but it has the BEST menus I have ever used, end of story. Properly organised. Not too long. Snappy to navigate. It is amazing how many other cameras get this wrong, even Canon which have too many sub-sections / tabs. Then there's a nice big MY menu at the end of the new Fujifilm main menu so you barely have to dig into the other tabs at all. It is such a nice improvement on the previous Fuji cameras. During a shoot the menus can make or break a camera. Ask any FS7 owner 2. COLOUR and CODEC and DETAIL - it excels at each. The images have an electricity to them, super alive. On most cameras, even with H.265 on the NX1, the codec always pays lipservice to the blacks. Whenever you bring them up they are a mess of banding, compression, blocking. The X Pro 2 codec handles like the D750, super clean in the shadows and LOTS of detail. You can bring so much out of the blacks even when they are crushed in-camera when using Velvia - which by the way, is giving me the most satisfying out of camera non-graded non-fussed with colour yet. 3. SMOOTH editing, and 60p for slow mo. With 4K i have come to miss my render-less timeline, snappy editing and 60p with small file sizes. The only 4K 60p DSLR is $6k and 800Mbit. Hmm - no thank you. 4. SOUL. It has as much soul as a Leica but is far cheaper and with a much more versatile feature set and viewfinder. The EVF is super sharp and you don't even have to magnify focus half the time, just go off the EVF or the back screen. Both are superb. To shoot with it is a pleasure. The water sealed body, the build quality, the twin memory card slots, the reassuringly photographic clunk of the mechanical shutter, which by the way is much quieter than a DSLR but no less beefy, the retro good looks - SUPERB looking camera body - it all adds up to something you just want to pick up over anything else. Makes the GH4 and NX1 feel like boring utility tools. 5. It is FAST and the LENSES are lovely. AF and general speed of operation is a big improvement from the X Pro 1. Then there's the lenses 35mm F2.0 WR, small and affordable. 56mm F1.2, creamy like a Noctilux. I also love the 18-55mm F2.8-4 zoom, it is small and well above average for an APS-C zoom of this kind, 35mm F1.4 is slower to focus and has no OIS but it is a lovely piece of glass, 23mm F1.4 also a stunner. OK, I wish it had zero moire, I wish it had 4K and I'd love an articulated screen. And yes... This is designed purely as a purist photographer's Leica-style rangefinder, what the hell am I doing shooting video with it? Because it FEELS so good to do so and it LOOKS so nice when I playback the results afterwards. Two things that are so important - the feel of holding the damn thing and the feel you get from the colour and details afterwards. Vibrant and alive, the whole experience. Sony, Canon, Panasonic experience dull by comparison. They really need to take a hint from Fujifilm.

A7S II is contrast based AF, the A7R II is phase and contrast hybrid. Phase detect active with Canon lenses with the Metabones adapter on the latter, it can be very fast. Lack of native NX lenses, hmm... not really! S 16-50mm F2.0-2.8 OIS? S 50-150mm F2.8 OIS? 85mm F1.4? (It beats my Zeiss wide open) 30mm F2.0? Lovely cheap pancake 45mm F2.0? Again very cheap, light, fast and sharp! Those are the best ones... not a bad line up and covers 16-150 all at fast apertures. AF is best on the S premium zooms What else would you need? Plus you can adapt Nikon, Sony Alpha and a ton of other lenses to it with adapters.

Corpse like. No it depends how you move it. Just hand-holding it steady won't be enough to hurt the image. Throwing the camera around like in a Greengrass movie wouldn't work, but most other stuff would and don't forget you can fix rolling shutter easily in post most of the time, although it does involve a bit of a crop. OIS on the lens helps too. Plenty of Canon lenses with this via the metabones adapter. Not quite so many nice Sony lenses with OIS.

1. It takes 30ms to read out the entire 6K sensor. More pixels to read out. 2. What do you mean by video "lag"? Lower frame rate? 3. I don't really get this... ISO 3200 does not = 280 due to pixel binning

Because Sony's noise reduction is voodoo magic.

I'm afraid all the replies so far aren't right. The NX1 uses a power saving live view mode when not in video standby mode. In this mode for framing up a shot, there's hardly any rolling shutter skew because the sensor is doing a very fast sweep, missing out a lot of pixels and lines. We call that binning. In video mode it does a 6K full pixel readout for the great quality 4K recording it has. That takes time... approx 30ms for the rolling shutter to expose the entire sensor, which is what creates the skew in video mode. Switch to 1080/120fps and it reverts to pixel binning and there's less skew.

Yes has the viewfinder adjustment diopter. No it doesn't... same.

Doesn't it crop the sensor at 4K 30p? Only 24/25p is full sensor readout from the 6K

Canon have a knack for this. When all around them is a circus of silly menus, bad ergonomics and underperforming images given the raw power under the hood, Canon with their underperforming specs have over-performing images with very good automatic white balance, well thought out menus and no frivolous stuff to get in the way on a shoot. I like the simplicity. Clearly you get a lot more colour information in a 300Mbit or 500Mbit 4:2:2 file like on the XC10 and 1DC, plus it helps the colour science is bang on in Canon LOG unlike in S-LOG. Clearly Sony know something is wrong otherwise they wouldn't have added 3 separate S Gamuts to the FS5 for different WB temperatures. Sony seem hell bent on squeezing every last drop of dynamic range and colour gamut out of the image, then packing it into as small a file as possible... the end result is a bit of a car crash. The A7S II was almost the 'dream camera' wasn't it... but I've barely felt compelled to use mine... I keep picking up my NX1 instead. That's because the body design of the A7S II is soulless, feels awful in the hand - it has the ergonomic charm of a brick. They went backwards from the A7S and that wasn't exactly perfect to begin with. Please Sony hire some designers from Fuji or whoever were responsible for the NX1 body at Samsung. Then sort the menus out - it isn't rocket science. I think they underestimate the importance of this... the shooting experience. I feel a little bit guilty when I see someone struggling through a shoot with a Shogun bolted onto the top of a small Sony mirrorless camera... great specs and we should support the push, in the face of Canon's paralysis... but it's a horrible shooting experience isn't it...

Internet culture is just a reflection of real life - there's a vast majority of stupid people in the world.

People are all entitled to not like a film for whatever reason they care to choose. It does not make them misogynists. I honestly don't think anyone 15-35 of my generation even know what sexism is any more. The term is applied so liberally to so many things. People need to learn the difference between prejudices, tastes, personal preferences and the -IST words. You might prefer pizza over burgers. This is a preference for pizza, it is not a form of food-racism. I am sure many of the people upset at the new Ghostbusters movie are just saying that the don't like it, rather than saying that they think men are superior to women, whites superior to blacks, slimer superior to marshmallow man. I think if they substituted Lara Croft with Rambo in the next Tomb Raider, fans of the series would be equally disappointed. And that is mostly the sentiment here. I am sure we all have our preferences when it comes to much loved 80's films and what made them work in the first place. For me the male buddy-comedy central characters were a big part of that. This does not make my opinion sexist. Now some will say that preference for a male cast is sexist... some will say it is anti-feminist, anti-woman, even anti-ghost. This shows they do not know the definition of terms like sexism and racism. Do I like the trailer? Nah. Fan edited one is better than the studio's own! It is definitely not a feminist film despite what the marketing and the gender of the cast wants you to believe. Crude vagina joke, lame script, poor VFX. The reboot is far more a cynical box office plot to appeal to a larger female demographic than anything else.

Why not just get the A7S used then? It isn't much more expensive. The 1080/60p is good in APS-C mode on the A7S. Excellent in fact. Not much good in full frame mode though. The D5500 and D750 also shoot very good 1080/60p.

Yes the Sigma is good But you will need to go past 35mm sooner or later. The old Sigma 50-150mm APS-C lens is pretty good... compact and F2.8. The upcoming 50-100mm F1.8 will be much more expensive and you'd never get that and the 18-35mm under $1k together. The 18-35 and 50-150mm you could do. Also the Samsung 16-50mm F2.0 to F2.8 OIS has stabilisation.. Sigma 18-35 doesn't. Something to bear in mind as well as whether you need AF to quickly establish a shot before the opportunity vanishes whilst you're in the magnified focus assist with a lens adapter