Andrew Reid

Some good options there... On PC side it is probably a case of just adding the expansion card to a spare PCIe slot? Or even a PCIe capture card with S-video input. There's also some £80 car boot sale/FB market place Windows XP PCs with a front panel that includes a firewire jack plugged directly into the mainboard. Some external firewire interface boxes are also an option for PCIe sound cards like the Creative Audigy 2 ZS.

High-end production and film industry is in real trouble at the moment. Stuff is not selling. From ARRI, RED, all the way down to vintage lenses on eBay there has been a real slump in demand. It was good timing for RED to sell up to Nikon. Not so great for Nikon though. The question is how long this slump is going to last... Streaming giants are cutting back on new production. Cinemas closing left right and centre across the world. TV is struggling for ad money and social media is taking over casual viewing in the home with GenZ. So it remains to be seen how long RED can last and whether the market correction for high-end gear is going to be significant and permanent, especially with AI on the horizon.

Ah I see yes, I agree with that. Sometimes the customer doesn't need to go on a deep dive and upgrades become less frequent anyway. But it doesn't change the fact that written journalism in the tech industry should not simply vanish, there is still a huge demand for it. It is just that the way we digest content now on small screens just isn't suited to magazine style in-depth articles so it discourages us from spending time that way. When I do try to spend time with many of these websites I am bombarded by cookie permissions, ads, bad design and clickbait anyway, whereas scrolling through apps on a phone is a much cleaner, faster experience. Yeah the ad dollars have by and large been hoovered up by influencer gobshites. Witness the last Pana launch where they outnumbered journalists by a huge margin. And anyone who does more probing coverage isn't as useful for marketing now anyway. They are not there to sell. They're there to tell the truth in an in-depth way. Guess which the marketing bosses prefer, them or the influencers? And therefore they spend accordingly... Indeed the ad industry has seen a large shift in spend to influence the influencer.... rather than to themselves directly influence the customer. Yes good point. But wasn't it always a minority in class rooms that nerded out on stuff like this? But yeah, times change... Today's kids are more likely to be into Telegram, Ai, social media, YouTube, console gaming and streaming. A toxic bunch of platforms if ever I saw one.

The 2k, 3k, 4k canon stuff is still cost cut but not as bad as the construction of the entry and mid-range stuff. Local store here in Berlin had a tiny, light 18-45mm kit zoom gently fall off a table onto soft flooring and it was irredeemably fucked forever. The stuff I have taken apart such as an R10 was so delicate inside that I have no idea how they even service the things. Just the act of partial disassembly is enough to make it dissolve. It is like the materials are brittle and made of a very low grade plastic, and the ribbon cables seem to be made of paper. The internal layout is also very busy and you can tell that it is not really meant to be serviced at all by hand. They seem to have automated a lot of the build.

Plus dongles?

I recently took apart some RF lenses and an RF body, and they are shockingly cheap and poorly designed inside. Canon have automated a lot of manufacturing and the mechanical side all looks like it was put together in CAD by a trainee. This is a particular shame as Japan was known for having the best mechanical engineers in the world. I guess this is what happens when you promote accountants to run the company over the heads of engineers. So many problems on the EOS R5 II for such an expensive piece of kit. They are like the boeing of Cameras. I would never spend 4K on something with incomplete firmware. It's supposed to be a mature product, it's not like it's first gen.

Here is the sum total of what I have pulled out the trash in the last few months Nice to see Panasonic can do a 3.8 inch screen after all on the NV-DS5 in the background which takes same battery as the DX1 and DX100, but is only a one-chip. The GS400 is / was a very capable beast, on par with the pinnacle of prosumer Mini DV cameras... Sony TRV950e The DX100 was 40 euros, the rest of them 5 euros or in case of GS400 40 again. Still have my earliest filmmaking from university in 2005 on tape. Should get round to digitising it soon via firewire.

Funnily enough this EXACT one was sitting staring at me from a Berlin flea market table today for 40 euros. So of course I couldn't resist and have yet another 90s Mini Dv camera to play with. Must have been one of the smaller 3 chip cameras of the era? It's nice and compact. The later one in 2005 I used to have is the Panasonic GS400. That was the peak of the Panasonic prosumer MiniDV cams for me. Very nice screen and lens on that, and it's 3CCD.

Well said.

Sorry but this doesn't explain why the longer form written journalism is going away. The tech market that Andandtech covers might be mature but it's still absolutely huge in terms of interest and enthusiasts, and there's a wealth of discovery to be done, debate and bait online devoted to GPUs, gaming, and such like. LinusTechTips on YouTube is huge, one of the highest subscriber counts anywhere. This is all the fault of phones, you can't READ a phone like you can a magazine due to the small screen, it's just not very nice to read long stuff on a phone and you're much better off sitting at a desk instead with a laptop. You'll be surprised how many people use their phone as a laptop or desktop replacement now. Also it is far too easy for social media and clickbait aggregators / rumors sites to hoover up other site's content and act as a link farm or highlights reel without attribution. And that is how people now digest the content. In the days when the camera rumors sites were interested in EOSHD blog posts, their link-through to the source was of no real benefit to me - they got all the views, and I had virtually nothing out of it. Andandtech could go on publishing deep dives on Apple's architecture and such like but 90% of the delivery of this would be done by aggregators, reddit, Facebook, etc. So the internet is truly broken with social media and it will soon die, or become too financially unrewarding to bother working with.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell Very sad to see the news of Anandtech stopping. Canary in the coal mine or what? If this can happen to a PC / tech website which is part of a thriving market compared to DPReview, then it can happen to ALL quality journalism on the world wide web. Anandtech is owned by Future PLC, they are the British company behind some of the earliest mainstream tech journalism in the UK such as the PC and Atari magazines on shelves in the 80s and 90s. In a nut shell smartphones are killing long form written content completely and the internet is going away as we know it. It is turning into cable TV or sensationalised clickbait tabloid news. Just look at the camera rumors sites and YouTube. A big shame if you ask me and it would be great to know what to do to preserve the written word, written journalism and written knowledge outside of just books, if the internet is no longer the right medium for it. Time for an internet 1.0... That can only be accessed via a desktop or laptop? The problem with phones is that you just don't have the large enough screen space to do anything useful, content wise. It lends itself only to scrolling and short captions, or photos and video.

S1R II and S1H II are in doubt as originals didn't sell. S1 II is also problematic as the S5 II has taken over as the mid-range / entry level FF model... Not the S9 so much as that is a different form factor type and has no EVF. Various Pana cameras of late have been impacted by severe cost cutting. The S9 feels hollow and cheap, because it is. And it has a very old sensor in it. The G9 II malarky with the same case as S5 II was a pity. The GH7 in EXACT same casing as the previous GH camera... Although the GH3 and GH4 were very similar, it does show Panasonic cutting back. Leica SL3 coming out before the new Panasonic cameras is also a sign that things aren't well. I hope they prove me wrong.

Lovely subject and rustic colours, all cuts together well and is nice and abstract. Yeah it doesn't have a true 24p or progressive scan sensor mode... But it will always have a use. Another paint brush on the canvas. And the form factor is very interesting... Why the mirrorless hybrid cameras have not got out of their stuck-in-a-mini-DSLR-all-the-same-shape rut yet I have no idea.

The lens on this thing is bonkers, most of the shots come out looking like they are shot on at least an APS-C sensor. The FZ1000 had been going for under 400 euros in recent months but I got lucky and found one for 150 at Foto-Meyer in Berlin. I don't remember the lens ever being this good. The close-focus ability is nuts. The contrast at the long end is very nice for a 25-400mm, it is very crispy for such a ridiculous zoom and it is really quick to AF. The whole thing is more ergonomic and snappier to use than Sony's RX10 series too. The 4K is a crop, that's the only flaw. Sony didn't let them use the later stacked 1" sensor so it has the older version. It was a bargain at 900 euros 10 years ago and I think it is one of those shot-getters that has really stood the test of time, so a mega thumbs-up at 150-400 in 2024 from me. The original review: https://www.eoshd.com/review/panasonic-fz1000-review-bargain-4k-super-zoom/

Panasonic GH7 sensor = On-semi? (ARRI Alexa 35 = On-semi) Perhaps there's a move to On-semi away from Sony for the full frame cameras. That's the good excuse for the delay. The bad excuse for the delay is that they ain't coming at all... But until the white smoke rises from the Tuscany villa, who am I to say? 🙂

7-ish years BEFORE the DVX100 came the DX1, a little gem from Panasonic in 1996! The form factor is pretty nifty - it has a director's viewfinder thing going on. Known as NV-DX1 or EZ1 Digital 6 camera depending on region, this was Panasonic's first prosumer MiniDV camcorder which was I think up against the Sony VX series cameras like the VX1 and later VX1000. It has a very large articulated viewfinder and being a 3CCD camera, pretty nice colours. Amazingly the tape mech still seems to work without a hitch. Picked it up in Berlin yesterday so will be fun to do some shoots to see how it compares to some of the later MiniDV cams.

Hello. Which version of EOS Utility are you using?

If you throw in Gwen as well I might consider it 🙂

I just remembered they might hate us less than thought...

In Berlin I've been trying to find a DVX100 for a while and actually they are pretty rare now. There's also the TRV 900 Sony handycam which has a certain appeal with a nice Zeiss on the front. The VX1000 and VX2000 I am also looking for, but some of the prices have recognised the current inflationary conditions of 20%, plus VAT, plus Instagram tax, plus seller remorse, plus Sony Handytax, plus tips https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sony-dcr-vx1000-e-minidv/2796362065-245-3433 There is however a TRV 900 for 100 bucks at a local junk shop... with a C31 error. This error was famous as it was apparently fixable by "giving the camera a good smack". So if I can get the shop owner out of earshot for a few seconds somehow so I can whack the shit out of his camera I might be in luck? Maybe he needs a bit of DIY and a few window frame nails doing anyway?

Looks like it's time for you to do some discrete street shooting with DVX100 down market street to Piccadilly then! Would seamlessly blend in! Plus if anyone has a problem it does double duty as a baseball bat

FS5 with that elusive electronic ND filter even more so. I can't believe that hasn't made its way into many, many more cameras yet. The conclusion is indeed that Sony and Panasonic hate us.

What a gem Your next shoot... (23:33 if it doesn't queue at right spot)

Yes I agree with that, but this is the current traditional way of looking at image generation as a raw product of sensor and lens. In the future, the sensor and lens will be merely there to set the template to embellish from. They will capture the reality - with a deep DOF and a lot of detail, in a clinical form - and the "final render"will be done with software. Would you like a Noctilux at F1.0? Tap it Of course this opens up the hellscape of lenses being seen as subscriptions and online services. But I wouldn't design it like this - I would have them all built in as a one-time purchase with the hardware, with subsequent style transfers added in firmware updates throughout the life of the camera. EF? Sure, not RF though - which is what you need for the optimal performance on a current Canon mirrorless system. Then the cost goes up very significantly. And so does the weight. With my camera design, all of that is irrelevant and the annoying need to remove a prime and attach a zoom during a shoot, also dies a death. You're talking about today's market, yes? I'm pointing to what the next market should be. That is if any of the manufacturers are brave enough to start... Which currently, they are not. It will take someone with far less skin in the existing game to come along to get the ball rolling.

Love them. Not enough good ones around for full frame though.