Andrew Reid

This is a bit of a pity isn't it? Also the file sizes in ProRes RAW and N-RAW are not nice. Hopefully Nikon will do away with both in favour of R3D in future. Does it lack a mech shutter as per Z8/9? Apart from the above mentioned points and the bulkier body vs OG Z6 (not to mention bulkier price), it does seem like a very solid option but until it comes down in price, Z8 is surely the better choice.

Here comes the u-turn!

A dream GH camera, although feel a bit sorry for GH6 owners and those who weren't invited to the launch like Gerald. Incidentally Panasonic did not even email me that it was coming out or give me any press release. Panasonic marketing at their finest!

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Back to the day job

Pathetic organisation https://news.sky.com/story/robert-de-niro-has-award-withdrawn-after-calling-donald-trump-monster-outside-of-trial-13146624

The image has aged well but not the feature set. It's lacking AF, IBIS, 4K, HFR, and a good battery or audio. The Olympus E-M1 II is 400 quid and a good alternative.

I do Making money out of our suffering

Sarcasm?

Yeah the irony is that these were more useful tests. Yea even ducks Theres a third component to all of this as well alongside just the shills and camera companies, and that is the audience size of the influencers. People clearly must enjoy it, and therefore the mainstream audiences and followers are all part of problem as well, and until they wake up and unfollow, I don’t see anything changing and the internet will continue to be a sinking ship !

🙂

Let's take a moment to appreciate the old treasure that is the Nikon Z6 OG, which couldn't have aged better even if it were deposited in an oak barrel in Scotland for the past 6 years. First of all it is £650 now. Secondly of course it is full frame whereas a lot of the other options for this price are crop sensor. Many of the other mirrorless full frame cameras have aged quite badly. The Panasonic S1 is superseded by a smaller cheaper camera with better AF. The Canon EOS R classic has been superseded twice by the R6 and R6 II. The formula of Z6 on the other hand has only merely been tweaked with the Z6 II that doesn't add a huge amount extra, because it just doesn't need to. And the Z8 / Z9 are insanely more money than £650. I like that it has such nice colour science out the box. It also has better custom picture profile management than Canon. The IBIS is superior to the Canon EOS R3 in every way, let alone the EOS R5 or R6 II. The 4K video and 6K sensor is superb in low light, better than the 8K+ stuff. And despite now being very cheap the top LCD and enormous, detailed EVF hold up very favourably today, in fact the EVF competes with some of the best even in 2024. The ergonomics are excellent, it doesn't put a foot wrong in terms of what it tries to do. And what it doesn't do, you probably don't need. OK, so there's no 4K/60p, or faster stacked sensor, and 120fps is limited to 1080p, but everything feels fast and responsive, including the on-sensor phase-detect AF. It is much smaller and lighter than the Panasonic S1 or S1H, yet with phase-detect AF and a very similar sensor under the hood. Z mount has also ripened well... It has a really good line up of lenses and adapters now, including the nifty Leica M mount autofocus adapter which will turn every manual focus lens into a fast and snappy autofocus optic. Plus it's the only mirrorless mount that adapts to Sony E! So you can put your native Sony mirrorless lenses on there and everything works. I can't think of a better deal for £650 at the moment on the used market for cameras. Curious to hear other opinions and what's changed in Nikon land since it came out those long 6 years ago in 2018. I can't for the life of me think of another 6 year old camera that has aged this well.

LOL!

Indeed. Gerald likes to complain in that video about all the unfair consequences for speaking his mind, yet when it comes to people like me speaking my mind about cameras, he and fellow influencer marketing colleagues like Chris Nichols just aren't at all interested (even in the case of the EOS R5), and this demonstrates that they don't respect real journalism, and don't value it enough to draw attention to it. This is because such marketeers are not the same as us - they're not filmmakers, nor are they journalists, nor are they end-users paying their own money and finding stuff out - it's quite simple - they are marketing and sales people in a fancy studio, who like to stick together with other marketing and sales people. They respect each other in terms of other marketing and sales colleagues and PR departments, rather than actual journalists, shooters or those outside the PR industry circle like artists and real filmmakers. They are opportunists. Undone and his marketeer chums like Chris, enjoy being in their little circle jerk with the camera company PR people and events. That's where they want to stay. It goes to show that the hypocrisy levels are off the chart - Gerald doesn't like free speech, and doesn't tolerate it at all when a filmmaker speaks their mind about them. And the moment a camera company has uninvited them, for whatever reason logical or not, all the toys come out the pram which shows how much this attention circle jerk means to them. Unchartered levels of window licking achieved!!

It helps standardise and unify the content, so for example Tokyo is one of the most photogenic places on the planet... That breathtaking beauty is going to be plastered all over the launch footage and test shots on the day the embargo lifts. It's why Canon took their bros to Hawaii, and not a carpark in Slough. Couple of days on a trip you can tell a lot about a camera, but it usually isn't final firmware and you can't compare very much to rival models. Although I did once bring my Leica SL to the Panasonic S1 launch 🙂 So you're right that you need longer to really get a long term insight into whether it's worth a serious investment and how it compares to a myriad of other options. So what usually comes out on YouTube is a range of quite glossy stuff that shows off the camera in the best light possible, in some of the most aesthetic situations. This has replaced the Vimeo tests of old where you had a filmmaker and model, or perhaps a videographer and a duck in the pond. And herein lies the marketing.

I remember our time at Photokina, Dave, some of the trips are really fun, really productive. And we've both been invited by various camera companies at times to a launch or two. It's all part of the industry, but where it goes wrong is when they start barring outspoken voices and strong personalities, because to be honest free speech is what it should be all about, not marketing. The best marketing is always truthful. If they are going to start telling Gerald what his YouTube titles should be, that crosses a line for me. I like to poke fun at it, but on the other hand sometimes have to throw my hands up and say I am unhappy with some of our colleagues and the hypocrisy. If Gerald was truly transparent about why deep down he truly no longer likes Panasonic, it would not have much to do with cameras let me tell you that. The brand in his eyes is tarnished now, and that is partly the fault of Panasonic Canada or whatever PR company handled him. But I don't buy the video he put out. It's weird. It isn't fully honest. In my opinion Panasonic will now be all over it trying to patch things up and bringing him back into the inner circle which is exactly what he wants! There can't be a situation where the press and journalists are turned into a bunch of crybabies who change their opinions on a whim depending on how their VIP status is going. I have been let down and insulted by camera companies before, most notably Blackmagic and have had the odd incidence of throwing my own toys out the pram! In some ways a normal reaction because you want the access and your survival depends quite a bit on the attention of the big players in the market. So at end of the day I don't blame Gerald as much as I blame the world of corporate marketing. It is the marketing people who are playing an unethical game, slicing and dicing, horse trading and using people like pawns in a broader war.

Just watched the Gerald piece. Brands have been pursuing the same format for launches on social media for many years, but maybe they have now jumped the shark. It's becoming easier and easier to see who is in the preferred circle of manufacturer mouthpieces and who isn't, and therefore what's not objective and what is just a sales pitch and straight forward shilling. It has undermined the internet and social media so much, that it's starting to become a turn off for even the most unassuming consumers and customers. We on this forum of course spotted it coming a mile ago, and I think we know how to not get sucked into the hype and just focus on the objective info that comes out of these videos.... although to be honest, usually most of that fits on the back of an envelope even after a 20 minute viewing session. I've been to a few launches myself and it does absolutely on a personal level make it very uncomfortable and embarrassing to come back home afterwards and then be truly critical to an audience of thousands, it feels like kicking a lot of nice camera company people in the teeth. You will lose that access as a journalist (as I have). You might even be bullied into a non-disparagement agreement as was the case with me and a certain Mr Jannard at RED or made persona-non-grata without future access to pre-release hardware as was the case with Sony and now also Panasonic as well. The question for me with Gerald is whether he is truly concerned about any of this, or whether he is being hypocritical. I am assuming the latter given the very close relationship he has maintained with nearly all the major PR agencies and camera manufacturers in our industry for years without ever raising these kinds of conflict of interest and objectivity issues until many years later, i.e. now, and even then, purely because he's butt hurt about not being invited on a fancy trip to Tokyo. On the other hand, props to Gerald for being one of the few Canadian YouTubers who aren't born salesmen / Camera store duo *cough cough*. It makes perfect sense for the camera manufacturers of course to nurture the next generation of salesman by bringing them to the fore on YouTube, rather than nurturing filmmakers, real reviewers and journalists who can say troublesome things like me. Some of the key moments for me... "Why now, why Lumix launch"... I think it's because he wasn't invited. Otherwise, he would have done a video like this about 8 years ago after a Sony launch or a Canon launch. Because the same thing has been going on since about 2012 and the ramp up in YouTube & social media hype of consumer brands. "I'm just sitting at home reading the reviews"... This is him painting himself as a casual observer, and therefore an objective one. "Didn't get invited to the S5 II launch in Japan, didn't get invited to S9 launch, because I was critical of GH6"... Exactly, but had he been invited to those - would he still be putting his superman cape on and making a video like this? Nope. Because in the end he has always been 100% happy to benefit from early access and press trips when it suited him, the sanctimonious bastard. Sorry... not very polite of me, but then I aint Canadian.

I enjoyed his pivot to ghosts

Nice of him to spill the beans after only 10 years of benefiting personally from such beans. What's next... A pivot to reviewing Macs?

What a dope

I think it's time for Ed's speaking tour to make a comeback 🙂

The company Nikon SHOULD have bought.

Yellow jersey.

A weak person looks at a wrongdoing and thinks, ah too bad that's normal because look over there - the others are doing it too, whereas any person of any principals or character all would strongly condemn it. You just find the large scale fraud 'merely disappointing' tho. LOL! Through no fault of his own you are going to suggest next?? For those he cheated out of career success it wasn't merely disappointing and if you think it is 'merely disappointing' to have disgusting ethics, cheat in sport, do drugs and try to cover it up, and profit in prize money, fame and sponsorship from a huge sporting fraud, then perhaps someone like you would have no qualms about joining them yourself or colluding with people like that given the chance as it's 'not that bad'. Just like a certain camera boss is suspected of doing.

The 18-50 will be a really nice run and gun lens on the R7 for not too many pennies Exactly what the cheaper Canon bodies needed, as the full frame RF lenses are completely wasted on them. Small, cheap, fun, yet high quality - that is what the Sigma APS-C lenses bring to the table. The 23mm F1.4 looks like one to get as well. Will be interesting to see if this paves the way to full frame Sigma RF releases and if Canon have decided that their too big, too expensive and too clinical technically perfect full frame RF lenses are tanking the system, as I have heard the RF lens sales are going a bit iffy. Also with Nikon and the Z8, Sony and their successes, and Fuji taking a slice of the take with GFX, I think the high-end of Canon's line-up will need some Sigma help pretty soon.