Andrew Reid

Recently I backed the fps1000 high speed camera on Kickstarter, choosing the £1000 Platinum version with 1" sensor. Its UK-based creator Graham Rowan says the camera will get a 4K Super 35mm sensor option in 2015. The existing camera has also been improved considerably since the initial plans, with numerous stretch goals being applied. Read the full article here

Turns out Adobe Camera Raw does have a setting for the NX1 + Samsung 30mm F2.0, I just have to turn it on to remove the fringing wide open. Quite a nice lens for 250 euros if you need the AF and small size. It weighs practically zero.

  A sense of pride in your existence :)

I talked to London Camera Exchange in Manchester and they said a lot of Sony bodies were selling now. Used to be mostly Canon and Nikon. Times are a changin. Don't say I didn't warn them...

  Allow me to fill you in on that second one at C5D. It's a seriously biased piece of writing and testing. Johnnie and Seb at that site fell out with me a year ago after they made a deal at NAB with a Berlin cine shop to do an exclusive review of the KineRaw Mini, practically whipping the camera from under me in my own back yard, doing deals behind my back with my own contacts and friends. Regardless when the camera landed in Berlin the shop offered the demo unit to me first anyway and I emailed Johnnie to ask if it was ok to put my results out there. He said yes ok, as long as no video. I forgot about the video and as part of the page of images put a very short clip out there showing some bubbles in slow mo and he lost his rag saying I couldn't be trusted. That was over a year and a half ago.   Now we come to the present and the NX1 is a target because I have been advocating it as a decent camera. So the C5D test is basically there to discredit me. And this tweet just before it came out, is another passive aggressive swipe at EOSHD -    It's full of flaws anyway. They criticise the EVF at the same time as giving the 7D Mark II top marks for handling... well that doesn't even have one! The EVF on the NX1 is great anyway! They complain about usability when all their complaints are solved merely by setting up the camera properly.   Put stills to 16:9 so it matches video framing, use peaking and magnified focus assist, hit record. Not hard is it? The 7D mark II doesn't even have peaking and neither can magnify focus whilst recording yet the NX1 gets a kick in the knees for it and the 7D doesn't. They barely mentioned it.   Most critically the workflow they used was totally the wrong one. They had SmartRange turned on and Contrast -10. Double trouble. They say 18 hours to transcode 1 hour of footage, but that simply isn't the case. They didn't use Wondershare to transcode to ProRes and only used the supplied Samsung software to transcode to H.264.   On top of this their rolling shutter test has been flawed previously, rating the GH4 in 4K better than the 5D Mark III in 1080p and the A7S in APS-C crop mode. That's not borne out in reality. Likewise their dynamic range test has brought up weird results. They rated the A7S at 14 stops, same as an Arri Amira and the 5D Mark III with CineStyle ahead of the 1D C with Canon LOG!! I'm curious how they get 11.8 stops out of the 5D Mark III's stock video mode when the sensor is only rated for 11.5 stops in raw!!   It all just seemed overly critical, more critical than their other reviews for distinctly less impressive cameras. What a shame some personal bias has affected their impartiality as reporters. I hope nobody cancelled their NX1 order as a result.

  Here's a 1:1 crop, as you can see the Samsung 30mm F2.0 has some chromatic aberration wide open in the raw (bottom image) but the video processor completely gets rid of it, which sharpens up the black text nicely. Best video processor ever in a stills camera.

  That rolling shutter on the NX1 is similar to the 1D C is actually quite a strong point.   One costs $1599, the other $12,000.   One is doing a 28MP readout in those 33ms, the other just a 8MP readout (and with a crop of the sensor).   One is doing that on a smaller battery. The other is a clunky beast all round.   One is labeled Samsung, one is labeled Canon.   One is raved about and hyped to an alarming degree. Guess which.

I think it's hard to give a one answer suits all for this.   Devil is in the detail. If you're focused on infinity with a wide angle lens and there's nothing in the foreground within 5 meters, then A7S is clearly going to be better in low light even though the 'deep depth of field' is a little less deep on the A7S shot, that shot will look the same as the GH4 because nothing will be out of focus.   APS-C crop mode on the A7S still benefits from the massive 9 micron pixels so we should compare that 1.5x crop to GH4's 2.3 crop in the DOF calculations, not full frame. There A7S will be cleaner on all shots, just not by as much.   The GH4 gets a bad rap in low light, it's not so bad actually. The reference point should be Super 35m film which gets noisy at 800 ASA and $25,000 cinema cameras which get noisy at ISO 3200. By those standards the GH4 is perfectly fine. The A7S is an alien from another planet, an exception.

Sorry yes A is video, B is raw.

A is video.   Some people got it perfectly. A bit more compression in the blacks on A and a bit more sharpening in-camera. The raw file had more C/A because Adobe Camera Raw didn't remove it by default and sharpness was left on default as well which is why it looked a little softer.   But the very fact that they look so similar to the general 'audience' with almost a 50-50 split between you on this forum over which was which, shows how good the video is on this camera.

Drum roll...  

  That was rather impressive actually. It won't be that reliable all the time though :)    He used the Samsung 16-50mm F2.0-2.8. Good lens.

  The 7D had a huge video following, actually. Canon say it is wildlife / sports stills camera because that's an even bigger market. Money talks. It will be their downfall in the end though, because the camera market is about more than just figures and numbers.

  And you are doing the reverse which is the same thing.

Some great guesses in here. Some of you are spot on. Nearly time to reveal which is which...

Damn I think I've forgotten which is which ;)   This would have been much easier had it been Canon 5D Mark III H.264 video vs 22MP raw!!!   Results and blog coming in the afternoon of the 3rd Dec, Berlin time.

Why do you think that? :)

  All will be revealed tomorrow. Until now have your guess on the forum.   I am using a special grading technique here for the first time which is giving beautiful results on the NX1. There will be a full blog post about this when the result is revealed. Camera settings were all on default. Picture profile turned off. Sharpening on default level for video and in Adobe Camera Raw for the still. Video was shot in 3840 x 2160 Ultra HD mode at 25p and the still in raw at 28MP. H.265 video converted to ProRes LT then graded in Premiere. Raw still graded in Photoshop (Adobe Camera Raw). Focus point is on colour 28.   Read the full article here

  Before DSLRs die out for photography, manufacturers have to sort the mirrorless lenses, AF and offer more full frame stuff (looking at you Panasonic & Fuji). Otherwise DSLRs will trundle on forever.   AF is still not good enough and nobody has a full frame mirrorless range of lenses to match Canon or Nikon.   Until that happens, it is easier to "get shit done" as a working photographer on Canon & Nikon gear professionally, unless you are using manual focus lenses and adapters - in that situation then mirrorless is better because you can focus more precisely through the viewfinder.   For video it's a no-contest at the moment... not just in terms of specs or performance... but what use does a mirror have for video? It is a hinderance. 1D C was worst camera ergonomically I ever used for shooting video with. Worse than their low end DSLRs and much worse than the 5D Mark III with Magic Lantern.   Despite that I still hold out hope that one day Magic Lantern will be brave and dive into the 1D X, unlocking 4K & adding focus peaking, etc. Because we all know it's essentially a 1D C underneath. The 1D X with 4K if it drops below $3000 used would be a lot more in league with the others... NX1, GH4 and A7S in particular.   ---   It baffles me why Canon's success seems a mystery to some of the trailing manufacturers sales-wise like Panasonic and Olympus. This isn't hard to fix guys. You need a full frame sensor, plenty of fast primes, a couple of fast zooms, AF needs to be as good and that really is about it. The rest they're already very strong at. Photographers are not going to all suddenly dump full frame Canon stuff and go to Panasonic or Olympus when they have so much smaller sensors. If Panasonic wants to lead, they have to follow what Sony have been doing and do it better. Takes a lot of resources but it can be done. Micro Four Thirds is a great system... it's also been a waste of time... they should keep just the GH4 and LX100, then focus on bringing out a new full frame system - Lumix FX. Then the serious doors will start opening, pros will adopt it and the micro four thirds stuff can continue to provide for the niches like GH4 is doing so well with video.

Now we are on page 9, by the same token I'm wondering how I ended up with someone with 459 posts on my own site (like a virus on each page) berating me every-time he reads something he doesn't agree with. It doesn't seem like a fair deal does it!? I give him a platform as a filmmaker and 459 posts of server bandwidth, and in return he says I am flogging a dead horse! Canon may be a dead horse but I have nothing to flog!

    And yet here you are on page 8.

The FZ1000 initially lacked 24p. It has it now with the latest firmware update.   To answer those Qs above...   1. LX100 is better in low light by quite some margin 2. LX100 has the better overall video quality, but they have the same codec and at ISO 200 hard to tell apart 3. LX100 again better picture quality because of larger sensor and it's less noisy. The lens plays a part. The LX100 is simply lovely at wide angle, F1.7 4. Lens quality is similar in terms of sharpness, contrast, etc. But LX100 doesn't flare too well - green splurge 5. Both are "clean" but LX100 is less noisy

Fair enough! Now let's get back to talking about why there is no high spec video on Canon cameras under $5000.

Francis Ford Coppola liked the GH2 best in the Zacuto shootout. Are some subjective opinions more important than others in the opinion soup? I do believe they are.

When does a big sample of subjective opinions turn into an objective opinion?