cantsin

Hello, I agree with your points on stabilization and weather sealing. But if you combine those 17-50mm lenses with a Metabones MFT 0.71x Speed Booster, you get a 12-35mm/f2.0 [!] lens for the total cost of $400 (Tamron) + $400 (Speed Booster) vs. the Panasonic's $850. You gain a better focus ring for pulling manual focus, a stepless aperture ring on the Speedbooster adapter, one stop aperture, better natural resolution and a better out-of-the-lens picture thanks to the combination of APS-C glass + Speed Booster, and you get the Speed Booster (easily the most useful accessory to any MFT camera) as a factually "gratis" extra in the whole package. So I agree that it depends on your priorities. Since this forum is mostly crowded by people who want to shoot cinematic video rather than camcorder/ENG style, I have a hunch that the Speed Booster combination provides some real advantages, and that the Panasonic 12-35mm is overrated.

Just read the photozone.de test. It might not sound pretty for people who invested money into this lens, but if you look at the objective measurements, then it's a lens that should cost at best half of what it costs right now. (It performs worse than a comparable Sigma or Tamron, at a price for which you can get a professional Canon L or Nikon lens.) What has been described here as the "clinical look" of the lens is actually the product of software correction: distortion compensation, CA filtering, brightening up the margins to compensate for vignetting, software sharpening at the margins. It looks clinical and artificial because it's not naturally sharp, but in-camera photoshopped to look better. These are tricks adopted from consumer camcorders and compact digital cameras where it's normal to design lenses with optical flaws and compensate them in the camera firmware. Which explains why this and other Panasonic zoom lenses look "camcorderish" or "video-ish" when mounted on a Panasonic G body. You'll encounter compatibility problems as soon as you mount the lens on any non-Panasonic body because even Olympus' Micro Four Thirds cameras do not support all of the software corrections (such as CA filtering). - Btw., you can test all of the above yourself even with a Panasonic camera body if you isolate the electronic contacts of the lens (with a thin piece of plastic or paper) before mounting it. Then the camera will no longer recognize it as a system lens and skip software corrections. I once tried that with the Panasonic 14-140mm zoom, and it was quite an eye opener.

In reality, the 12-35mm is an optically poor and way overpriced lens. Look at its real distortion by hovering the mouse over the chart on in this page: http://www.photozone.de/m43/766_pana1235f28?start=1 It suffers from terrible CAs, distortion and disappointing sharpness. These are all masked on native MFT cameras like the GHs through software corrections of the image - but will hit you when you mount the lens on a Blackmagic camera. Any Tamron or Sigma 17-50mm/2.8 APS-C lens is optically much better while costing only a fraction. Even in combination with a Speed Booster (which would make their focal length the same as the Panasonic's, with one stop aperture gain at f2.0), those lenses cost less than the Panasonic alone. The only advantage of the Panasonic is its compact size and optical stabilization.

You need an M39 (old Leica screw mount) to Micro Four Thirds adapter. They're cheaply available on Ebay and Amazon.

F-numbers refer to physical size of front lens opening vs. back lenses opening. A 24-70/1.8 on a full frame camera - would have to be twice as large as the Sigma only to meet f1.8, and then twice as large again because of the longer focal length. You'd end up with a 4 times as large and heavy brick of glass. These are laws of physics. The only reason Sigma could build the 18-35/1.8 is that it's made for an APS-C crop sensor. And this is no rocket science since 35mm cine zooms (for the same, roughly APS-C equivalent frame size) with f1.8 have been around for a long time. But as I said before, this forum is degenerating into a cargo cult. In fact, it already has. It's almost comedy.

This site provides perfect material for future anthropologists who want to study 21st century cargo cults.

All Panasonic needs to do is implement 10bit 4:2:2 Video with a log image profile and a decent codec. This would be equivalent to the Blackmagic recording ProRes log, but in a nicer camera package with less quirks, more out-of-the-box functionality (EVF, audio, UV+IR-cut and OLPF filters in front of the sensor, pixel mapping of defect sensor pixels) and much better handling. The good thing is: 10bit 4:2:2 already is part of the official 4K/UHD specification. So it's not something esoteric to expect. Andrew might know more and even might have been given a prototype model, but would most likely be under an NDA with Panasonic at this point.

You can't transfer raw via HDMI. And if price is king, they've already lost against Blackmagic. I agree with you that this is a boutique (as opposed to a workhorse) camera. It occupies a similar niche as a Leica M9 in digital photography.

I highly recommend downloading and playing with the sample D16 raw DNG footage from https://www.copy.com/s/2F1SEP36q04oIcRZ/Ashlee_Willis_Misery.zip and from https://philipbloom.wetransfer.com/downloads/a2361ca610eb3bc6182af7fea9838d5420131228180425/df0c2f in order to informedly make up one's judgement of the camera's strengths and limitations. Whether one sees the CCD sensor as an advantage or disadvantage, will be a matter of priorities (and, for sure: taste).

You can't mount a Speedbooster on the D16 since it doesn't have a MFT mount.

This site here is getting obsessive-compulsive and childish. Goodbye.

  In additions, there are clear advantages to sticking to a native lens mount over adapting lens mounts: http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2013/09/there-is-no-free-lunch-episode-763-lens-adapters   The problems mentioned in the above article will get the more visible in video, too, the better codecs and resolutions are getting. 

  Not a consumer camera. (Those buyers who mistook it for a consumer camera are the people angrily ranting about it on the Blackmagic forum.) Not a camera where the video signal processing is a by-product of the JPEG engine.   Mainstream manufacturers would have to turn priorities upside down and reengineer their cameras' debayered signal processing so that they produce 8-bit JPEG as a downsampled by-product of 10-bit video processing. I don't expect this to happen with any standard photo camera. Heck, not even amateur-level video editing programs (like iMovie, Pinnacle, the budget editions of Vegas) support more than 8-bit color depth, so this would be purely a feature for people editing on pro NLEs.    Maybe it will come in a future GH camera, probably it will be brought to Canon's C line sooner or later. Maybe we'll see a 10-bit Canon C camera and a 10-bit Sony F camera for $1000-$2000 if both manufacturers think that Blackmagic seriously cuts into their semipro/pro video market. But for cameras primarily targeted at the stills market, the R&D and engineering costs of 10-bit signal processing won't make much business sense - unless future camera controller chips do 10-bit out of the box anyway so that it can be provided as a by-product. (Don't forget that DSLR video started a by-product of the CMOS live view signal. Live view signals will not be debayered to 10-bit for the foreseeable future because LCD viewfinders can't reproduce more than true color/3*8 bits anyway.)

  This will neither happen fast or easily because all current camera chips process debayered image data (including JPEG) only in 8 bit. It would require a complete overhaul of the internal signal processing. Therefore, I don't expect 10 bit signal processing to arrive in consumer cameras any time soon.

I actually do agree with no smiley attached - and the Blackmagic cameras are one good solution for the problem.

Nobody sells a $3000 camera to 14 million people. The average price of a DSLR used by Vimeo filmmakers is probably in the area of a Canon Rebel T[x]i or Panasonic GH[x], between $700 and $1000. On top of that, your estimate assumes that people buy, on the average, a new camera every year. If Nikon could make a model that would convince 3-5% (=500,000) of Vimeo users to buy it as their next camera, that would amount to 250,000 extra cameras sold per year, a 4% sales increase in relation to the 6.5 Million interchangeable lens cameras Nikon sells every year. Whatever the real numbers are, Nikon management could have decided that it's not worth the effort. Even more if a considerable part of their current customer base thinks that the video button is a triggered-by-accident annoyance.

  Point taken. But also consider that EOSHD is more or less the last DSLR/mirrorless DIY filmmaking site out there while others have disappeared or shifted focus. In 2010, EOSHD had much more competition (Philipp Bloom's blog, ProLost, Cinema5D, DVXuser ...). 

Couldn't agree more.

People, you're all overestimating the DSLR video market. It's marginal, and has become more so recently. The 2009-2012 video DSLR hype is over. For pros and semipros, there are now better video cameras with large sensors and interchangeable lenses. Amateurs of the kind that ceaselessly filmed "test videos" of flowers in shallow DoF seem to have moved on to other toys (GoPros?). No DSLR or mirrorless manufacturer will sell a lot of cameras because of video. Even in their heydays, cameras like the GH1/2/3 were rarely stocked by camera and consumer electronics stores because they catered to a too specialist market niche. Shooting and editing video is still relatively complex compared to shooting stills, no matter with which technology. At any time, amateur moving images have been a niche market compared to photography, whether on small gauge film, analog or digital video. Arguably, they were much more popular in the 1970s with Super 8 home movies than any time later. Today, probably 99% of amateur video is cell phone video uploaded to social media. Even smartphone video editing apps aren't used that much. And how many amateurs, prosumers, semi-pros and DIY filmmakers worldwide are users of Final Cut, Premiere, Vegas or Avid? Those are the people who constitute the whole market for cameras that sit in between point-and-shoot camcorders and digital cinema cameras. To take another example: Vimeo, more or less the Internet platform for DIY/prosumer filmmaking, has 14 Million user accounts. If we factor in inactive accounts on the one hand and DIY filmmakers without Vimeo accounts on the other, and also consider that roughly half of the active Vimeo contributors use either lower or higher end cameras, then 14 Million users likely represent the maximum number of worldwide DSLR/mirrorless video shooters. (Frankly, I think that the number is much smaller if activity on related web forums and social media is any good indicator.) If each of them buys a new camera every two years, then 7 million cameras would be sold to this target group per year. That's a mere 6% of worldwide digital camera sales, still based on a very optimistic guess of the user demographic. In other words: better video features aren't relevant for at least 94% of camera buyers. And thus hardly relevant for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus, Fuji, given their total volume of sales.

My favorite photo camera is still the (analog) Nikon FM2 because it is so simple, straightforward, robust and snappy. There is still no digital camera with which I can shoot as fast and as easily, especially in manual mode. In my book, the Nikon Df combines the worst of analog and digital - a cluttered interface typical for modern DSLR forced into a pseudo film-DSLR housing. What Nikon should have done, IMHO, is bring back the simplicity of a camera like the FM2 (rather than something that vaguely resembles its looks): - Skip JPEG, only shoot RAW. These days, no serious photographer needs JPEG except news shooters who need fast turnaround times - and who won't buy this camera anyway. Eliminating JPEG will also eliminate most camera menu items - white balance, compression quality, "active d-lighting", picture styles, color space, etc. - Get rid of the mode dial, but have three dials on top of the camera: (1) shutter speed, in the classical increments + one "A" setting; (2) ISO, in classical increments + one "A" setting, (3) aperture [for all lenses without aperture ring + one "A" setting. This would be enough to control the camera for all purposes. - Get rid of the camera menu, and the menu button, altogether. (Formatting cards could simply be done via a dialogue popping up whenever a card is newly being inserted, and confirmation via the shutter button.) - Provide a split-prism viewfinder for quick and precise manual focusing. - Eliminate shutter lag. - Use the more robust CF cards instead of SD cards. - Power the camera with standard (rechargeable) AA batteries instead of a proprietary battery. - Provide a classical cable release thread in the shutter button. - Make the camera all-metal. Personally, I like the idea of a pure photo camera, but the Nikon Rf isn't it. I also think that DSLR video is dead now, with nothing to be expected by the mainstream camera manufacturers except maybe Panasonic. (Whose GH series is the only large sensor interchangeable lens camera that has ever been officially developed and marketed as a truly hybrid stills and video camera.)

Many people here overestimate the importance of DSLR video for companies like Canon. It's just a very small if not fringe part of their sales and customer base. And even this niche is shrinking to likely a fraction of what it used to be only a few years ago ever since large sensor camcorders took over the high end of the market and Blackmagic cameras compete on the low-cost side.   Just look at the number of websites and blogs that are still truly about DSLR filmmaking. This one here is among the last ones standing, but it's not exclusively about DSLR/mirrorless photo camera filmmaking anymore either.

  It's off topic, but here's a fact check: Android Inc. was founded in 2003, was acquired by Google in 2005, and first released as a smartphone OS in 2007. iOS was released with the first iPhone in 2007.   For sure, Android copied great parts of the iOS user interface. But conversely, iOS took inspiration from a number of older touchscreen/pen device interfaces, such as the 1990s Magic Cap OS of the company General Magic. Andy Rubin, the architect of Android, was a software engineer with General Magic, later the designer of the Danger Hiptop, a pre-iPhone mobile Internet device popular in the US. And let's not forget the Palm Pilot whose 1997 start screen and calendar app look like straightforward prototypes of the iPhone and Android. - The history of mobile operating systems and user interfaces is as complex as that of PCs (where Apple didn't invent the GUI either, but took the idea from Xerox).   You might consider iOS more rounded from a user interface point of view. Android is more powerful under the hood because it it is a full Unix operating system with a true filesystem (as opposed to iOS with its per-application databases), full multitasking, multiuser and file permission management. Next to running on smartphones, tablets, media players and smart TVs, Android can even be used as a PC operating system, as camera firmware, on basically any device with any CPU supported by the Linux kernel.   As mobile phones and tablets mature and get used as productivity devices, iOS has some software design limitations that sooner or later need to be addressed: most importantly, the lack of a true file system and/or fully featured network storage system that would allow sharing of documents across different apps. Currently, iOS only supports that for pictures and videos in the camera roll, or application-specific data sharing workarounds (via Dropbox or iCloud, depending on the individual application). It's the same limitation that crippled the CP/M home computer operating system in the 1980s. Another severe constraint of iOS is that it doesn't permit alternatives for its core services (such as HTML and Javascript rendering, or the maps API), and Google currently has the edge over Apple in browser and maps technologies.    Aside from interface simplicity, iOS was better usable than Android for a long time because it's leaner and technologically more simple, thus running better on the slow cell phone hardware from 2007-2012. But in the age of mobile quadcore CPUs and GPUs, this has become moot, and the limitations of iOS are starting to become anachronistic. The A7 chips in the new iPad Air are as fast as the Core Duo chips in the first generation Intel Macbooks from 2006. iOS wasn't designed for such powerful hardware, and is beginning to show its age, just like Mac OS 7/8/9 was no longer adequate for PowerMacs in the years before Apple switched to Mac OS X. Unfortunately, iOS 6 has mostly been optical cosmetics, with no real change under the hood.   So, to go back on topic: Apple has lately become the Canon of the computer industry - once a leader, now on their way to a producer of mature yet uninnovative products. If Apple had leadership with vision, it should try to technologically merge the iOS and Mac OS platforms in a system that would still be appealingly simple. This has now become purely a question of software engineering; Apple's mobile hardware is already powerful enough to run such a system.   (Disclaimer: I'm a completely OS and platform agnostic person, since my combination of jobs and a private life makes me a simultaneous user of iOS, Android, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux, Windows and ChromeOS.)

The crucial question is whether mass market DSLRs and mirrorless cameras will go beyond 8-bit 4:2:0 color Rec.709 (a color space meant for HD video playback, not for recording or post-production) any time soon. As long as this doesn't happen, higher bitrates, more frame rates and better sensors won't be enough for shooters who aren't satisfied with the out-of-the-box image of a camera.

Judging on the number of MagicLantern downloads and uploads of Canon/ML raw videos to sites like Vimeo, I believe that this still is a very small market niche.

Even then I don't quite get the argument: Either you have too few SD cards for the footage you want to shoot, and then you need a laptop/computer around anyway in order to offload your footage. Or you have enough SD cards, and then it's not a big deal to format them on a computer at home or work before you go out shooting. I only foresee problems when people have messy habits of not properly offloading footage and cleaning up their SD cards so that they run into problems of popping cards into their camera that still have older footage on them. The normal workflow should be (even for other video and DSLR cameras): (1) shoot (2) repeat the following with each SD card you used: (a) offload SD card to computer (+ ideally to a backup drive); (b ) format SD card. Under Mac OS X, (a) and (b ) can even be automated with a single Automator or shell script. Under Windows, the same should be possible with PowerShell.