TC

I don't know how successful they will be with raw recording, but hopefully it gives the Magic Lantern devs a better idea of why the 'official' Canon image is so soft. Part of this would seem to be deliberate and unnecessary downscale/upscale to 1904 then 1920 image width. Maybe they can bypass that routine.

Well this is rather unsurprising, but it is still great to see it out in the open.  It just makes it clear how far Canon go to cripple their own hardware.

Blackmagic are claiming 12 stops.  I expect CMOSIS have been working Blackmagic to optimise the sensor to Blackmagic's requirements and have managed to squeeze an extra stop out of it.  12 stops is still as much as any Canon camera ever released.  

You could buy a Leica M10 and a BMPC for less than a 1D C.

The 13 stops of dynamic range spec suggests the pocket camera will use the same sensor as the existing camera, just reading a smaller window from chip.  

Fantastic news.  And also nicely complementary to the existing camera.  I suspect the original will offer better dynamic range than the Production Camera, as well as the slightly lower price.  Demand will be massive for these new cameras, so existing owners can shoot with the original cam and then upgrade when the new models are available.  

 

Executives at Canon, Nikon, Sony and Panasonic will be very, very worried.  And they only have themselves to blame.

My guess is the pocket camera uses the same sensor as the original BMCC.  Hence the same 13 stops of dynamic range.  They are just reading a smaller window from the middle of the sensor to give full HD output.

Let us not forget Canon have only just released the 1D C.  It is not as if it is an old camera.  And they want to charge a $6k premium for basically a firmware upgrade to shoot crappy MJPEG 4k, with no other video features.  I hope I never have to give that loathsome, corrupt company any of my hard earned money again.  

I think things will change a lot when Blackmagic have worked through their backorder list.  It may take a couple more months, but when you can walk into your dealer and choose between walking out with a BMCC and, well, any competing camera below $10k, I think many will make the obvious choice and buy the BMCC.  

I agree with the DSLRs not being up to par, but regarding the November announcements, at the time everyone dismissed Canon's C300, and it turned out to be a huge success, way more than the Scarlet. The C300 is the most rented camera at the moment.

 

It is probably the most rented camera because very few people want to buy one.  A lot of people, however, wanted (and still want) to buy a Scarlet as an investment in a modular, upgradeable and future-proof system.  

I can only assume Canon fired all their engineers and scientists in 2008 and have employed only people in marketing since then. There is no other explanation.

Coffee trip video from Zach is damn nice.  Amazing quality.  We (the video community) are well used to software hacks from the likes of Magic Lantern.  It is more difficult, but perhaps now we should get some electronic engineers to do some hardware hacks.  This is a cheap camera: tear one of these things apart, take the feed from the buffer and send it to an SSD.  A cooling fan should complete the setup.  

No, this is impossible. The technology to do this costs at least $10,000 even in 2013.

What, the V1 was released in 2011? Hold on a minute...

Anyway, for me the significant thing about the new M (the M10) is that it adds liveview and focus peaking for the first time on a Leica body.  As it has a short flange distance, with the right adapter you can now use pretty much any lens which covers the full 35mm frame for stills (or video, but the sample here suggests you might not want to) on this camera.  And it is a 24 megapixel sensor in a Leica!  That is a very tempting proposition for me.  

That was poor.  I think Leica's marketing department have to take the blame here.  Why did they give the camera to a stills photographer who openly confesses to hate video?  And one who clearly has no experience of shooting or editing video at all.  That is not the way to promote the video features of your new camera. 

I was wondering when the rest of this would appear.  For me, the Blackmagic looks to have a superior image.  

Yeah, let's see.  Of course I exaggerated somewhat... perhaps it will be usable in daylight, but if the native ISO is too high, it will be a limited as a specialist camera.  Which is fine, I guess it could be a specialist low light camera, just like you have specialist high-speed cameras.

I'm not sure this will be of practical use outside of scientific or surveillance applications.  Unless you like shooting in daylight at f32, 1 degree shutter angle with a big stack of ND8s on the front of your lens.  *Too* sensitive.

Toshiba also make the amazing 41 megapixel sensor in the Nokia 808.  They don't make any their own cameras, so have no reason to hold back on the technology, unlike Canon.

@jgharding Yep, spot on. A camera with a $7,000 price premium for its *video* features: a 4k firmware upgrade and headphone socket. A camera with a red C for 'cinema' on the front. And it doesn't even have focus peaking.

Kudos for the use of, "Such folly!" in your post.

Canon have some serious problems. One of the biggest is dynamic range. Canon have never been able to make a sensor with more than 12 stops of dynamic range. The DxO mark for the 5D3 gives it 11.7 stops. The D800 registers 14.4, nearly three stops more. The D600 is almost as high. Canon have made no progress in dynamic range since 2007.

Their other big problem is as follows. Despite having quite obviously fallen behind the competition in key areas (dynamic range; high-speed image processing on the video side) they are doing two things which are making them very unpopular. One is high pricing. From the 5D3, to the cinema EOS range, to the EOS-M, to new lenses such as the new 24-70 f4. The other is the obvious and deliberate crippling of their hardware. No clean HDMI out on DLSRs. No time lapse feature in firmware to make you buy the $150 cable release. No focus peaking or zebras on anything other than the C1/3/500. Super low bit-rate on the C100, to differentiate it from the C300 and for no other reason. Hell, even the microphone arm of the C100 is not compatible with the C300, despite the fact that they were almost certainly developed concurrently. Everything is designed with a built in weakness, a built in omission, an obvious and easy-to-implement feature removed. Nothing is designed to be as good as it possibly could be.

And reading this and other blogs, it is pretty clear that almost all their customers have woken up to this fact. Canon are becoming very, very unpopular. If they don't change their ways soon it will be too late - they are well on the way to alienating their entire customer base who will chose another brand next time.

You can't compare the ludicrousness of a 2.3 crop factor with the C300. Sorry, you just can't.

You can't compare the 'ludicrousness' of 11 stops of dynamic range recorded in 8-bit at 50Mbps to 13 stops of dynamic range recorded in 12-bit raw at 1.1Gbps.  Sorry, you just can't.

It's not a scam. It was a very risky investment if you ask me, but it is legit. They have used the kickstarter money to hire engineers and software designers and have prototype circuit boards and camera body. I think they bit off more than they can chew, but they are having a good go of it and it is fairly clear that they are spending the kickstarter funds sensibly. I wish them well and hope they can finalise their prototypes soon and put the thing into production.

@cameraboy Nice links. Yes, looks like the Blackmagic sensor really does have superb dynamic range, presumably due to the dual gain readout, as in Arri's sensor. It's almost like a HDR mode built into the sensor - applying high gain for the shadows and low gain for the highlights, then recombine in the digital output.

@Andrew Great that you contacted CMOSIS. I hope they are watching the camera industry closely and working on sensors aimed less at scientific applications and more at cameras.