roxics

No. It's not going to add the secret sauce of an Alexa for instance, but it's still better to have more resolution if all they are giving you is an 8bit image. Which is what we typically get on these cheaper cameras. It means I can produce a nicer 4K image in the end. Not Alexa nice, but better than using a 100% crop of a GH4. 

I can't afford to shoot on big guns like Alexa, RED or Venice, so I'm never really getting the true potential of 4K from a 4K H.264/5 camera. 
Bring on the 8K. So long as most of these Japanese camera makers are going to continue to deliver us 8bit H.264/5 files, at least give me more resolution so I can make up the difference in post. 

 

I can't afford to shoot on big guns like Alexa, RED or Venice, so I'm never really getting the true potential of 4K from a 4K H.264/5 camera. 
Bring on the 8K. So long as most of these Japanese camera makers are going to continue to deliver us 8bit H.264/5 files, at least give me more resolution so I can make up the difference in post. 

 

There is a compelling argument that 8K is the way to go from an image standpoint. It doesn't have to be sharp. Sharpness and resolution are separate things. 

That said, I'll remain skeptical of this. I'm not sure what RED has to gain here. Keep in mind the market for cinema cameras is not the same as the market for smart phones. Most people aren't shooting video for a living, let alone cinematic movies. Saying you're going to make up for dwindling smart phones sales by making cinema cameras just seems like a strange step to take. But hey if they can give me something like a Weapon for a few grand, I'm all for it. 

Yeah but she still has the best skin tone and still pretty hot. You kinda wish you could hook up with her again (even just once) if it wasn't for all her issues and the fact that she's a gold digger. 

Yeah but she still has the best skin tone and still pretty hot. You kinda wish you could hook up with her again (even just once) if it wasn't for all her issues and the fact that she's a gold digger. 

Yeah but she still has the best skin tone and still pretty hot. You kinda wish you could hook up with her again (even just once) if it wasn't for all her issues and the fact that she's a gold digger. 

Yeah but she still has the best skin tone and still pretty hot. You kinda wish you could hook up with her again (even just once) if it wasn't for all her issues and the fact that she's a gold digger. 

Yeah but she still has the best skin tone and still pretty hot. You kinda wish you could hook up with her again (even just once) if it wasn't for all her issues and the fact that she's a gold digger. 

Yeah but she still has the best skin tone and still pretty hot. You kinda wish you could hook up with her again (even just once) if it wasn't for all her issues and the fact that she's a gold digger. 

I think you have that backwards. I think most people assumed it too expensive for what it is. It's a super 16 sized sensor that shoots 2K raw. The BMPCC is basically the same thing for one third the cost. It was inevitable this was going to happen. Despite the fact that this shot a nice image and raw, we now live in a world where you can buy a GH4 that shoots 4k on a larger sensor with a flip out screen and EVF and doubles as a stills camera for $1500 or less. Half the cost or more than the D16. While you lose the raw, most people really aren't equipped to handle raw editing anyway. 
As a camera maker you have three customer bases you can appeal to, consumer shooters (doing family videos) which has pretty much all been lost to smart phones and low cost DSLRs, shoestring filmmakers who in a lot of ways see the super 16 sensor size as anticlimactic since we've had super 35 sized sensors since the DSLR revolution. So to shoot super 16 it needs to be cheap for them, which this wasn't. Lastly Pros who are pretty much all shooting with FS7s and above and aren't going to bother with a physically large sized super 16 camera they can't use as a crash cam. Which meant that this camera was really just a niche hobbyist camera from the start for people who wanted to use something retro looking on the exterior.

I read the whole article before first responding. But I still disagree. Like I said before, full frame and APS-C existed before Panasonic and Olympus consciously made the choice to build a smaller m43 system. They did this to reduce size of all components and carve out a niche for themselves. Now you're asking them to confuse their niche. They're already competing just fine and GH4 sales are good. They can continue this with a 60fps GH5 and 10-bit internal. Those two alone will sell the next camera to a lot of people. Let's say they dd this tomorrow, who else on the market is offering you a 4K 60p 10-bit camera for under $2000? Will Sony catch up, sure. But that's just the nature of the game. That's why you don't pick cameras based on the latest specs but the one that works for you when you need it. 

Again, adding a S35 sensor is just going to upset people who are already invested in m43 glass. Because now they can't get the most out of their new camera with their investment in m43 lenses. Which will make them not want to invest further in m43 lenses going forward. If Panasonic makes APS-C lenses as premium glass, that just fragments a system that doesn't need to be fragmented. The only reason APS-C DSLRs exist is because Canon and Nikon needed to find a way to get better yields on their sensors in the early days when making full frame sensors was a lot more expensive and more prone to error on the larger waffers. So they fragmented out of necessity. M43 doesn't need to go this route and I don't think they will. Nor do I think they will become irrelevant if they don't.   

What you're looking for is a cheaper/smaller Varicam. That's what you should be asking them to make. Not disrupt their m43 line.      
No they would not. Larger sensors require a larger circle of confusion which requires larger glass elements to retain certain speeds. Why do you think 16mm lenses are smaller and medium format lenses are bigger?   

I read the whole article before first responding. But I still disagree. Like I said before, full frame and APS-C existed before Panasonic and Olympus consciously made the choice to build a smaller m43 system. They did this to reduce size of all components and carve out a niche for themselves. Now you're asking them to confuse their niche. They're already competing just fine and GH4 sales are good. They can continue this with a 60fps GH5 and 10-bit internal. Those two alone will sell the next camera to a lot of people. Let's say they dd this tomorrow, who else on the market is offering you a 4K 60p 10-bit camera for under $2000? Will Sony catch up, sure. But that's just the nature of the game. That's why you don't pick cameras based on the latest specs but the one that works for you when you need it. 

Again, adding a S35 sensor is just going to upset people who are already invested in m43 glass. Because now they can't get the most out of their new camera with their investment in m43 lenses. Which will make them not want to invest further in m43 lenses going forward. If Panasonic makes APS-C lenses as premium glass, that just fragments a system that doesn't need to be fragmented. The only reason APS-C DSLRs exist is because Canon and Nikon needed to find a way to get better yields on their sensors in the early days when making full frame sensors was a lot more expensive and more prone to error on the larger waffers. So they fragmented out of necessity. M43 doesn't need to go this route and I don't think they will. Nor do I think they will become irrelevant if they don't.   

What you're looking for is a cheaper/smaller Varicam. That's what you should be asking them to make. Not disrupt their m43 line.      
No they would not. Larger sensors require a larger circle of confusion which requires larger glass elements to retain certain speeds. Why do you think 16mm lenses are smaller and medium format lenses are bigger?   

What's the point? It's not like APS-C wasn't around when Panasonic and Olympus made the conscious choice to build a smaller sensor camera system. They did that so they could carve out a niche for themselves making smaller bodies and lenses for people that might like that. Now you want them to essentially conform to APS-C. Why should Panasonic build a camera that basically tells people to use third party lenses if they want the best quality out of that camera? That doesn't make much sense for them or most people who buy m43 cameras. I mean if the camera had an APS-C sensor at 24 megapixels and people using Panasonic lenses could only get say 18MP photos (or whatever the m43 crop resulted in) that kind of looks bad for Panasonic. People would be like "what do you mean I have to buy Canon lenses and an adapter to get the full resolution my camera advertises and even then it may not autofocus as well?" It's silly when you really think about it.

If you want APS-C, then buy into a different camera system. Plenty of others offer them. 
Just seems weird to ask Panasonic to change their sensor size when you could just buy a Sony or a Canon or a Nikon and demand from them the features you want. Out of all of those, go to Nikon because they don't have eighteen plus thousand dollar cinema cameras they would have to risk cannibalizing by loading up a DSLR with cinema features. Panasonic, like Sony and Canon, do.

Plus if Panasonic can offer a 20MP sensor for stills (which we know they can) that's a perfectly great resolution. Heck the 1D XmkII shoots at 20 megapixel and the Canon 5D is around that. If they can then do a full sensor width readout of a 16:9 area and produce 4K video downsampled in camera from that, great. If Sony and Samsung can, Panasonic shouldn't be far behind. If they can increase dynamic range and offer a global shutter and compressed raw recording, even better. There are plenty of ways for them to improve without increasing sensor size.  

I think you're asking too much from what is basically a consumer camera. 
I think Panasonic is interested in output formats that meet predefined display specs, so you can throw 6K recording out the window. 

Best we can hope for is:
4K from a 6K (20mp) sensor with full readout of that sensor and no crop (closer to 5K in 16:9 mode) downsampled in camera. 
4K at 60fps and 200Mbps, 4K at 30/25/24 still being 100mbps
10-bit internal recording
Slightly higher dynamic range due to an improved sensor/DSP.
Maybe a choice of H.265 recording at the same bitrates.

They'll stick to an m43 size sensor. 
 

Totally agree there. If they could nail the Alexa look in a camera at this price, you'd have a lot of shoestring budget filmmakers switching from saying "wow this is an expensive camera" to "wow this thing is a steal and a big winner."

That aside, it's really cool to see them work with you on this and those are some great suggestions you've added. 

​I think the 7DmkII was the harbinger of what to expect from Canon DSLR video for the foreseeable future.