Cliff Totten

Sony will liscence phase detect AF on their sensors to Olumpus and Nikon with no trouble. But,...there is no way they will EVER liscense it to Panasonic. They will say, "we are happy to sell you our sensor and even liscence you 4k 30p and 60p in 10bit....but we will force you to keep contrast AF only....no PDAF for you!"
To my knowledge, the only phase detect AF cameras on planet Earth are Canon cameras....or. any other phone or camera that buys Sony sensors. That's it, if you are not Canon than you get your PDAF through your Sony sensor liscense and contract of sale.
Panny is deliberetely left out in the cold. They dont "believe" contrast detect is better...no, the truth is that Panny has no choice in the matter.

Its going to be fascinating to see what the XDCAM management team will "allow" the Alpha management team to give the new A7S-III. A Sony manager fir Russia was stating that he thinks the A7S-III wont have "deep color" as that is reserved for the XDCAM FS series only. I suspect he means 10bit.
I heard at NAB that Panasonic is very receptive to the S1 having 4k raw over HDMI and that it IS definetely comming to the S1 this year. Those same sources told me that Sony is not willing to go that far right now. Atomos is pressuring them but Sony is not buying into the raw idea for Alpha. (The next FS probably)
Will Alpha be allowed to have highly compressed 10bit internal recording or will it only be granted 10bit video HDMI? I would love to be a fly on the wall in these Alpha/XDCAM manager board room meetings!!
2019 is a massive political fight for managers inside Sony and Panasonic. Nikon?....no no, HDMI raw was an EASY choice!!!

Oh yeah....Panny no doubt threw some cripple tricks into the S1. One of the worst being 128k compressed audio! 128k!!!! What decent camera on planet Earth has audio THAT compressed?
The S1 was given one of the WORST audio recording modes in the entire camera industry. It sounds "ok" but what happens when you take a 128k audio track, edit it and it gets compressed again on YouTube? Your 128k....which is already heavily stripped of data...gets slammed again.
Dont worry though, if you buy the VLog upgrade, you THEN get PCM uncompressed audio.

Does anybody think that Sony actually has the BALLS to make an 8bit A7S-III compete against all the other 10bit cameras on the market?
Does Sony think their 8bit "low light" performace is so good that people wont care that its 8 bit?
I can say that my S1 with 10bit color already FAR exceeds any "low light" requirement I will ever need. And this is comming from a guy that just sold his A7S-II for the S1. The S1 is far superior to the A7S-II is countless ways.
When the S1 gets HDMI and Atomos ProRes raw 4k....Im finished. I dont need and A7S-III....ever!
The Lumix S1 "IS" what we have been asking for with the A7S-III.

Its going to be fascinating to see what the XDCAM management team will "allow" the Alpha management team to give the new A7S-III. A Sony manager fir Russia was stating that he thinks the A7S-III wont have "deep color" as that is reserved for the XDCAM FS series only. I suspect he means 10bit.
I heard at NAB that Panasonic is very receptive to the S1 having 4k raw over HDMI and that it IS definetely comming to the S1 this year. Those same sources told me that Sony is not willing to go that far right now. Atomos is pressuring them but Sony is not buying into the raw idea for Alpha. (The next FS probably)
Will Alpha be allowed to have highly compressed 10bit internal recording or will it only be granted 10bit video HDMI? I would love to be a fly on the wall in these Alpha/XDCAM manager board room meetings!!
2019 is a massive political fight for managers inside Sony and Panasonic. Nikon?....no no, HDMI raw was an EASY choice!!!

Its going to be fascinating to see what the XDCAM management team will "allow" the Alpha management team to give the new A7S-III. A Sony manager fir Russia was stating that he thinks the A7S-III wont have "deep color" as that is reserved for the XDCAM FS series only. I suspect he means 10bit.
I heard at NAB that Panasonic is very receptive to the S1 having 4k raw over HDMI and that it IS definetely comming to the S1 this year. Those same sources told me that Sony is not willing to go that far right now. Atomos is pressuring them but Sony is not buying into the raw idea for Alpha. (The next FS probably)
Will Alpha be allowed to have highly compressed 10bit internal recording or will it only be granted 10bit video HDMI? I would love to be a fly on the wall in these Alpha/XDCAM manager board room meetings!!
2019 is a massive political fight for managers inside Sony and Panasonic. Nikon?....no no, HDMI raw was an EASY choice!!!

I dont understand why Panasonic just didnt make a new mount diameter that was simply based on MFT data protocol. Panny could have made this new mount standard in one meeting. Essentially, a full frame ring with MFT data pins. I dont see how the Leica partnership help Lumix at all. What tech does Leica give to Panny? Their lenses are niche and very few people will ever buy them. Sigma?....now THEY are a fantastic partner and absolutely key to making these Panny camera sell. I think Panny only really needed Sigma and any profit sharing could have stayed between two companies instead of being split three ways.

I dont understand why Panasonic just didnt make a new mount diameter that was simply based on MFT data protocol. Panny could have made this new mount standard in one meeting. Essentially, a full frame ring with MFT data pins. I dont see how the Leica partnership help Lumix at all. What tech does Leica give to Panny? Their lenses are niche and very few people will ever buy them. Sigma?....now THEY are a fantastic partner and absolutely key to making these Panny camera sell. I think Panny only really needed Sigma and any profit sharing could have stayed between two companies instead of being split three ways.

It's literally impossible for us to know what sensor is in this thing. IMX410, Samsung IsoCell, TowerJazz? How many times do we always hear "No, its not a Sony sensor" only to find out that is IS certainly a Sony sensor 6 months later? 
Panasonic NAB booth...."No!...the GH5 is absolutely NOT a Sony sensor, its a Panasonic chip"...TechInsights then blows that out of the water and says "No Panisonic, our labs and x-ray machines identify it as a Sony IM272"  Next year same thing. "No Panasonic, the GH5-S is a Sony IMX299" Same thing with the Nikon D850 and now Z6 and BlackMagic pocket 4k....more and more Sony sensors.
For some reason, every camera company is embarassed to say that Sony pattens are all over their image sensor.... the most important part of every camera. Its no use lying about it anymore....Tech Insights will expose you eventually.

I think you are right about the S1's noise reduction in these early firmware testing. Cinema5D said their noise reduction -/+ controls were not even working at all on their version. I REALLY hope the full 1.0 firmware has a functioning parameter set. To me, effective noise reduction -/+ settings are even more important than color fine tuning. Noise reduction is a destructive process,...color is not.
Actually, Panny.....PLEASE give us a noise reduction "off" setting! That would make many people really happy. (It would also free up some of your image processor CPU for other things too!)

About the S1's dynamic range....I have two questions:
1.) What in the Hell is this mystery sensor? Who's tech is in it? Some think it might be an IMX410 (A7-III & Z6) Meanwhile, some are saying its a  completely brand new sensor that nobody has ever seen before. There are rumors it's NOT even a back side illuminated chip. Samsung IsoCell??
2.) Panny might very well calibrate it's video A/D conversion and raw readout to NOT exceed 12stops. Supposedly, this could have been a demand that VariCam managers had placed on these S cameras. You can bet your life that the VariCam group did NOT want a high sensor read clock speed (intentional rolling shutter) and wanted it capped at 12stops.
Who knows? We will find out more in the months that follow. On the GH5/GH5-S,...HLG matches VLog-L in dynamic range.

Cinema5D is reporting the S1 to test at about 12 stops of dynamic range using HLG gamma. This actually matches the Sony FS7 tests with SLog-3 gamma. It's hard to know if Panny will allow it's VLog upgrade to gain any more than 12 stops. I suspect they might lock it at 12 stops to give the EVA-1 a 1 or 2 stop dynamic range advantage. Who knows?
There is one very depressing thing that Cinema5D found out....NOISE REDUCTION IS HEAVY AND +/- NR CONTROLLS HAVE ZERO AFFECT!!
Ouch!....that one REALLY stings! If Panny has disabled the noise reduction controlls than we have no way to draw it back and save ourselves from heavy in-camera noise reduction.
As we all know,....noise reduction is a 100% DESTRUCTIVE PROCESS....once it's applied, it's artifacts can never be removed in post.
Im hoping their firmware just had a bug that Panny will fix soon.

Will Canon EVER figure out how to oversample a sensor, deBayer and downsample it to 4k? My God,...how long has Sony been doing their full pixel readout now? The GH5 (Sony IMX272) does a 5k full pixel readout too.
I guess Canon will need to buy Sony sensors to do this? Until then, Canon is still stuck in crude RGGB 1:1 deBayer land.

Is hard to say what VLog will do on this sensor. If it's the Sony IMX410 like many believe it is, neither the A7-III or Z6 get more than 12 stops in video out of it. The IMX410 is believed by some to be used in the Sony Venice too....but that camera is "allowed" to record 15+ stops.
Its all in the sensor feature licensing contracts and the negotiations that go into the contracts of sale. Sony licenses read out modes and frame rates and bit depths seperately. That's how they price the sensor....on the market value of your feature choices. Its not a "1 simple price, you get the whole thing deal". You pay for what you want and you are legally blocked from using what you didnt pay for.

Ha!....wow, this will make Atomos, very VERY happy! No 400mbps all-I. Wow.

Is hard to say what VLog will do on this sensor. If it's the Sony IMX410 like many believe it is, neither the A7-III or Z6 get more than 12 stops in video out of it. The IMX410 is believed by some to be used in the Sony Venice too....but that camera is "allowed" to record 15+ stops.
Its all in the sensor feature licensing contracts and the negotiations that go into the contracts of sale. Sony licenses read out modes and frame rates and bit depths seperately. That's how they price the sensor....on the market value of your feature choices. Its not a "1 simple price, you get the whole thing deal". You pay for what you want and you are legally blocked from using what you didnt pay for.

Absutely right. All the gain in the universe doesn't turn a half-full pixel well into a full pixel well. Gain has zero affect on the amount of light (photons) that were counted. Gain also cannot improve signal to noise ratio either. A 25% full pixel well will always be noisier than a 99% full well.
Yes, you can take a 25% full pixel well reading and amplify that (dim voltage) and amplify it to represent pure white, but it will never be the same as getting a pure white value from a 100% full pixel well. (And of course all the mid tone mappings that come with it)
"Gain" is not "exposure" in any way shape or form.

That was me that posted that on Sony Alpha Rumors. I read that MIT is working on a sensor readout technique that virtually doesnt allow a photosite to saturate. It makes a photosite fill up, dump its value and fill up again and again until the readout cycle is complete.
If you were using a 1/30 second shutter setting, you could collect and "add up" the photons in your your brightest highlight areas 2 or 3 or more times in that 1/60 shutter opening.
Your dark shadow areas wont get much help because those photosites would never completely fill up but your highlights theoretically have no limit. (Execpt for the readout and processing speed of A/D conversion.) How fast can the processor handle a photosite fill, read, dump, add, fill, read, dump, add, fill, read, dump add in 1/30 or 1/60th of a second?
Thats a TON of adding work for each photosite. You would probably need a specialized processing chip to take advantage of this new way of handling this kind of A/D.....
Oh wait!!,...isnt that what Sony is saying? You must also buy their specially paired image processor to go with this sensor? ( otherwize it cant work with any other? )
Hmmmm.......
P.s. Im sure this is a gross over simplification of what MIT and maybe Sony are doing. We will need to see how this develops to truely know. I think is clear that Sony is doing something unusual to make these phototon collection numbers so high using photosites that ore only 4+microns large.
CT

I seriously doubt this is the A7S-III sensor. Sony will go for new generation 12mp BSI fully  stacked design using this architecture. The current 12mp sensor is an older front side illuminated design with 8 micron photosites. A next generation stacked model could be 10+ microns in size?
This spec sheet does give is a good look at what Sony's latest generation sensor architecture will look like.
 
CT

My God.....The Brexit concept is starting to look pretty good today! There is nothing like having 100% controll over your own contries laws! That is precious in every way.

The biggest problem that Sony Alpha has,....is Sony XDCAM.
Its going to be politically hard for the Alpha folks to add 10bit, 4k, 60p, 400mbp/s internal recording with no recording limit to a new A7S-III. This is what they will probably face with a Panny S1 competition at NAB 2019. If Apha does this, XDCAM managers with scream bloody blue murder to the highest Sony executives. XDCAM does NOT want a Sony camera like this to exisr for fear that it would cannibalize far more expensive camcorder models.
Actually, Im certain our favorite Panny EVA1 manager is very nervous about the idea of a fully loaded FF Panny S1 under his EVA1 either. (No, he has never actually told me this)
Guys,...this huge shift we are seeing in the industry scares a lot of marketing execs and is probably making everybody scramble to try and figure out how to fight each other without stabbing themselves in the process!

The biggest problem that Sony Alpha has,....is Sony XDCAM.
Its going to be politically hard for the Alpha folks to add 10bit, 4k, 60p, 400mbp/s internal recording with no recording limit to a new A7S-III. This is what they will probably face with a Panny S1 competition at NAB 2019. If Apha does this, XDCAM managers with scream bloody blue murder to the highest Sony executives. XDCAM does NOT want a Sony camera like this to exisr for fear that it would cannibalize far more expensive camcorder models.
Actually, Im certain our favorite Panny EVA1 manager is very nervous about the idea of a fully loaded FF Panny S1 under his EVA1 either. (No, he has never actually told me this)
Guys,...this huge shift we are seeing in the industry scares a lot of marketing execs and is probably making everybody scramble to try and figure out how to fight each other without stabbing themselves in the process!

The biggest problem that Sony Alpha has,....is Sony XDCAM.
Its going to be politically hard for the Alpha folks to add 10bit, 4k, 60p, 400mbp/s internal recording with no recording limit to a new A7S-III. This is what they will probably face with a Panny S1 competition at NAB 2019. If Apha does this, XDCAM managers with scream bloody blue murder to the highest Sony executives. XDCAM does NOT want a Sony camera like this to exisr for fear that it would cannibalize far more expensive camcorder models.
Actually, Im certain our favorite Panny EVA1 manager is very nervous about the idea of a fully loaded FF Panny S1 under his EVA1 either. (No, he has never actually told me this)
Guys,...this huge shift we are seeing in the industry scares a lot of marketing execs and is probably making everybody scramble to try and figure out how to fight each other without stabbing themselves in the process!

Panasonic would be in absolute HEAVEN if Sony backed away from an A7S-II sucessor! I suspect that the rumors about an A7S-III being fully R&D finished and waiting to go into production could now we completely turned upside down this month. I suspect that Sony said "Crap....look at our competition!...we need to go back to R&D and cripple the A7S-III less now!) Sony doesnt want to stop their E Mount system development. They have good momentum and they KNOW they must push as hard as they can in the next 12 months. I dont think they want to help Panasonic by blocking the A7S-III...even if it means hurting the FS5.

Here 'ya go.
Mavic-II Pro - UHD - 100mbp/s H.264 .mp4 container
Profile is "standard"  Sharpness +1   Contrast -3   Saturation 0
Both files are directly off the card and are short. One is Full "FOV" view and teh other is HQ crop view both on the exact same scene. (remember, the color is flat rec709)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1c-k4pnmzrEwuwfnumzATMr4W4o__iI7l?usp=sharing
This is the real thing.....Enjoy!!
CT