David Bowgett

I've always thought that the big three in the camera market are like the big three in the console market: Sony are equivalent to... well, Sony. Not perfect by any means, but overall they're clearly the strongest of the major players, and have made very few serious mis-steps in recent years. Nikon are equivalent to Microsoft. Definitely the weaker one between them and Sony, but still a strong player overall (thanks to sharing much of the same hardware), and there are even a few things they do better. Canon are like Nintendo. A lot of the time their decisions are so face-palmingly stupid that you can't help but wonder why on earth anyone ever liked their products. But then, every once in a while they'll produce something really special, something that reminds you how amazing they can be when they put their minds to it... and then follow it with another awful product.

They managed to figure out APS-C 4K, yeah, but full-frame? IIRC they had a prototype full-frame sensor and camera that was near to production when they pulled the plug on their line, but there's never been any word on how it would have performed. As to the age-old "Samsung figured 4K out, why can't the rest?" question, bear in mind that Samsung aren't just a consumer electronics manufacturer, they're widely regarded as being second-only to the behemoth that is Intel when it comes to manufacturing semiconductor chips. I don't think it's just a coincidence that Samsung managed to get 4K APS-C right with only some minor problems, while Canon and Nikon have resorted to crops, Panasonic smaller sensors and Sony either horrible rolling shutter and overheating problems (A6300, and A7Rii to a lesser extent) or a low megapixel count in stills (A7S and A7Sii).

Sounds like it's essentially just the D5500's innards crammed into the D3300's body... minus the mic input for some bizarre reason. To tell the truth I actually don't know of many people who used a D3300 as their primary video body - most I heard used it as a B-cam to a D5x00, which presumably would be handling audio duties - but still... it seems like this is a case of two steps forward (flat profile and better battery life) and one step back.

Not that these specs sound massively exciting by any means, but I'd be wary about making predictions like this. Back at the start of the year the 4K modes in the D5 and D500 were greeted with howls of derision by many on this forum, and predictions about how the still-to-be-announced A6300 would be a massive game-changer and render every similar camera (with the likely exception of the GH4) obsolete. The reality was... less clear-cut, to say the least.

They'd need something akin to Canon's Dual-Pixel AF before they could go all-out on an APS-C or full-frame mirrorless. As a D5500 owner, I can tell you that only being able to use the camera's Contrast Detect AF would not be a fun experience in the slightest. I suppose it'd be a different matter if you were using it only for video, but then a lot of people buy cameras in that category specifically because they can pull double duty as still and video devices. What Nikon really need (with the obvious exception of 4K, which little by little they're rolling out already) is zebra indicators on their lower-end cameras and focus peaking across the range. Or, they need better contract lawyers if the rumours about Sony forcing restrictions on what Nikon can do with their sensors are true.

High street prices are pretty uniformly at £1,000 or thereabouts. Amazon are probably the cheapest of the major retailers, at £930. Then there are sites like SLRHut who use loopholes to drastically undercut UK retailers; they'd sell you an A6300 at a much cheaper price (around £800 or so), but it'd probably be a bit dicey for a non-UK resident to use them, unless you have someone in this country whose address you can use.

With the sensor size that'd produce something like a 3x crop factor. They'd need to slap a m4/3rds mount on it for it to be even vaguely useful for most purposes, and somehow I just don't see Canon giving that sort of validation to their competitors.

The two main guys might have thought that, but one of their other reviewers also took a look at it in their 5DS review and was a lot more positive about it, saying that while there were a lot of annoying issues with the camera's design, the actual video quality was pretty good. https://youtu.be/QwLZRKfFmUY?t=12m57s

Weirdly enough, it looks like the biggest improvement might actually in the white balance. The 70D footage seems to have this murky greenish look to it, whereas the 80D's whites are a lot more crisp. Then again, there were one or two spots where it looked like the 80D was actually worse in terms of aliasing than the 70D... though that might just be YouTube's encoding at work.

Just when we think Canon's thrown us a bone with the improved video quality on the 5DS(r), they have to go do something like this. Yay for non-progress! As an aside, the actual first video-capable APS-C from Canon was the 500D. Insomuch as a camera that has no manual video exposure, no microphone socket, and video resolutions that include either a useless 1080p20 mode or a truly awful-looking 720p24 mode can be considered "video-capable" anyway.

I think a lot of the reason why the D5 and D500 caught so much flack was because at the time they were announced, people were still expecting the A6300 to be a game-changing camera for 4K. And while you could probably make a case that the A6300 still represents the better option for video users, I think now we're seeing that there's still a lot of engineering issues regarding 4K on APS-C and above that manufacturers (except, ironically, the one who's now pulled out of the market) are having trouble dealing with.

It's the same as the one found on their old DSLR range. I'm guessing that coming up with a whole new mirrorless lens mount would have been too expensive... although it does make you wonder why they didn't just licence the (F)E-mount from Sony, seeing how they've started producing lenses for it.

Do you know what graphics card power connectors your computer has? An R9 390 typically requires a 6-pin and an 8-pin connector, which a 500W power supply is unlikely to have. A GTX970 on the other hand will usually be just fine with two 6-pin power connectors.

At a rough guess, it looks like it's somewhere in-between the G7 (no crop in 4K) and GH4 (~1.3x crop). Might not be the crazy-huge crop we got from the NX500, but still... Probably the best we can hope for is that by the time 4K filters through to the rest of Nikon's line-up, there's an option to switch between full sensor line-skip/pixel bin and 1:1 crop modes.

In fairness, I imagine Nikon know full well that most serious video shooters will be going for the D500, and that anyone who can afford to shell out for the D5 probably has enough money to also buy an external 4K recorder (both cameras do 4K uncompressed over HDMI, though I don't know if that's 8-bit or 10-bit). Still seems like a rather odd limitation.

More info is available in this PDF on Nikon's website: http://chsvimg.nikon.com/lineup/microsite/d500/common/pdf/technology-digest.pdf Strangely enough, the D500 can record up to the full 29:29 in 4K mode, but on the D5 it's limited to just three minutes! EDIT: On further inspection, it seems that the D500 does full-pixel readout from a 4K area in order to get the video. Definitely better than line-skipping, though it's going to leave the effective crop quite near the m4/3rds level.

I don't think the 5D Mark III has an APS-C video mode, so there'd be no benefit to attaching one even if it existed. And while I suppose it's theoretically possible for someone to produce a speed booster for a full-frame camera, you'd likely need medium-format lenses for it to actually work.

There was on the original, can't see why there wouldn't be on this one. Though presumably it shares the same caveat of being upscaled from ~2.5K.

You may be thinking of the A7rII, which does do full sensor readout, albeit only in APS-C mode. Even if Canon were somehow able to perform a full readout on a full-frame 50MP sensor without frying the camera, it'd produce truly insane amounts of rolling shutter, which would easily be noticeable in the sample videos. However, if Canon maintained the same video scanning pattern from the 7D Mk2/ 70D sensor and sized it up by 1.6X, it'd give a ~2.5K resolution.

Very surprising. The video samples from the pre-production models appeared to be 6D-level bad, so Canon have pulled out one hell of an improvement for the final model. Considering that the 5DS(r) sensor is by all accounts essentially a jumbo-sized 7D Mark II/70D sensor (though as mentioned, without dual-pixel AF), it makes me wonder whether the camera might be oversampling the video and downscaling it to produce the end result.

I don't think dynamic range is the be all and end all of things, but being able to push the shadow detail (perhaps along with overall exposure) does make for a more convenient workflow than having to mess around with multiple exposures or gradual ND filters. Canon probably wouldn't pick up so much heat over this if not for just how bad their cameras perform in this regard. It's one thing for Sony and Samsung's sensors to be outperforming them; it's another thing entirely when even the various m4/3rds sensors do much better.

Wow. I'd heard that the A7 was poor when it came to moire, but that's just comically bad! I mean, the A7ii isn't any great shakes when it comes to video, but I have to admit they did improve it massively over the original model. Bit more surprised to see just how bad the a6000 does here. I often hear people say what a great camera it is and how it beats the pants off of any DSLR when it comes to video, but in terms of moire at least it looks no better than most of Canon's DSLRs, and noticeably worse than any of Nikon's cameras from the last couple of years.

Am I right in thinking that this is Canon's first product that has a full-frame sensor, yet supports EF-S lenses? Hopefully a sign that a Canon full-frame mirrorless might not be a pipe dream. On another note, since there's presumably an APS-C crop mode for using EF-S lenses, and the sensor has a 1:1 readout, that would mean that the available resolution in APS-C mode would only be 1200x675px. Be interesting to see how that's handled.

They'd need a new imaging processor and sensor (probably with something like Canon's dual-pixel AF) before that'd be viable, as the contrast-detect AF on Nikon's DSLRs still isn't nearly good enough for it to act as a camera's only AF system. A mirrorless D5500 (an M5500?) would work well for video, but it'd make a horrible stills camera.

​Mirrorless might be the future... but we don't live in the future, we live in the present. And the present situation is still that DSLRs are better in some areas, and mirrorless better in others. In fact, that's probably a big part of why the D750 was so well-received. In photography terms it's better than the D610 and A7, but not overwhelmingly so. In video terms, it's clearly weaker than the A7S and GH4 in just about all aspects other than colour rendition (and low light performance versus the latter). But it still does both things so well that it makes a very good package for people who need one camera for both purposes.