kaylee

So now I have to use a Shogun + a7rii, plus buy SSDs / Metabones adapter / multiple batteries for both / a grip probably to add some heft?  Now we're at over 6k and you've built something that still cannot shoot sports and is larger to carry around than the 1dc + this Kinotehnik LCDVFE.
I don't care about video AF; if I do I grab the Samsung NX1.  The A7x models don't exactly AF well in video as you well know.  Unless it's something as smooth as a 70d I wouldn't tout that as a feature of the a7x series.
Regarding the LCDVFE - It will display underexposed areas as well, allow you to customize what's on the screen, 4 custom modes, 4 separate zoom modes, display in all blue as well as false color, allow you to control it with an external USB controller, has a proper eyepiece/loupe that blocks out all the glare, and the top folds down to double as a small monitor.  I've had the a7s and this EVF is light years better.  The Shogun is nice but hard to see in bright light, very large and has limited battery life.  Or so I've read.  What do I know - I've never owned one.
No camera is perfect - I would like better high speed framerates with the 1dc - hell I'd take 4k 30 - the difference I think between us is I shoot quite a bit of kids running around playing sports and need the native long lens reach and superior AF tracking that the 1d(x) system provides.  I don't see the 2.8 zooms being available yet in FE mount, nor any long glass, and shooting indoor basketball and gymnastics would drive me crazy if it didn't work properly in mixed lighting.  I simply love the dynamic range of the Sony cameras and Canon would do well designing some newer sensors for their cameras.
One thing that drove me batty was not having the custom modes on the a7s save the APS-C setting.  If you create a custom mode 1 with FF and a #2 with APS-C on, will it remember it now?  If not can you at least assign it to a button at least?

RX10 II works with it, but it's pretty limited (same goes for the A7RII probably). E.g. you cant't shoot video using a Picture Profile. I've told them in January when I got the A7s, but naturally nothing has happened since then. If more people requested this feature perhaps this would be implemented. It's a real shame, too, because the app has the best image of all the remote apps I've tried.

I don't think it's very good. I'd never shoot at ISO 3200-6400 like the review states. 

Revolutionary insights!

Having played with both cameras side by side with identical settings, the RX10 II certainly seems to have a more pleasing look out the box. It feels more natural and accurate - whereas with the A7S it's not as prominent. I feel this may have something to do with the ISO, as the A7S needs 3200. You get much more pleasing colour when you add light, rather than artificially boosting the sensitivity. (this is completely non-scientific, just experience). 
Only buy the A7S if you need full frame and better low light, but don't live under the illusion that your overall image quality will be better just because you can boost the ISO. Be prepared for a lot of noise and cocktails of weirdness when used this way. A lot of the Vimeo-lots "replace lights with the A7S". Not a good idea for serious usage. The A7S for regular use under a different picture profile can look spectacular though. Slog2 + low light is best avoided. 
I would personally wait for the A7S II unless you get a ridiculous offer. Very good camera. Keep enjoying the RX!

Thanks for the review. 
As an owner of the camera, I can definitely relate to some of your points made. 
I would highly recommend anyone shooting on the camera to not use the factory settings for Slog2. It looks like Homer Simpson put too much butter on his bacon and threw it all up, and you have a toothbrush to clean it up. By playing with the Slog2 settings, I've got very pleasing skintones and colour - better than the A7S. 
It's certainly no replacement for an FS7 either. The difference between Slog3/Slog2 10bit/8bit combination is very obvious when you start playing with footage and matching it up in the grade. If you need 100fps and have the budget to rent the FS7, then you should  
The camera is great quality though. I bullishly took it out for a night shoot to do some narrative shots for a music video. We had battery powered lights, so low light wasn't too much of a concern as most of the shots were mid/close-ups. Unfortunately, it was too time consuming on the tight schedule and we called out for an A7S and whipped out the Sigma ART lenses - using two LEDs to shape the light around the faces. (The A7S record button - absolute fail!). 
The RX10 footage was superior - because it was lit properly. The A7S did the job but the shots are very noisy, and I certainly would not shoot this way on a regular basis just because I can - unless I want cocktail zombie vomit images! Point is - the RX10 II shows it is a great cinematic tool with all factors considered. Certainly the great low light of the A7S has very serious trade-offs. 
The BEST thing about the camera is the ability to run around with just the camera, grab your shots and put more time/focus on the subject. It's a liberating low budget tool that's perfectly capable of creating fantastic images with a very small footprint. 
Just the one thing I'm struggling with is sharpness. I have a feeling the peaking is a bit inaccurate and I think Sony should have a look at this for a firmware update. 

RX10/100 only have contrast detect, no phase detect. http://***URL removed***/articles/1652088044/sony-an-eye-on-focus
I always get eye cancer when reading dpreview, thanks to the nice white on black background...Who needs good UX?!

awesome!!!!! what a great review. andrew i love your writing style and this was filled with great information thats super useful to me and my new rx10m2 
i have owned a few cameras over the years (anybody remember this?) and the rx10m2 represents many firsts for me
its the first camera ive owned that i have ~any~ intention of shooting stills with that has a fixed lens, or a sensor smaller than +/- super35mm. if you wouldve told me three months ago that my next camera was going to have those characteristics i would have laughed
but when i realized that this brand new “bridge” cam could be a [relatively] inexpensive point of entry to shooting slog2 to see how much i like using it, i said why not~! because im very interested in the performance of the a7rii, and the upcoming a7sii, but im also interested in all the alternatives for the varied advantages they may provide.
anyway, some salient points which i personally appreciated:
•  rx100iv magfilter, how interesting~! good to kno
• calling the 1080p the best youve used for the money is a big compliment! and your simile about a small sensor fs7 is just the thought i had when i first starting shooting 120fps with it!!…. its like a lil baby fs7 with a small sensor that i have with me~! no ones bringing an fs7 anywhere because its fun to carry around lol
• thanks for underscoring the 240fps being so good. i havent shot above 120 yet due to fear of quality loss and lack of time to experiment, but ill be sure to use it soon~! awesome  
• re: low light, didnt know i could raise the iso for slog2 above 800  hadnt even tried ive been fighting with color in slog [a topic for another time, frowny face]. thanks for the heads up
• agree the 4k isnt impressive per se, but its my first 4k camera so it is for me in all those ways lol. a world of possibilities. but yeah, the 1dc for example annihilates it in terms of resolving power. its like night and day
• the continuous af in movie mode is so bizarrely awful that i couldnt figure out at first IF IT WAS ON OR NOT. when i realized it was i had to laugh such garbage. james may on lsd lol
• "Too many 'cannot do this’ messages”  
ok i think you get my point that i liked this weblog entry (tbh reading it at work was the most fun ive had all day smfh). also im sorry that i didnt make posts complaining about the wait for the second part of this article; ill try to bitch more in the future 
 

Well, not for your enthusiast soccor mom/dad, the traveller and the streetphotog that want a somewhat compact all-in-one solution.
Besides, they make for great secondary cams as well?

By now you might be wondering which to pull the trigger on - the RX10 II or RX100 IV?
The good news is I have now finally got round to finishing my review of the RX10 II and have also bought the RX100 IV to compare it with...
Read the full article

if youre going for this look id pick up a sony that shoots slog2+sgamut
 

Helios 44 & 44-2 are pretty unbeatable for all round character/sharpness/bokeh/flare.
It's 58mm is also a nice focal length to 'restrict' yourself with, allows creative 'zoom with your feet' approach ...has very good close focus too.

We've spoke about it before on this forum (lenses with character) - but I'd particularly like to collate some thoughts/findings on lenses that have a weird aesthetic feature, and post visual references here.
There are also times when I see a particular video that repeatedly creates an in-camera aesthetic through the lens. I'd like to make this topic an area for sharing such images and finding out which "weird" lens can perform such an aesthetic.
So we are looking at: 
Any lens with some kind of weird feature/aesthetic/artefact.  Features: bokeh, lens flares, color, tints, haze, distortion.. anything bizarre/odd/weird/strange.  Recommending lenses/sharing images/finding out what "weirdness" features on what lens.  I'm shooting a music video in 2 weeks, and the clients wants this particular aesthetic in their video, all over the place. I've attached an image. 
Anyone with some weird less love?  
 
 
 

its kaylee one word lol
ok i checked: on my rx10m2 shutter goes down to 1/4sec for 24fps like rich said, BUT it only goes down to 1/120 in 120fps mode

Uhm, this was shot with a stabilized lens - the 16-35 F/4 IS.  All handheld and purely casual shooting.  IBIS is fine for short lenses, but really useless for 135mm+.  Also you do know there are external EVFs that attach to the HDMI port, right?  Like this one:
IMO it's the best of both worlds - this EVF does way more than the Sony built in EVF; I can remove it when I don't want to use it.  False colors, multiple zoom modes, underexposed/overexposed areas, crop marks, more peaking choices, etc.  Weighs less than a pound and I can pull it off to shoot sports; it attaches to the shoe so no, I don't need to remove it.  I would take exception to your use of the word "extreme" sports.  The A7x can't shoot regular sports without any native long glass or good focusing in low / mixed lighting.  I hate shooting action with an EVF.  But hey, for non-moving objects it's a great camera -  if you don't have a client pissed when it overheats and shuts down.  Nothing is as clumsy as that.  To each his own I guess. 
 

for this technique you want less frames per second.  Shooting at 120fps means you will degrade image quality for no reason since each frame will be sharp, and low light benefits no longer apply.
 
 
 for instance, 25p at 1/5th of a second confirms perfectly when sped up to 500% since the 1/5th shutter equates to 5 frames being exposed with one image.  hyperspeed by 500% smooths as if it were 25fps.  
 
shooting 24p and 1/4 sec means you need to speed up by 600% to keep the perfect conformation.  1/4 x 600% = 1/24th sec or 360degree shutter.
 
 
 
this was shot on the humble NEX5n, more than 3 years ago at around 400iso i think.  imagine how clean the a7s would be when in this mode. 

updated the comparator, it is now "Il Comparatorre".. bigger pictures, updated layout. 

Sony allow as slow as 1/4sec at any frame rate.  shooting at 25p and 1/5th sec then speeding it up by 500% gives beautiful low light results for timelapse type stuff.  with the motion blur which is very pleasing for thing slike cars in the dark.  
https://vimeo.com/52579247 
 

Hello!
 
We cant carry our NX1s, GH4s and A7s with us all the time. For those who want a good 4k camera that you can carry all the time, thats the best solution that I have found.
The best Android phones shoot 4k with a bitrate of aprox 48Mbps. They are not bad, but they have too much compression artifacts, contrast, saturation etc.
A few days ago I found an amazing app, and I would like to share it with everyone. I have no bonds with the app developer, but im afraid he will give up his project if there is not enough support. Im pretty sure he can make things even better.
What we have now with the app is:
 
- Flat picture profile (It recovers a good amount of highlights and a little bit of shadows)
- Better noise reduction (more like film grain. The stock one is very blocky)
- 24 fps - 30 fps
- 200Mbps!!! Thats the best part! Much better video quality. Less macro blocking, less banding etc, so you can recover more detail, grade the videos with the less problems etc. 
 
Frame grab from the Samsung Galaxy S6 stock camera - 4k at 50Mbps

 
Frame grab from the Samsung Galaxy S6 using the app at 200 Mbps
 

 
There is a lot of room for improvements, like more manual control, more control over the picture profile etc. But I do think that, at the moment, thats the best 4k camera that you can carry around all the time!
 
Lets support the guy, so he can make it even better!
 
The name of the app is CINEMA 4K, and its available for free at the play store! Make sure to update your phone to 5.1.1!!!
 
 

I might not be too professional about this, but I came to the conclusion that complex RAID setups are nothing for me and as long as you're no data host or anything, I don't believe it has to be for you, either.
Consider this: the really high transfer rates you need only for editing, so I go like this: I use a RAID 0 of two inexpensive 7.200 RPM HDs for editing, temporary storage, two SSDs (one for OS, one for caching), so you can always read from one, cache on another and write to a third array/disk. If you need more speed, just use an SSD RAID 0 or whatever. In terms of storage and backup I use inexpensive USB 3 solutions like these:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tool-free-Inateck-Including-External-Comaptible/dp/B00GIDNLI6/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1440515061&sr=8-10&keywords=inateck+usb+3
Windows 10 works perfectly with USB 3 solutions (previous Windows versions did have issues), dunno about Mac, though. I just dump the data onto inexpensive 7.200 HDs (write speed around 120 to 140 MB/s), handwrite something on the label and put them into a closet. If the data is super precious, just get two disks. I do have a Synology 8-bay NAS, but I hate using it. And if something goes wrong, rebuild times are tedious, the damn thing has to run all the time and it's not as fast as your main workstation. So nowadays I'm all about JBOD (just a bunch of disks) as long as you have good control over your environment and shit. Works as long as you're no corporate bigwig. Inexpensive, uncomplicated and imho reliable.
Oh, if anyone in Europe wants to buy the Synology DS1813+, give me a shout.

If you're looking for both speed and redundancy, RAID-10 or RAID 0+1 will be better.
The RAID levels using checksum data (RAID-5, RAID-6 and such) will always be slower.
But, with a fast enough processor for the raid storage you can get decent speeds out of RAID-5 and RAID-6 levels too. I'm not sure what kind of CPU that device has.
 
Here's a test you can do if you have an internal SSD:
Just create a large file that you put on SSD, preferrably a few TB's of size. In terminal you can do the following command:
time cp /path/to/testfile /path/to/destination
This will test the write speed of your volume (as long as the internal SSD is fast enough). time is a command that will give you the exact time it takes to execute a command. cp is the unix command for copying files.
Do this test both for RAID-10 and RAID-5 on your device. For reading from the volume you just switch the source & destination paths and write to your internal SSD instead.
 
A note here: If you don't have a fast enough SSD, you'll be benchmarking the read/write speed of the SSD instead of the thunderbolt volume. Then you'll have to find some software/script that can create semi-random data fast enough in realtime for benchmarking reads & writes.
 
Anyway, how fast your volume will be with RAID-5 is very cpu dependent. I'm myself using a NAS I built myself which uses ZFS raidz2 (functions similar to RAID-6). The network connection is my limitation and I've reached write speeds of 400-500 MB/s when benchmarking on the machine itself with no network involved. Read speeds are even better. But that machine has quad-core Xeon cpu doing the checksum calculations.
 
In the end what matters for you when you do your copy tests:
- What sequential read & write speed is fast enough?
- Is the most speed or the most available disk space more important?
If you have the time to test with real data (test with the highest bitrate material you will be using), try that on RAID-5 first. If that is too slow - you will get a bit more speed out of RAID-10 and can rebuild the array with that.

i don't use multiple step up rings. i use a either a 49, 52, or 62 to 77mm. i've got step up rings coming outta my ears. i'm silly with all these step up rings.

I have the Genustech Eclipse Variable ND and really, really rate it. Never really dealt with any sort of bad colour cast.

http://www.genustech.tv/products/eclipse-nd-fader-77mm

I used it the other day to get some pick up shots for a music video. Shot in Slog.... It's the same old story you will hear over and over. Very yellow, kind of ill-looking Homer Simpson skintones, lots of tweaking required but achievable. 
HOWEVER - mess with the Slog profile (lots of resources online) and Slog becomes something quite beautiful. Still, grading after is key. Filmconvert, Impulz and the like are your friend. 
Everything is cool with this little guy. Battery life isn't the best, peaking could be better - but hey - it's a great tool in the bag. Highly recommended. 

I haven't run into an X pattern with the SLR Magic yet but I know they (SLR Magic) have stated it can happen. I use it with step-up rings as well (49, 52, 62 to 77). I believe the only hesitation I have about it is that it maxes out at cutting 6 stops. And sometimes, especially on bright southern california days, I wish I could cut as many as 8 stops.