Simon Young

@Django My bad, the 4k moiré is in the XH-1, for some unknown reason. But if the rumoured specs of this coming x-t3 are valid and the price is right, I imagine me and a lot of other people are willing to live with the quirks just thanks to the color science in glorious 10 bit.

Hopefully it's possible to record 4k for more than 10 minutes internally without the battery grip and without the camera splitting up the data in 4GB chunks. And hopefully the bad rolling shutter and the moiré in 4k in the x-t2 is fixed. I love Fuji's color science as much as the next guy and I don't think ibis is fundamental, but I seriously hope they manage to get the very basic things right this time.

Looks gorgeous.

On 8/2/2018 at 3:53 AM, jonpais said:

I posted this in another thread, but it belongs here as well.

Some Panasonic diehards claim the only drawbacks of the GH5 are poor autofocus and weak low light ability. Yet few things in photography are as important as the ability to gather light and focus!

Reliable AF-C is huge, and the a7 III has it in spades. Particularly useful for shooting at wide apertures and gimbal work. And unlike some other manufacturers’ implementation, transitions are not so jarring as to be all but unusable.

And while it’s true that some gimbals have focus solutions for a select few cameras, the focusing is stepped, meaning not smooth. And in the case of Panasonic, it is sometimes restricted to Panasonic lenses, which I rarely use anymore.

Low light as well – the Sony a7 III absolutely crushes the GH5.

Dynamic range? Much greater with the a7 III – the GH5 maxes out at around 10 stops.

Beautiful FF look without BS adapters? Sony.

Is manual focus your bag? Focus peaking is a dream on the Sony, even in difficult lighting and in spite of the lo-rez LCD: with the GH5, you  really need an external monitor for gauging correct focus. And unlike the GH5, focus magnification works even while recording on the a7 III.

The menu system’s a draw since practically every menu item on the Sony can now be assigned to a button or dial; and if that’s not enough, you can create your own My Menu.

Battery life is also no longer an issue with Sony. Too bad Fuji and others require bulky $350 power solutions that make use with a cage or gimbal problematic. And because that battery grip is proprietary, you’ve just thrown your hard-earned cash out the window the moment you upgrade!

And speaking of lenses, just like Fuji, Sony now offers a range of reasonably fast, optically outstanding lenses in the focal lengths I use most – meaning I no longer have to mix and match lenses from a half dozen different manufacturers, each with radically different mechanical properties and color characteristics. And for those who appreciate the very best in mechanical lenses, Voigtlander is stepping up its production of E mount glass.

I own the a7riii and the GH5 and while the autofocus is superior on the Sony I still think it’s very easy to pull focus manually with the gh5, even without aids such as focus peaking and magnifying. I really don’t know how @jonpais finds he needs an external monitor to manage, especially considering the abysmal resolution on the a7iii viewfinder and screen.

Oh, and even with pro color, the colors are much better on the GH5.

@Sage beautiful work! Due to the slight difference in color science, how you think this would work with the GH5s?

23 minutes ago, DaveAltizer said:

I’ve been so busy with the review channel I haven’t had time to work on it but I really want to. He’s such an inspiring dude! 

Certainly looks promising, super excited to see it. Please notify me when it’s done

Haha, great comparison, both cameras look awful. Thank you. But why do you get all aggro? Weird.

30 minutes ago, DaveAltizer said:

I think Simon is right actually. If money is no object, I would go a7Riii over a7iii. I found the rolling shutter performance especially in the S35 mode to be truly remarkable. The best of any mirrorless Ive ever seen! 

Loved your review Dave! Would be awesome to see the whole documentary about the balloon artist. Is that possible?

Just get the A7rIII and call it a day.

I honestly find the Sony color science bashing mildly offensive - and I agree with Philip Bloom’s statement that it’s easy to get the new Sonys to look almost anyway you want (within the limits of the 8-bit codec).

If people don’t know or won’t take five minutes to learn how to grade slog2 but still use it, no wonder a lot of footage looks like shit. The color space transform plugin takes two seconds to apply. And have people not heard of the fucking qualifier in Resolve? If you’re too lazy or pressed for time to grade correctly use EOSHD then and apply some minor tweaks.

There’s little to fault with the colors from the a7rIII in this clip:

The famous “canon colors” from the 5d mark IV looks like thrash straight out of the camera by the way with a nasty highlight roll off and too much red in the skin.

5 hours ago, Geoff CB said:

D750 is magic. I want it back. 

Preach! I still miss mine, that sensor was pure magic. If it only had a little more detailed 1080p I would have kept it forever.

This is the clip that made me buy it.

I respectfully disagree about the video quality being better on the a7iii than the riii. I’ve used both extensively and I agree about the a7iii being maybe one stop better in low light and more detailed in full frame, but there’s something about the image of the riii in full frame that’s simply more pleasing, even if you get the occasional moire and aliasing artifacts. Maybe it’s got something to do with the riii having less rolling shutter or being a tad “softer”, thus resulting in a more organic image.

I also feel the build quality and evf (obviously) being a notch above the a7iii. Is the Riii worth the price though? Highly questionable for 99% of potential buyers who are more video oriented.

And what about those ghosting artifacts? They are nowhere near as severe in the a7riii due to possibly better nr algorithm. (Read Arturs description).

Sony a7riii profile now available in Filmconvert.

https://www.filmconvert.com/download/camera-profile

Is noise reduction available in the free version of 15? 

Jon, why don’t you bake in the LUT? It looks terrible!

I think we should think about the fact it’s supposed to be possible to load up custom LUTs on the camera, not only for monitoring but you’ll be able to bake them in. This is potentially huge for fast turnover shooting and something we’ve seen is detrimental to the image quality, which James Miller has shown with the GH5. 

@Beritar I think that video was shot in 1080 60p, it’s worse in 4K, especially the strange shimmering thing.

Returned the overhyped piece of shit that is the A7III. So happy with the rIII. Feels more solid all around as well. Don’t get the A7III unless the problems are addressed properly is my advice.

1 minute ago, Django said:

I edited my post to add camera pointed at changing subject/scene like guy did shooting his tele.. could that be a variable?

Sounds likely. I recorded a very non moving book shelf.

Just now, Django said:

@Alex Uzan did you replicate the exact shooting conditions as the YT video? 4K 25p 100mb with AF-C, IBIS and Face tracking on? 

I also tested this last night. I set up the camera on a table, 4k 25p 100mb AF-C, IBIS and Face tracking, and the camera barely got warm after 30 minutes. It's strange because today I shot with it for five minutes with the exact same settings and it got very warm, no warning signs but a significant difference. Weird.

@Robert Collins

just check out Gordon Laings pan in the bar over the bottles, that’s what it looks like, regardless of his shaky ass hands. I have a very steady hand and still can’t get a nice pan. Never mind the ibis, pay attention to the labels of the bottles, they get all jagged and nasty.

I also advice you to look at the Cinema5d “review” of the camera from Japan. Look at how odd the movement of the people I seem, it’s jittery. And it has nothing do with the shutter angle, I’ve tried.

59 minutes ago, Beritar said:

I was close to cancel my preorder because of the pixels issue and the massive noise reduction, but if in addition there is really a bad motion cadence and stuttering ...

This high noise reduction is applied even in S-Log 3 ?

If I could go back I’d cancel it. Just wait for the sIII. The noise reduction you can live with but the stuttering and the frankly horrible motion cadence is ruining it for me. Decent for stills though haha

As far as video goes, Sony better hit it out of the park with the A7sIII.

Remember I said I got a copy without the blinking pixel row when I swapped the first one? Well guess what, the replacement has them as well. Sometimes they pop up, sometimes they don’t. It’s fucking abysmal. And another thing I noticed is the motion cadence is a lot worse than on the A7rIII - a lot worse. It almost seems like the processor can’t handle the downsampling of the 6k image and it just gets horrible. As soon as you do a pan this weird almost shimmering effect turns up. Add to that the stuttering from the lacking computational power of the thing and the image gets shitty, no matter how good the low light performance is.

If Sony don’t issue a firmware update within a week regarding the pixels I’m returning it for sure. Guess it was too good to be true. I really wanted to like this camera. 

The A7rIII on the other hand, is a true beast.

1 minute ago, Castorp said:

Isn’t that because Leica uses DNG which is a universal format rather than a proprietary one? Makes sense.

Fujifilm strikes me as quite different. Adobe renders ok nowadays but used to look pretty bad with Fuji files. I haven’t found their conversion as good as the proprietary one. Fujifilm repeatedly underlines their imaging chain, reminding people of jpeg, lenses, xtrans and so on. A bit Apple like. Of course if they want to do something really controversial with for example sensor they have to leave universal standards behind.

@Trek of Joy I love the new Fujifilm conversion software. It’s slow and cumbersome but I still use it. I often do tiny tweaks to the jpegs too. Like Mattias is saying so much easier to start from somewhere. Just like it was with C-type printing with film and colour paper. You started out from a colour profile that was already good. Just needed burning/dodging usually. Personally I find jpegs mostly sufficient. To me  HDR, pulled shadows, cranked up vibrancy and clarity looks way worse than any clipping. The people that configure jpegs really know what they’re doing. Same way the experts that configure colour film know that too.

Jpegs used to look very bad. I’m happy that changed.

Sluta trolla