BTM_Pix

Funnily enough, I’ve been at my storage unit today going through stuff in the dustier boxes buried at the back to do exactly the same. During the quest, I found this and concluded that Panasonic really do hate us now. Was there ever a camera more inclined to make you pick it up and go out and film with it.

Watching the Olympics and seeing the bullet time replay systems they had set up at most of the events, I thought that Olympic Broadcasting Services must have bought shit loads of them and it might spark a resurgence, albeit niche, of interest in them. On closer inspection, they were Z-Cam. Considering that Panasonic are an actual sponsor of the Olympics, that must’ve been a kick in the knackers.

My laser scanned 3D printed FX6 body shell that you can hide an a7iv in has a chance then. Inspired by this genius that hid a GoPro in a broadcast camera.

Like when they elect a new Pope, he should do this when he has a confirmed rumour.

Funnily enough… Obviously, I won’t believe it until a breathless man abandons his family in a log cabin to rush out onto the balcony to do an emergency YouTube video about it but likely to be something S1/H/R related I would imagine. Unless the mad bastards are releasing an MFT camera in a medium format body of course.

Can I just suggest an informal guideline for threads like this that are started by new members? To save everyone wasting their time and effort adding additional suggestions, if the thread starter doesn’t reply to the first one to at least acknowledge it then hold back until they do. We have had so many of these threads in the past couple of years where the original thread starter either doesn’t come back at all or comes back with some spam links. Forums such as this are being used for AI training by using innocent looking requests for help so don’t be surprised if you ask ChatGPT for advice about low light image making and seeing your own words coming back at you in the reply. If the original thread starter is genuinely looking for advice for this then please stop being rude and at least acknowledge the people who are going out of their way and trying to help you here and sharing their knowledge.

And very likely to have comment lines in Japanese 😉

I thought camera opinion videos were getting a bit obsessive when that guy a few weeks ago left his kids alone inside the holiday cabin as he couldn't possibly wait another minute to get on the porch and share his thoughts on a camera rumour with the wider world on YouTube but..... Well, this is on another level. The moral of the tale is that even when staring down the long tunnel into the abyss he still stands by his decision to buy the Z8.

I’ve never understood the negative reaction to those cooling solutions. They are an entirely pragmatic approach to solving a potential problem that may not occur in every single shooting situation people find themselves in. Standing out in bright sunlight every day doing long takes ? No but when you are then you just deploy one of these to solve the problem. Exactly like how you don’t need to have the AC on in the car in every single journey but it’s there when you need it. They are cheap, compact and effective so I have never seen the issue. But hey, now Canon do one in a £400 grip for their new camera and everyone nods along sagely saying “good solution Canon”.

One slightly obvious, but often overlooked, standout for the Z mount is that it is the ONLY mount that has an AF Mount adapter for Nikon F mount lenses. Being able to use F, EF, E mount lenses with as native AF performance and the TechArt adapter to give AF for manual focus Leica M and by extension Leica R, Canon FD, M42 etc lenses is a huge edge for it over R mount for me.

Very much Batman 1966 with the Dutch angle when in the lairs of the villains to indicate that they were crooked. Not sure thats the vibe that Canon would want to portray but it would have been quite apt for the launch of the original R5.

The UK price for the R5ii is £4499 versus £3299 for the Z8. The R5ii has some neat new features but the core stuff doesn't seem like its justifying 35% a hike against the more flexible mounted Z8. I'll be interested to see the overheating scrutiny it gets after the erm "interesting" history of the mark 1.

Well I'm guessing that whatever massive feature set these new cameras have that a level meter isn't one of them

Watch here

That’s really interesting to know as I was considering that lens with an Fp-L (yes, I’m considering doubling down!) as a kind of sort of nearly improvised Leica Q3. Despite the typical pissing down on a Sunday summer afternoon weather yesterday it was still bright enough to have to use have the Vari-ND on max on those shots as I was using vLOG. I used this one which I have to say does live up to the promise of no X pattern even when at max.

Loosen it one turn from this original orientation (XLRs up) Gets you to this (XLRs down) Then the battery tray is accessible on the other side like this, so you the don’t have to remove the F3 from the handle to change batterries.

Panasonic 35mm f1.8 L Mount. Frame extracts from 4K file on my Panasonic S5ii. It isn't lacking in sharpness that's for sure.

Take away that downside and put down that hacksaw for me then.

For anyone looking to a roll your own version of these top handles, here is my S5ii and F3 handle. Advantages are cost, 32 bit float, wireless sync with the UltraBlue and flexibility in mounting orientation and position (XLRs up and mounted forward in my case). Downside is that the F3 has a pair of mounting bars to enable it to be strapped to a pole or a wrist and they make it awkward to mount with a regular 1/20 to 1/20 screw from the handle to it base so I need to get a longer one at some point. Downside is presuming Zoom might have been silly enough to not make the mounting bars removable.

It'll do it if you are shooting the event through a window 😉 I think the 10 minute record limit will help in terms of limiting the impact in respect of giving it less opportunity to roast the balls off it (likely intentional) but those tests are at 4K30 so your particular mileage may vary as you will be using higher frame rates. Of course, there is no "gold standard" (sic) review as he threw his toys out of the pram with regard to the S9.

After that shithousery was exposed by the work we did on here with it you’d have thought that recovery times and techniques would be front and centre of these “reviews” but sadly not. Particularly in this instance when the reviewer in question can’t exactly plead ignorance over it.

Or the whole thing is completely overblown because four minutes of shock content on that is far easier to produce than four minutes of representative content produced by light from the great outdoors actually hitting the sensor. I'm absolutely no fan of this fella but this is a far more representative real world performance evaluation (queued up to overheating section). In looking at that section, he didn't have the screen out and maybe the fro was acting as a shade and no mention is made of recovery time and would have been better using a dummy battery in that situation etc etc. So, despite this looking far more indicative of what to expect when actually using it then, again, as I say, without any explanation of the mitigation/recovery it still leaves question marks. Funnily enough, I was in a real life camera shop (well plural actually) a couple of days ago with @Andrew Reid as we were looking for an S9 and talking to the staff about what its like etc and they didn't have a clue. Not because they're not knowledgable, its just that they don't get any hands on with any of them until months later if at all as its now all about just pre-orders getting collected. They don't have any training courses or even reps from the manufacturers coming to visit to show them the cameras any more either. Everything is about the first few weeks leading up to and following the online launch and getting those pre-orders in. The whole business now - and this direction is driven entirely by the manufacturers - is all about direct marketing through YouTube and other "influencers" and it is a complete disgrace that people are getting so short changed by shallow first look "reviews" and such obviously dubious relationships. Its difficult enough for bricks and mortar camera shops to keep going without wasting the experience and knowledge of the staff and reducing the experience of dealing with customers to just handing over a pre-ordered box that has been bought on the say so of some bearded dick in a baseball cap who is in the pocket of the manufacturer. I don't know who was more depressed about the conversation we had about the situation, the two of them behind the counter or the two of us on the other side of it.

Not particularly to be honest. There is no comparison to the overheating performance of the Mark 1 and in his actual review of the Mark 1 he writes off any overheating concerns in literally a single second. And yet in this review of the Mark II he devotes around 30% of the whole video to it. Curious, no ? The thing is that the original Mk I actually had a widely reported (and click baited) furore around overheating which his review singularly failed to mention let alone highlight. Interestingly, it was actually one of the few reviews where he actually went outside with a camera and used it like someone would, so that may be related. The furore around the Mark 1 (fuelled in large part by people using it for two hour live streams) went away with the combination of the High setting, the screen flipped out and the use of dummy batteries. So, the latter points the finger firmly at the issue being the battery/chamber. Now the Mark II has a completely different battery and chamber so it is really relevant to understand whether the performance in terms of overheating is different and whether the same mitigation works. Like all the cameras that I have ever seen labelled with an "oh my God this is fatal" overheating "issue", I'm always wondering how many camera shops are overwhelmed with returns of them and the manufacturers having to withdraw them from sale as that reality doesn't seem to chime with the pearl clutching. In the case of the Mark I, it is extremely popular with its target audience, which strongly suggests that the real world usage of them by those people isn't unduly impacted by this, so if the Mark II is markedly worse or different then it is incumbent on "reviewers" to contrast and compare. These tests tell us nothing about real world performance not least because they do not take into account recovery time, which is the biggest debilitating factor in evaluating overheating. Once again, I find myself bewildered by how many people consider him as some sort of gold standard of reviewer. At the very least, the disparity between less than one second of evaluation of the overheating of the Mark I and five whole minutes on the Mark II warrants some sort of evaluation. Maybe overheating didn't drive the clicks in the same way when the Mark I was released.

How does it compare to the Mark 1?