HockeyFan12

Nikon needs to address ergonomics, ecosystem, and UI, or their market share will continue to decline. Canon does, too, but less pressingly. Mirrorless cameras need to reach iPhone-level convenience before the iPhone reaches A7R-level image quality if the prosumer market is to survive.
This focus on specs will only get Nikon so far. 
Which is sort of a shame because those specs are monstrous and the Nikon ecosystem is great. I'd love this camera for stills and video, assuming the video is decent in practice.
(The D5 and 1DXII are fine for what they are, but; they're pro tools specifically for sports. That's not going away, but it's a tiny market. The prosumer market is in danger of going the way of point and shoots though.)
Anyhow, awesome specs. Likely an awesome camera. Hoping it keeps Nikon in the game a while longer (and that the tech trickles down to Canon's ecosystem five years later lol).

Nikon needs to address ergonomics, ecosystem, and UI, or their market share will continue to decline. Canon does, too, but less pressingly. Mirrorless cameras need to reach iPhone-level convenience before the iPhone reaches A7R-level image quality if the prosumer market is to survive.
This focus on specs will only get Nikon so far. 
Which is sort of a shame because those specs are monstrous and the Nikon ecosystem is great. I'd love this camera for stills and video, assuming the video is decent in practice.
(The D5 and 1DXII are fine for what they are, but; they're pro tools specifically for sports. That's not going away, but it's a tiny market. The prosumer market is in danger of going the way of point and shoots though.)
Anyhow, awesome specs. Likely an awesome camera. Hoping it keeps Nikon in the game a while longer (and that the tech trickles down to Canon's ecosystem five years later lol).

Nikon needs to address ergonomics, ecosystem, and UI, or their market share will continue to decline. Canon does, too, but less pressingly. Mirrorless cameras need to reach iPhone-level convenience before the iPhone reaches A7R-level image quality if the prosumer market is to survive.
This focus on specs will only get Nikon so far. 
Which is sort of a shame because those specs are monstrous and the Nikon ecosystem is great. I'd love this camera for stills and video, assuming the video is decent in practice.
(The D5 and 1DXII are fine for what they are, but; they're pro tools specifically for sports. That's not going away, but it's a tiny market. The prosumer market is in danger of going the way of point and shoots though.)
Anyhow, awesome specs. Likely an awesome camera. Hoping it keeps Nikon in the game a while longer (and that the tech trickles down to Canon's ecosystem five years later lol).

I don't know the first thing about lens design, either (well, maybe the first thing, but definitely not the second). I've just been playing around with wide angle adapters for a while. 
I also have one of these for my Iscorama:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/464579-REG/Canon_1724B001_WD_H72_72mm_0_8x_Wide.html
It's 72mm and I think it's the very same adapter Chris Probst uses on his Kowa 40mm. The only problem is you might need to find a machinist to grind the mount down a bit. But optically it's really good. There's significant barrel distortion and CA but it's very sharp. There should be some on the used market for good prices; I got mine on eBay and then found a local machinist to grind the area in front of the threads down to fit. For some reason they protrude too much. It was around $100 total in but I got a good deal I think. The machinist only charged $20 but I was lucky to find someone so good who charged so little.
Now you're making me want to buy an 18mm f3.5 Nikkor to use with it.... I'm going back to vintage lenses.
 

I don't think you're going to find an adequately high quality 0.5X wide angle adapter, and I suspect all of them will vignette (hard vignetting) when combined with a speed booster. I do think it's an intriguing idea, though.
I have a 0.8x adapter for my 24mm f2 Nikkor. Lots of barrel distortion, but sharp. I think it's this one:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?A=details&O=&Q=&ap=y&c3api=1876%2C{creative}%2C{keyword}&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI87WL_fLm1QIVEhuBCh3gTAAlEAQYASABEgJEevD_BwE&is=REG&m=Y&sku=751265
From what I understand the off-brand ones are worse but can be found even cheaper. The corner sharpness suffers with them. You can try something like this but I expect it will have hard vignetting and an atrocious image in the corners:
https://www.amazon.com/Neewer-0-45x-Select-Camera-Models/dp/B002W4RPD2
I don't think a 0.5x adapter is going to do a good job, but it's not necessary anyway imo. The Speed Booster XL is 0.64X and has good performance. With a 0.8x adapter and the Speed Booster you're down to about 0.5 anyway. Might be worth getting a 24mm FD lens (if Canon makes one with 58mm) threads to eke out those last few degrees of FOV, though. That would bring you right around 12mm.
Wide angle adapters are a viable option if you don't mind barrel distortion. I believe Chris Probst uses one on his 40mm Kowa. I think they look nice on anamorphic lenses in particular, where the distortion adds more character.

Big DP Merrill fan here.  

I'll look into it. I actually would be curious to give this a try and I apologize for getting worked up earlier, it's been a rough week, and that's made me a little touchy. I'm as convinced as ever I'm right, but I do feel foolish for getting heated. Anytime anyone mentions money online it's as dumb as mentioning Hitler or resulting to ad hominem attacks. Pointless escalation. My bad on escalating that one. Maybe I was just trying to add a little more to my down payment.  But that wouldn't be fair. Now that I see Beverly Hills in your profile, I'm starting to think you could escalate the wager a lot higher than me without suffering the consequences, but it's still just a shitty way of escalating an argument.
Sorry about all that.
That said, I'll see if I can rent a 4k zone plate or visit Red headquarters or something. I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars to win an argument online when I only have to prove something to you (those actually designing sensors are already following my model), but on the other hand I'm curious. Can we agree to use a sine wave plate rather than a square wave plate? And can we agree that a blurry image doesn't count as aliasing, only false detail does, and that slight false detail specifically from sharpening isn't aliasing, either? The real difficulty is that the best thing I have is a Foveon camera (don't own an M monochrome or anything) and Sigma's zero sharpening setting still has some sharpening, and one-pixel radius sharpening looks like slight false detail at one pixel. So the result will be a little funky due to real world variables. But I still contend that the result will correlate far more closely with my model: a properly framed 4k sinusoidal zone plate won't exhibit significant aliasing when shot with the 4k crop portion of a Foveon camera, even if the full resolution isn't clearly resolved when the two are out of phase.
But we have to go with a sinusoidal zone plate (which is unfortunately the really expensive and scarce one, binary is cheaper and far more common) and recognize that if it's fully out of phase the result will be near-gray.
That aside, I would be genuinely curious to put a 4k zone plate in front of a 4k Foveon crop. But we'd have to agree SINUSOIDAL lines (halves of full sinusoidal cycles). Even if it's just a gentleman's bet. Let's agree on a sinusoidal zone plate first.
And I apologize again for getting worked up. That was really childish of me. It's been a bad week and I'm sorry about that.

If you can find me an affordable 4k zone plate (SINUSOIDAL) I will.
You're right it's not about money but I also don't have to prove it to myself. Like, how's $10,000? Doesn't make me any more right or wrong. This escalation is absurd and I'm sorry I got involved with it. Might makes right is generally wrong. You're right to the extent that it doesn't matter, it's about what's right and not about money or what sources claim what (even if the reputable ones agree with my model).
I apologize for that, but why should I spend money to prove to myself what I already know? It's not on me to prove you wrong, it's on you to stop spreading misinformation.

Depends how confident you are that you're right. I'm 100% confident that I am. If you can find a 4k SINUSOIDAL zone plate to shoot and we can agree on what represents 2,000 horizontal line pairs, let's just make it a $500 wager. I'll bring my Foveon camera. Again, there will be some slight difference due to real-world factors like imperfectly aligned grids and quantization error and sharpening etc. But the result will be far closer to the figure I cite than the one you do.
It doesn't matter how many people agree with Graeme. What matters is that he's the one doing math and the others are confusing vertical axes with horizontal axes and confusing sine waves with square waves... those articles are poorly-researched and scattershot in their methodology. They're click bait.
Truth is truth. Doesn't matter what the majority says. That's what I'm standing up for above all else.

Indica, at the moment. 
And I don't have to prove my point to anyone but you, because everyone else gets it. At least the people who matter, like Graeme and whoever put that test together. I just wish you wouldn't spread this kind of misinformation online. If you want to you're free to but there's already enough misinformation out there. Case in point, that article confuses vertical and horizontal lines of resolution.
So did you.
Buy me a 4k sinusoidal (not square wave) zone plate. (Let's keep the budget at $500 or less.) I'll photograph it with a Foveon camera, center crop 4k. If the behavior correlates more closely with the model I correctly cite than the one you made up, you eat the cost of the zone plate. If it correlates with your claims, I'll pay you back. We can accept a small margin of error either way due to other real world factors (quantization error, things not being perfectly aligned). But our models are vastly different so we should see one or the other clearly prevail. 
I'm dead serious. But keep the zone plate to $500 or less I have rent to pay and am saving up for a house. :/ 

Then why does the image you recently posted show 540 line pairs (1080 lines) in the VERTICAL (not horizontal) resolution for the F3? Exactly as my model would predict from a full raster 3 megapixel sample downscaled to 1080p? And 848 line pairs for the Alexa in RAW, very close to the figure my model would predict (it would predict 1620 lines from a 2880X1620 sensor, or 810 line pairs–the difference between 810 and 848 could be aliasing reading as false detail).
Edit: also, that wasn't long enough to read a four-page thread. Go back and read it all. I had my questions, too, at first, until I got into the difference between sinusoidal and binary zone plates.
Anyhow, I'm done. Everything except online banter agrees with what I've posted, including repeatably real-world behavior (science) and numbers (math). If you want to take this up with Graeme I encourage you to, but I just wish you wouldn't freely post misinformation like this.

JCS, can you stop propagating that incorrect version of the Nyquist theorem? If you want I can link you to the original thread where Graeme Nattress at Red describes how it actually works. If you agree to take a look at it I'll leave you alone about it, since usually you're a valuable contributor, but I hate to see that kind of misinformation spread online in a technical forum.

I've never been that bullish on 4k video or it providing a significant or worthwhile improvement in real-world use. For UI elements on phones and computers I think a high res display is advantageous, but 4k video doesn't look significantly better to me at normal viewing distances (except maybe for line art and 2D animation). I recall that the text on my projector from my PS4 looks pixellated but the video never does. For VR I think higher resolutions are going to be particularly important, for video and UI elements alike. 
The statistic you posted is misleading. Most of us are in the US or developed countries that have at least a majority HD infrastructure and even if we're selling to other markets that don't have HD, those markets are less important to our revenue stream. I think all of us benefit from shooting HD. I think most of us know whether our clients will pay more for 4k and it's really just a cost-benefit analysis at that point. Or as hobbyists, we decide that cost-benefit analysis subjectively. 
Personally, I prefer working with 2k or 1080p media both professionally and as a hobby. I hate doing the extra busy work or waiting on the extra renders and I don't see any difference in real-world use. I just don't see the difference, but my eyes are now 20:30 or 20:20. When I was young and they were 20:15 I bet I tell the difference even with video at a normal viewing distance. I do think VR video is too low res now and that will need to be acquired at 8k or 16k or beyond to look good. 
I don't personally expect that most tv networks will upgrade their infrastructure to 1080p in the US or abroad. Upgrading to HD was recent and very expensive. Their libraries are all 1080p anyway, and finished as such. But I do think tv will eventually be displaced by Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, etc. which already have 4k infrastructure. So watching how that market changes and evolves and tracing those viewership graphs will probably give a pretty good idea when 4k will become widely demanded. CBS won't push its shows to 4k for air. Not ever, I think. But Netflix might push them to shoot in 4k so they can license a 4k deliverable for their own distribution.
When networks earn more money from licensing 4k to Netflix than they suffer in added production cost shooting in that format (fwiw, the added cost is deceptively enormous for larger productions), we'll see a quick change. That won't be too soon. But it will happen soon enough. Probably sooner than we think! I bet Arri is targeting a true 4k Alexa for before that date.
Personally, I'm in no rush at all to upgrade, but that's just me! I know a lot of people here are primarily targeting Netflix Original distribution (based on posts I've read). I still think 1080p is fine for that. They'll acquire 1080p movies as originals; they just won't produce 1080p series. So I wouldn't worry about that. 
TL;DR: People shooting 4k did a cost-benefit analysis and 4k provided more profit from their clients, which in that case are the only clients who matter, or they just want to because they're hobbyists, in which case their preferences (and bank account) are all that matter.

I've never been that bullish on 4k video or it providing a significant or worthwhile improvement in real-world use. For UI elements on phones and computers I think a high res display is advantageous, but 4k video doesn't look significantly better to me at normal viewing distances (except maybe for line art and 2D animation). I recall that the text on my projector from my PS4 looks pixellated but the video never does. For VR I think higher resolutions are going to be particularly important, for video and UI elements alike. 
The statistic you posted is misleading. Most of us are in the US or developed countries that have at least a majority HD infrastructure and even if we're selling to other markets that don't have HD, those markets are less important to our revenue stream. I think all of us benefit from shooting HD. I think most of us know whether our clients will pay more for 4k and it's really just a cost-benefit analysis at that point. Or as hobbyists, we decide that cost-benefit analysis subjectively. 
Personally, I prefer working with 2k or 1080p media both professionally and as a hobby. I hate doing the extra busy work or waiting on the extra renders and I don't see any difference in real-world use. I just don't see the difference, but my eyes are now 20:30 or 20:20. When I was young and they were 20:15 I bet I tell the difference even with video at a normal viewing distance. I do think VR video is too low res now and that will need to be acquired at 8k or 16k or beyond to look good. 
I don't personally expect that most tv networks will upgrade their infrastructure to 1080p in the US or abroad. Upgrading to HD was recent and very expensive. Their libraries are all 1080p anyway, and finished as such. But I do think tv will eventually be displaced by Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, etc. which already have 4k infrastructure. So watching how that market changes and evolves and tracing those viewership graphs will probably give a pretty good idea when 4k will become widely demanded. CBS won't push its shows to 4k for air. Not ever, I think. But Netflix might push them to shoot in 4k so they can license a 4k deliverable for their own distribution.
When networks earn more money from licensing 4k to Netflix than they suffer in added production cost shooting in that format (fwiw, the added cost is deceptively enormous for larger productions), we'll see a quick change. That won't be too soon. But it will happen soon enough. Probably sooner than we think! I bet Arri is targeting a true 4k Alexa for before that date.
Personally, I'm in no rush at all to upgrade, but that's just me! I know a lot of people here are primarily targeting Netflix Original distribution (based on posts I've read). I still think 1080p is fine for that. They'll acquire 1080p movies as originals; they just won't produce 1080p series. So I wouldn't worry about that. 
TL;DR: People shooting 4k did a cost-benefit analysis and 4k provided more profit from their clients, which in that case are the only clients who matter, or they just want to because they're hobbyists, in which case their preferences (and bank account) are all that matter.

I don't know what more to say except that the Nyquist theorem specifically concerns sine waves. Always has, always will. It concerns other wave shapes only to the extent that they are the product of sine waves. By frequency, Nyquist means frequency of the highest order sine wave. (Which in the case of an unfiltered square wave is infinite.)
I don't think we're going to make any progress in this discussion until we can agree upon this point, and if we can't we won't. Which is okay! Everyone will draw their own conclusions and luckily this discussion is more academic than practical (to the extent that neither of us are designing sensors and both of us agree the F65 looks awesome).
By fairly arbitrary, I only mean tuned partially subjectively. That's my bad for articulating that poorly. And yes, Nyquist does apply to computer graphics, and to that extent the fact that all the graphics you present are of square wave functions (infinite order so far as Nyquist is concerned) is very relevant. That's why they're aliasing like crazy when you downscale them. A few posts back I downsampled some sine wave zone plates (quantized sine waves, granted, and I suppose a binary quantized sine wave resembles a square wave, which further complicates things....) and they didn't alias in the same way! Not nearly as much aliasing. Not any, in fact... until they hit the Nyquist limit. 
So yes, square waves and sine waves do have different frequencies as concerns Nyquist. 

I know of one or two DPs who own expensive kits like that. Reds or Alexas. It worked for them, they got work from bundling the camera in with the deal, and they gradually paid the camera off. But the majority of people I know who are working consistently and supporting themselves well don't own any camera except something like a t2i for personal use. Partially because different cameras are better for different shoots, mostly because they're getting hired for their ability and not their gear. Yes, if you're being hired mostly for bundling a cheap rental then that cheap rental will open doors to you... but only with bad shitty clients. So yeah, it will open doors for sure... imo, the wrong ones. Most commercial sets cost $250k/day. Lower end shoots still cost five figures a day. Is saving a few hundred dollars on a camera rental really that important to anyone but the most miserly client? Is the most miserly client the one you want?
There is a middle ground of C300 and FS7 ops who work as wet hires for lower rates ($600-$800/day wet hire, maybe a lot more but that seems to be the agreed upon low end) and seem to do REALLY well because they get tons of work for mostly documentary style stuff, tv and web. Usually they can pay off their small camera ($20k investment rather than $200k investment) in the first six months while still making money and after that it's just gravy. Talent helps there but all you need to be able to do is operate competently and reliably. But when it comes to Alexas and Epics... I rarely see owner/ops unless they own their own production company or are independently wealthy or just crazy ambitious. The cost of the crew to support those cameras is thousands of dollars a day, anyway, so most cheap professional clients don't want the hassle. A lot of student films do, though, and if you're in a city with a lot of film schools you can do okay just with that since you can recruit a free crew of film students and still ask a decent rate for yourself.
In my experience the most important thing is who you know. You want to know people who are looking for DPs. You also have to be able to do the job reliably. That's about it.
I've witnessed a number of DP hiring decisions and it's usually just who's easiest to work with. What camera someone owns almost never matters at all. Having a good reel of course is very helpful.
Edit: for narrative specifically I can see having a higher end camera being a strong selling point. For breaking into indie films (where rates are low but passion is high) having a good camera could be a significant factor.

I know of one or two DPs who own expensive kits like that. Reds or Alexas. It worked for them, they got work from bundling the camera in with the deal, and they gradually paid the camera off. But the majority of people I know who are working consistently and supporting themselves well don't own any camera except something like a t2i for personal use. Partially because different cameras are better for different shoots, mostly because they're getting hired for their ability and not their gear. Yes, if you're being hired mostly for bundling a cheap rental then that cheap rental will open doors to you... but only with bad shitty clients. So yeah, it will open doors for sure... imo, the wrong ones. Most commercial sets cost $250k/day. Lower end shoots still cost five figures a day. Is saving a few hundred dollars on a camera rental really that important to anyone but the most miserly client? Is the most miserly client the one you want?
There is a middle ground of C300 and FS7 ops who work as wet hires for lower rates ($600-$800/day wet hire, maybe a lot more but that seems to be the agreed upon low end) and seem to do REALLY well because they get tons of work for mostly documentary style stuff, tv and web. Usually they can pay off their small camera ($20k investment rather than $200k investment) in the first six months while still making money and after that it's just gravy. Talent helps there but all you need to be able to do is operate competently and reliably. But when it comes to Alexas and Epics... I rarely see owner/ops unless they own their own production company or are independently wealthy or just crazy ambitious. The cost of the crew to support those cameras is thousands of dollars a day, anyway, so most cheap professional clients don't want the hassle. A lot of student films do, though, and if you're in a city with a lot of film schools you can do okay just with that since you can recruit a free crew of film students and still ask a decent rate for yourself.
In my experience the most important thing is who you know. You want to know people who are looking for DPs. You also have to be able to do the job reliably. That's about it.
I've witnessed a number of DP hiring decisions and it's usually just who's easiest to work with. What camera someone owns almost never matters at all. Having a good reel of course is very helpful.
Edit: for narrative specifically I can see having a higher end camera being a strong selling point. For breaking into indie films (where rates are low but passion is high) having a good camera could be a significant factor.

I know of one or two DPs who own expensive kits like that. Reds or Alexas. It worked for them, they got work from bundling the camera in with the deal, and they gradually paid the camera off. But the majority of people I know who are working consistently and supporting themselves well don't own any camera except something like a t2i for personal use. Partially because different cameras are better for different shoots, mostly because they're getting hired for their ability and not their gear. Yes, if you're being hired mostly for bundling a cheap rental then that cheap rental will open doors to you... but only with bad shitty clients. So yeah, it will open doors for sure... imo, the wrong ones. Most commercial sets cost $250k/day. Lower end shoots still cost five figures a day. Is saving a few hundred dollars on a camera rental really that important to anyone but the most miserly client? Is the most miserly client the one you want?
There is a middle ground of C300 and FS7 ops who work as wet hires for lower rates ($600-$800/day wet hire, maybe a lot more but that seems to be the agreed upon low end) and seem to do REALLY well because they get tons of work for mostly documentary style stuff, tv and web. Usually they can pay off their small camera ($20k investment rather than $200k investment) in the first six months while still making money and after that it's just gravy. Talent helps there but all you need to be able to do is operate competently and reliably. But when it comes to Alexas and Epics... I rarely see owner/ops unless they own their own production company or are independently wealthy or just crazy ambitious. The cost of the crew to support those cameras is thousands of dollars a day, anyway, so most cheap professional clients don't want the hassle. A lot of student films do, though, and if you're in a city with a lot of film schools you can do okay just with that since you can recruit a free crew of film students and still ask a decent rate for yourself.
In my experience the most important thing is who you know. You want to know people who are looking for DPs. You also have to be able to do the job reliably. That's about it.
I've witnessed a number of DP hiring decisions and it's usually just who's easiest to work with. What camera someone owns almost never matters at all. Having a good reel of course is very helpful.
Edit: for narrative specifically I can see having a higher end camera being a strong selling point. For breaking into indie films (where rates are low but passion is high) having a good camera could be a significant factor.

I know of one or two DPs who own expensive kits like that. Reds or Alexas. It worked for them, they got work from bundling the camera in with the deal, and they gradually paid the camera off. But the majority of people I know who are working consistently and supporting themselves well don't own any camera except something like a t2i for personal use. Partially because different cameras are better for different shoots, mostly because they're getting hired for their ability and not their gear. Yes, if you're being hired mostly for bundling a cheap rental then that cheap rental will open doors to you... but only with bad shitty clients. So yeah, it will open doors for sure... imo, the wrong ones. Most commercial sets cost $250k/day. Lower end shoots still cost five figures a day. Is saving a few hundred dollars on a camera rental really that important to anyone but the most miserly client? Is the most miserly client the one you want?
There is a middle ground of C300 and FS7 ops who work as wet hires for lower rates ($600-$800/day wet hire, maybe a lot more but that seems to be the agreed upon low end) and seem to do REALLY well because they get tons of work for mostly documentary style stuff, tv and web. Usually they can pay off their small camera ($20k investment rather than $200k investment) in the first six months while still making money and after that it's just gravy. Talent helps there but all you need to be able to do is operate competently and reliably. But when it comes to Alexas and Epics... I rarely see owner/ops unless they own their own production company or are independently wealthy or just crazy ambitious. The cost of the crew to support those cameras is thousands of dollars a day, anyway, so most cheap professional clients don't want the hassle. A lot of student films do, though, and if you're in a city with a lot of film schools you can do okay just with that since you can recruit a free crew of film students and still ask a decent rate for yourself.
In my experience the most important thing is who you know. You want to know people who are looking for DPs. You also have to be able to do the job reliably. That's about it.
I've witnessed a number of DP hiring decisions and it's usually just who's easiest to work with. What camera someone owns almost never matters at all. Having a good reel of course is very helpful.
Edit: for narrative specifically I can see having a higher end camera being a strong selling point. For breaking into indie films (where rates are low but passion is high) having a good camera could be a significant factor.

I know of one or two DPs who own expensive kits like that. Reds or Alexas. It worked for them, they got work from bundling the camera in with the deal, and they gradually paid the camera off. But the majority of people I know who are working consistently and supporting themselves well don't own any camera except something like a t2i for personal use. Partially because different cameras are better for different shoots, mostly because they're getting hired for their ability and not their gear. Yes, if you're being hired mostly for bundling a cheap rental then that cheap rental will open doors to you... but only with bad shitty clients. So yeah, it will open doors for sure... imo, the wrong ones. Most commercial sets cost $250k/day. Lower end shoots still cost five figures a day. Is saving a few hundred dollars on a camera rental really that important to anyone but the most miserly client? Is the most miserly client the one you want?
There is a middle ground of C300 and FS7 ops who work as wet hires for lower rates ($600-$800/day wet hire, maybe a lot more but that seems to be the agreed upon low end) and seem to do REALLY well because they get tons of work for mostly documentary style stuff, tv and web. Usually they can pay off their small camera ($20k investment rather than $200k investment) in the first six months while still making money and after that it's just gravy. Talent helps there but all you need to be able to do is operate competently and reliably. But when it comes to Alexas and Epics... I rarely see owner/ops unless they own their own production company or are independently wealthy or just crazy ambitious. The cost of the crew to support those cameras is thousands of dollars a day, anyway, so most cheap professional clients don't want the hassle. A lot of student films do, though, and if you're in a city with a lot of film schools you can do okay just with that since you can recruit a free crew of film students and still ask a decent rate for yourself.
In my experience the most important thing is who you know. You want to know people who are looking for DPs. You also have to be able to do the job reliably. That's about it.
I've witnessed a number of DP hiring decisions and it's usually just who's easiest to work with. What camera someone owns almost never matters at all. Having a good reel of course is very helpful.
Edit: for narrative specifically I can see having a higher end camera being a strong selling point. For breaking into indie films (where rates are low but passion is high) having a good camera could be a significant factor.

I know of one or two DPs who own expensive kits like that. Reds or Alexas. It worked for them, they got work from bundling the camera in with the deal, and they gradually paid the camera off. But the majority of people I know who are working consistently and supporting themselves well don't own any camera except something like a t2i for personal use. Partially because different cameras are better for different shoots, mostly because they're getting hired for their ability and not their gear. Yes, if you're being hired mostly for bundling a cheap rental then that cheap rental will open doors to you... but only with bad shitty clients. So yeah, it will open doors for sure... imo, the wrong ones. Most commercial sets cost $250k/day. Lower end shoots still cost five figures a day. Is saving a few hundred dollars on a camera rental really that important to anyone but the most miserly client? Is the most miserly client the one you want?
There is a middle ground of C300 and FS7 ops who work as wet hires for lower rates ($600-$800/day wet hire, maybe a lot more but that seems to be the agreed upon low end) and seem to do REALLY well because they get tons of work for mostly documentary style stuff, tv and web. Usually they can pay off their small camera ($20k investment rather than $200k investment) in the first six months while still making money and after that it's just gravy. Talent helps there but all you need to be able to do is operate competently and reliably. But when it comes to Alexas and Epics... I rarely see owner/ops unless they own their own production company or are independently wealthy or just crazy ambitious. The cost of the crew to support those cameras is thousands of dollars a day, anyway, so most cheap professional clients don't want the hassle. A lot of student films do, though, and if you're in a city with a lot of film schools you can do okay just with that since you can recruit a free crew of film students and still ask a decent rate for yourself.
In my experience the most important thing is who you know. You want to know people who are looking for DPs. You also have to be able to do the job reliably. That's about it.
I've witnessed a number of DP hiring decisions and it's usually just who's easiest to work with. What camera someone owns almost never matters at all. Having a good reel of course is very helpful.
Edit: for narrative specifically I can see having a higher end camera being a strong selling point. For breaking into indie films (where rates are low but passion is high) having a good camera could be a significant factor.

There's a wide-ranging misunderstanding of Nyquist sampling theory when it comes to images, and I think you might be following that widely-publicized misunderstanding. If not, my apologizes but I think it's such an interesting topic (which I was totally wrong about for years) that I will butt in:
Nyquist does not apply to image sensors how many people think it does. A 4k sensor actually CAN resolve a full 4K (well, technically anything less than 4k so 99.99%) signal, and fully. It's only Bayer interpolation and the presence of anti-aliasing filters that reduces this number in a meaningful way. 
What it boils down to is that a line pair represents a full signal wave. Yes, you can only fully capture less than 2048 line pairs in 4k without aliasing, as per Nyquist. But that's still 4096 lines. So... with a Foveon or monochrome sensor you can capture full 4k with no aliasing on a 4k sensor. Really! You can! (Assuming you also have a high pass filter with 100% mtf below 4k and 0% mtf above 4k. Which... doesn't exist... but still.)
The other point of confusion is the idea that a line pair on a normal resolution chart represents a sine wave. It doesn't. And THAT is 99% of the reason why there's aliasing on all these test charts. It represents a sawtooth wave, which has infinitely high overtones. So mtf should be measured with a sinusoidal zone plate only, as the Nyquist theorem applies to sine waves specifically (well, it applies to anything, but sawtooth waves are effectively of infinite frequency because they contain infinite high odd order harmonics). Since most resolution charts are lines–sawtooth–waves, rather than sinusoidal gradients, even the lowest resolution lines are actually of effectively infinite frequency. Which might be another reason why you see such poorly reconstructed lines and false colors around the very high contrast areas of the window in Yedlin's test in the other thread.
To that extent, the use of anti-aliasing filters is more just "whatever works" for a given camera to split the difference between sharpness and aliasing, and not correlated with Nyquist in any specific way. Bayer patterns I believe remove a little less than 30% of linear resolution, but in practice it looks a lot sharper than 70% sharpness due to advanced algorithms and due to aliasing providing the illusion of resolution... 
So the resolution issue requiring over-sampling is due to anti-aliasing filters and Bayer pattern sensors and balancing things out between them so you get a sharp enough image with low enough aliasing. It's not Nyquist eating half your spatial resolution. I'm no engineer by any means and I have made this mistake in the past and now feel guilty for spreading misinformation online.
Also, I'm normally an 8-bit-is-fine-for-me-and-probably-for-everyone type person, but for next generation HDR wide gamut content you need 10 bit color and a wide gamut sensor. I think Netflix is going for a future proof thing and perhaps it is due to legal. That is a very astute comment. It's not an aesthetic choice, but a legal one. Otherwise, anything could be called "true 4k." (Fwiw you can include small amounts of b cam footage shot on other cameras or even stock footage.)

Sure, but at a normal resolution they still look pretty similar. Remember, he's punched in 4X or something by that point and you're watching on a laptop screen or iMac with a FOV equal to a 200" tv at standard viewing distance. So yeah, on an 800" tv I would definitely want 6k, heck, even on a 200" tv I would. But the biggest screen I've got is a 100" short throw projector or something so the only place where I can see pixels with it is with graphics and text.* I've also been watching a lot of Alexa65-shot content on dual 4k 3D IMAX at my local theater and tbh I can never tell when they cut to the b cam unless it's like a GoPro and then I can REALLY tell. :/
Furthermore, I don't think you need RAW video. That's another marketing myth. Anything high end (C300 Mk II, Varicam, Alexa, even arguably the shitty F55 etc.) is a total wash in terms of RAW vs ProRes.
Honestly I'm most impressed that he got the F55 to look that good! And I want that Nuke script!
I think the bigger lesson is that you can't apply logic against marketing. Red staked its reputation on a 4k camera that in practice had a much softer image than the C300 (the original Red pre-MX was softer per-pixel than the 5D Mark III–by a lot! I think the Genesis/F35 was sharper despite being 1080p)... and it worked! Netflix and YouTube are pushing hard with heavily compressed 4k... although at least YouTube lets you use the Alexa. 4k LCD panels are gaining some traction in the low end market where the image suffers from a million other problems and the screens are pointlessly small. It's like the megapixel wars. Most digital photographers aren't even printing, let alone printing wall-sized (and those I know who do printed wall-sized were satisfied with 12MP). But the big number works well for marketing departments, and that trickles up to everyone. No one who matters to marketing will watch this video anyway.
*I thought my projector's LCDs were misaligned until I noticed that what appeared to be chromatic aberration or misalignment was really just sub-pixel antialiasing! I think 4k would benefit a lot for cartoons, text, etc. Anything with really sharp lines. And for VR I think ultra high resolutions will matter a lot. I love my Rift, but the image is 1990s-level pixellated. I'm not big on VR video, though. 

I couldn't disagree much more strongly. That kind of rigging is taking away everything good about a dSLR and adding nothing but headaches. The only exposure aid I need is my 758 cine (heck, with zebras I don't even need the spot meter) and the only sound I would use from an on-camera mic would be for syncing dual system sound. Even with the best pre-amps in the world, your mic is still in the wrong place if it's on-camera. I can see the handle or a small cage being useful for balance, or maybe a loupe in daylight being helpful, but beyond that I don't see the point.
That said, not everyone agrees with me! If it works for you it works for you. As I mentioned before, s union AC I worked with did the same thing with a C300 when shooting a super bowl ad, rigging it out like crazy... and it is not designed to be rigged out. I asked what the point was when the ergonomics are great (for me) out of the box, but apparently the operator wanted a large 435-like form factor as it was what he was used to, having a film background. He wanted the thing to weigh 50 pounds.
But for me the smallest rig is the best one. If I wanted to weigh it down I'd tape a barbell to it. I do often get asked to use a matte box or something so clients and insecure actors will feel like the small camera is a real "cinema camera" but nothing makes me more irritated than this request. "Is that a real camera? Yes, are you a real actor? If so it'll show in your performance. If it's a real camera it'll show in the footage." But when I get that request it doesn't even reflect on the camera it reflects on me. If you think you know more about my job than I do, you've already lost confidence in me just by asking for a larger camera. Project your insecurities elsewhere. I'm doing my job well, worry about doing the same. Ugg... actors. So insecure it even wipes off on camera department.
I'm not saying I complete disagree, though. The Black Magic cameras, for instance, have such poor ergonomics that they need to be rigged up. Just offering a dissenting opinion. Each will have his or her own preferences. (And for mirrorless still cameras like the GH5 and A7S I do think the ergonomics are so poor that they often benefit from having a small cage and an HDMI clamp, but beyond that I don't see the point.)

Again, I agree to disagree. I've never even seen stereo audio captured on set (always a 416 or Schoeps or something with lavs mixed for stereo and 5.1 after), but I understand that it's useful for some stuff. My experience is in narrative but for ambient recordings I guess binaural is valuable. I listen to a lot of binaural recordings for music and they're great and I wish more narrative film were mixed like that, actually.
I also strongly disagree about the value of ETTR except on a camera-by-camera and case-by-case basis. I think it benefits the Red, for instance, even when possible using color filters and exposing each channel to the right, and fixing both white balance and exposure in post, assuming you want a "slick" commercial look. Whereas Rob Zombie's DP is a friend of a friend and he exposes the Red at 3200 ISO intentionally to intentionally muddy it up, as he finds that look preferable to a post grain pass for "gritty" footage. And I just find the color vs saturation values and even the hue vs lum shifts (I know I'm talking in Resolve terminology and not camera terminology but I stopped following camera tech closely after film was phased out) with most log colorspaces in particular to be inconsistent enough that (excepting maybe the Alexa) you're better off rating normally, or at the very least consistently, whereas ETTR is inconsistent by nature. Sony's F55 LUT threw me for a loop here in particular. And with inexpensive cameras that shoot 8 bit, ETTR is the surest way to generate banding even in cameras that normally don't suffer from it. That said, it's a case-by-case basis thing, but the cases where I would consider exposing with ETTR are vanishingly rare, especially because it adds such a huge headache in post having your vfx artists work with inconsistently exposed plates and your colorist do so many transforms, but I can see overexposing a stop or two consistently when possible, much as I would rate film 1/3 stop slower than it is, or using ETTR with particularly difficult exposures and fixing it in post rather than bracketing and comping or something.
But while I disagree strongly on both of those points, I strongly agree that it's valuable having and sharing different viewpoints. Readers will see whose goals mirror their own, and structure their needs around those who have similar goals and who have found effective ways to deal with them. So I think your post is really valuable, I'm just offering a counterpoint, from someone with a different perspective, one that's more rooted in narrative I assume, for better or worse. I think I have more concern for "good enough" than for "good" so for me ETTR isn't worth the hassle, but for others it definitely will be. (I'm also extremely lazy, and that's a huge factor in my workflows, often the biggest one.)