Robert Collins

My hands on first look and footage vid is live. Love the camera! 
 
 

It is my understanding that Sony's 5k and 6k full pixel readout and scaling to 4k video...is dont at the A/D conversion level. The sensor does that proprietary scaling right on the sensor and feeds that final 4k image to whatever video processor your camera has.
Why does this matter? Because all of the readout and scaling engine is on the chip itself. Your image processor doesnt have to do that work!
Anybody who buys a Sony sensor has access to the scaling readout modes. So when Canon buys 1 inch Sony sensors,...bang!...they got Sony-style full pixel readout. Since Canon makes their own FF and APSC sensors,...they dont have that scaling engine onboard! Their DIGIC processor has to collect and scale that readout by itself!
CLEARLY.....Canon has NOT figured out how to do 4k with anything more than a 1:1 deBayer or a 1:1 assembly using binning or line skipping!!
Canon is literly 10 years behind Sony in sensor readout and image assembly mathematics!
My God....wow.

I would caution about getting out of adobe for stills. I have bought ON1, DXO and Photo Ninja in the past, ON1 raw is simply a buggy mess (and incredibly slow). DXO is ok in parts but quite limited in others (selected adjustments) and I am not sure that Photo Ninja still exists. Now Capture One is very good but will work out expensive (especially as you sort of have to upgrade raw developers with your cameras.) I always find myself going back to Lightroom.
And Lightroom is pretty good these days (especially since the introduction of luminosity and color range masks.) Photoshop is unbeatable, spend an hour in Affinity and you will quickly come across limitations. Plus they are both stable (neither have crashed on me for a couple of years) and the photography plan at US$10 is quite a bargain measured against the competition.
I see the general angst about Premiere - it is unstable and buggy and slow and certainly not cheap. So looking/going elsewhere for video makes a lot of sense but for stills far less so. Of course if you are getting out of Adobes clutches as a matter of principle that is a different matter.....

I wouldnt count Canon out - underinvesting in their camera business looks, increasingly, a pretty smart move. 
Others appear to be 'rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic' while Sony is installing armchairs....

Hey @Andrew Reid 
I'm not sure you and I can still be friends if you are going round the internet bullying *checks notes* a camera company owned by a billionaire who took legal action to shut you up that they knew you couldn't possibly afford to have defended.

Clearly, as Peter says, the internet bullying must be stopped.
Peter's solution to your spiteful bullying is to *checks notes* go on the internet and demand a camera company owned by a billionaire shuts you down by taking legal action they know you couldn't possibly afford to defend.

Anyway, I'm off to 3D print a new irony meter as my current one has just exploded.
 
 

I think that the price of RED's components is not at all the issue. The issues, as far as I can tell, are:
- RED has a patent on compressed raw recording, which many people believe is too broad, and is either an invalid patent, or an example of the failure of the patent system. RED's patent is so broad that other camera companies cannot even develop their own compressed raw formats--hence Blackmagic's Braw is "partially debayered." It's not just filmmakers, apparently Apple is currently challenging the patent's legitimacy.
- In the past, RED has threatened individuals such as Andrew with lawsuits to get them to be quiet. As written in the blog post, a private individual would be financially unable to counter the lawsuit, whether it's valid or not. Many consider this to be bullying.
- In regards to the Jinni Tech controversy, Mr. Royce has provided evidence that RED's claims of custom firmware and "made in the USA" statements are false. If Royce is right, then RED has broken the law and lied to its customers. Additionally, RED claimed that Jinni Tech stole intellectual property, which Royce has also disputed. Again, if Royce is right, then that is libel.
- The issue of overpriced components is really incidental to the whole story, despite being an exciting headline. The only issue with the pricing is that there may be false advertising--RED can charge whatever price they want, but only if they are honest about what they are selling.
That's my summary of events thus far, hopefully fairly accurately (feel free to set me straight).

Linus makes a great point (around the 9 minute mark). That the minimags at their price point really should have ‘two’ SSDs configured in RAID 1 to provide data redundancy in case of the failure of one of the SSDs.

Backstory is becoming very wide knowledge.
1.6m views
 

RED is a patent troll. The fact that they sued Andrew in 2010 to keep his mouth shut tells you all you need to know. That is patent troll behavior.
Ready to hear more facts.

Camera companies have an enormous capacity for pain. Olympus's camera division last made a profit in 2009. BTW, Leica was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2004.
I rather suspect that Sony sees its losses in cameras as a marketing expense for its sensors....

The angst about Sony menus from camera 'reviewers' merely reflects the profile of 'reviewers'. Rather than using one camera system like most people, they typically 'test' an array of cameras from many systems. Sony menus are detailed and deep. My A7riii has 23 pages of options for setting up custom buttons. That might seem overkill but it does at least enable me to setting the custom buttons to do exactly what I want. Reviewers dont much like this because it takes longer to set up a Sony camera than others and they have the next camera review on the horizon. Some cant be bothered to make the effort and then complain they are always having to delve into the menus because they simply havent set up the camera properly for their needs in the first place.
So it is fair to say that Sony menus arent great if you have to change cameras and systems constantly. Personally I like them because I can set up the camera exactly how I want. But then again I used to like the Olympus menus (when I used Olympus) and everyone said their menus were rubbish too.

I am not optimistic. It seems to me that the whole social media - youtube/facebook etc - thing is 'one circular mind f**k'.
It seems that peoples actions are no longer driven by themselves but their perception of other peoples perception of them - the echo chamber of life.
IT seems an extremely efficient way of wasting time.

Apparently over half of youngsters want to be youtubers/vloggers...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3617062/children-turn-backs-on-traditional-careers-in-favour-of-internet-fame-study-finds/
So presumably half the world will be youtubers and the other half will spend their time watching youtube...

Camera companies have an enormous capacity for pain. Olympus's camera division last made a profit in 2009. BTW, Leica was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2004.
I rather suspect that Sony sees its losses in cameras as a marketing expense for its sensors....

Not just Japan. The world. The next 50 years don't look particularly good. Exploding population, climate change, antibiotic resistances, society and technology. I think human kind will need a certain level of pain to change...so cheers.

Camera companies have an enormous capacity for pain. Olympus's camera division last made a profit in 2009. BTW, Leica was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2004.
I rather suspect that Sony sees its losses in cameras as a marketing expense for its sensors....

It was actually Sony who bailed out Olympus after the Yakuza blew a hole in their balance sheet (go figure).
But realistically, these companies stay in the camera business because it is relatively sexy - or far more sexy at least than endoscopes (Olympus), photocopiers (Ricoh), image sensors (Sony) and microwaves (Panasonic) or however they make their money....
One would have thought that the market is ripe for a new company (DJI?) to come in and disrupt the market (like say Godox in lighting) but maybe the market is too small or consumers too entrenched in their systems to change.

Camera companies have an enormous capacity for pain. Olympus's camera division last made a profit in 2009. BTW, Leica was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2004.
I rather suspect that Sony sees its losses in cameras as a marketing expense for its sensors....

Yes, sorry. A7r4 photo....

Andrew, your test isn't fair. As the other forumer said, there's one photo shot with soft light in the shade and the other one with direct sunlight and green reflection from the grass. I totally agree with you about Canon (and Nikon, and even fuji) having better colors straight out of the camera than Sony, but the gap isn't as wide as those photos want it to be.
And now with presets in lightroom, you can easily turn any camera into anything. And applying it to series of photos takes one clic. I wasn't liking my RX100 V photos because of the colors. I purchased VSCO presets to try them out, and I was stunned at the results. With just a bit of fiddling, and a few clicks, my RX100 turned into a fuji camera ! With a classic chrome esthetic. And the latest sony cameras have tremendously improved their color science. But again, I prefer Canon jpegs. No actually I prefer Fuji jpegs :P

Seems to me you have to work quite hard with that Sony image in post to make it look that bad.

This is not true any more. The Sigma DP1, DP2 DP3, SD and SD H Qattro all shoot native DNGs which of course is editable in any raw editor you can think of.
The original DP1 and DP2 is also Lightroom compatible without shooting DNGs.
Another myth is that one must use a tripod. Obviously you don't need a tripod anymore than you do on a film camera. I've never used one, not once, with a Foveon.
Personally I have loved all my Sigma Foveon cameras and I'm in the process of buying the SD Quattro H to see how I like it compared to the regular Quattro.

The rich colors of Sigma are down to the Foveon sensor that captures full color on every pixel as opposed to 'bayer' sensors that only capture one color per pixel and then interpolates the color through processing.
One drawback of the Foveon sensor is poor lowlight performance. The other - more significant in my eyes at least - drawback is post editing. You have to use Sigma software and you can see the problem at the 10 minute mark of this video....
But the FP will be almost useless as a stills camera. Without a mechanical shutter, you will get rolling shutter rather like using a modern mirrorless in silent mode (unless it is a Sony A9.) Which means shot can come out like this.... even without subject movement.....
 

The rich colors of Sigma are down to the Foveon sensor that captures full color on every pixel as opposed to 'bayer' sensors that only capture one color per pixel and then interpolates the color through processing.
One drawback of the Foveon sensor is poor lowlight performance. The other - more significant in my eyes at least - drawback is post editing. You have to use Sigma software and you can see the problem at the 10 minute mark of this video....
But the FP will be almost useless as a stills camera. Without a mechanical shutter, you will get rolling shutter rather like using a modern mirrorless in silent mode (unless it is a Sony A9.) Which means shot can come out like this.... even without subject movement.....