kye

5 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

This is an interesting camera that is now on Kickstarter.

Takes Canon EF lenses and shoots Fuji Instax Mini film.

Not sure about naming it after Prince Andrew though..

 

\\

 

I had to google that! 😆😆😆

Regarding the camera though, I saw this review in my feed - IIRC it's a mixed bag?

Is the film for it expensive?

11 hours ago, IronFilm said:

Well I got this right. The Nova2 didn't come out in 2021! But it did in 2022... which was a surprise to me. 

https://www.jollypostie.com/store/gotham-sound/meet-the-zaxcom-nova-2-and-new-zmt4s-62f2ea42cfd0e

However the Nova2 was a relatively "small" update. (but very handy for those who it does scratch that itch the original Nova wasn't managing to reach)

Well, I guess I kinda got this right? Sort of. 

The Zoom F8n Pro was formally hinted at in 2021, and officially announced early in 2022. 

But the F8n Pro was also a very small update, not the bigger "F10" update I was hoping for. 

Ah well, but in general my predictions ("not much will happen") for 2021 I got right! 

Predicting the future is much harder than people realise.

IIRC most people who predict things get them wrong, but there's a cognitive tendency for people to change their memories of their predictions so they weren't wrong (or weren't as wrong as they actually were).  I've definitely experienced this when I've predicted something and wrote it down, then later on read my predictions and realised they were worse than I had remembered they were.  I hear people regularly predict things and then later on their recollection of their predictions is substantially different to my recollection of their predictions.

Writing down your predictions is quite brave, I think.  Sharing them with the world even more-so! 🙂 

1 hour ago, IronFilm said:

32bit is mostly marketing hot air and spin to sell to the lowly educated (to be fair, that's true for most people, they're not specialized in location audio. So they're marketing to a very large demographic)

One claim for 32-bit was that you could adjust gain so that you had lots of headroom and therefore wouldn't need a safety track in addition to normal level audio - do you think that 32-bit actually achieves this in reality?

I know lots of folks recording video in uncontrolled conditions (e.g. travel or docos) would appreciate a built-in safety track...  for me personally, going straight into my camera is always limited to stereo and that means I have to choose between mono+safety or stereo without a safety, when I'd rather just have both.

7 hours ago, The Dancing Babamef said:

I was hyperbolizing it a bit but what I said is true to an extent. 4K to 1080p is what you do when you are playing the file locally but uploading to Youtube it's better to leave it as 4K and add a slight NR to it. 

Unless you have a reason to have part of your signal path in 1080p.

I shoot GH5 using the 1080p 200Mbps ALL-I mode so that I can edit in 1080p smoothly on my MBP laptop without rendering proxies.  Before I settled on that workflow I did comparisons between the 5K h265 open gate Long-GOP mode, the 4K h264 Long-GOP mode, and the 1080p ALL-I mode, using my sharpest lens, stopped down, on a subject directly lit with harsh lighting and lots of fine detail, and then pixel peed my heart out trying to see differences.  They were there, but WOW did you really have to look HARD to find them.

8 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Were you saying that downsampled 4k to HD uploaded to YouTube in HD will look better than a 1080p sensor shooting 1080p video uploaded to YouTube in HD?

I'd test that out but I don't have any working SD cards for my BM micro. 

The original claim by @The Dancing Babamef was....

On 10/30/2022 at 5:54 PM, The Dancing Babamef said:

People. When uploading to Youtube, ignore all the downsampling crap. It only applies if you're not compressing the footage again and again. It sounds good on paper but even scaling 1080p to 4K and then watching that "1080p" as a 4K video on youtube gives it a higher visual quality. 

All the pixel binning and noise reduction gets washed away because the compression that youtube uses makes the fine detail into mush anyway.

My reply was simply that YouTube is good enough to show the difference between:

• Resolution X sensor -> Resolution X timeline -> Resolution X YT upload 
• Resolution >X sensor -> Resolution X timeline -> Resolution X YT upload 

It doesn't matter if X = 4K or 1080p, YT quality on both of them is enough to see differences.

I think people form the opinion that YT is completely useless and don't think it can do anything because of the way it handles grain (i.e. a bloodbath) and the high quantity of very low quality uploads where the footage has been crunched way before it made it to YT.

I'm yet to understand what makes a YT upload look worse or better, but there is definitely a lot of variation across different channels / videos.

In terms of a 4K sensor -> 1080p timeline -> 4K export-> 4K upload, that can benefit hugely from a little bit of sharpening.  Most of the people that think that 1080p is completely inferior to 4K are seeing the extra YT bitrate from the 4K YT stream, or are simply looking at sharpness, which is easily compensated for in grading.  

8 hours ago, scotchtape said:

For the ZSYB light I only tested at undervolt settings and the readings are good, haven't bothered to do a full test at 300W.

I bought the Yinleader 1000W transformer, it's like $60USD on Amazon.  I just plugged it into a wattmeter initially because the output was halved compared to the FS300, I checked with the transformer and it's drawing 300W so all good there.  @j_one I'll update when the other light comes in the mail, might be complete trash.

It's this one (can't even search by name, there is no name in the listings and I couldn't find any others lol):

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003436322681.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.0.0.18031802IdPYPY

The photo says QinYue AR-LX0101, tried to search for reviews etc but found nothing except listings in Thailand. It's $120USD on AE. 

The handle mount looks like crap and the remote has no display, but if the light is good it should work in an array for sun fighting power, plus it looks very compact.  Sound might be an issue though since the front looks like the old design where there is airflow through the front (yuck).  At $120USD it's 1/3 the price of Nanlite FS300 which already was the cheapest "good" 300W LED at launch of $350, now $380USD. 

The ZYSB at half price would have been amazing if not for the power issue, I don't know enough about PCB circuits to determine what to replace on the board, if anything.  If anyone is interested in helping that would be appreciated because it would be a killer deal on a light for the price... Quiet, powerful, lightweight, remote, cheap (and cheap build quality) but good quality metrics.

I did test the voltage of the DC leads to the COB and they measured at mains voltage, so I'm not sure what the coil transformer on the PCB does.  But that probably saves weight since there's no need for a transformer to change the mains voltage for the LED.

I know a small amount about linear power supply design, so if you can get a good image of the circuit board I'd be happy to have a look over it and see what I can see.  If it's using a normal AC transformer / rectifier setup then your options will be limited based on the secondary windings that the transformer has.

Often transformers will have dual secondaries to enable them to be put in parallel or series depending on if there's 220V or 110V being input.  Lots of older products would include some sort of switch that would connect the pins in the right way so you could have either 110 or 220, but I don't see those much anymore.  Still, the circuit might be modifiable.

6 minutes ago, PannySVHS said:

Article stating, in VLog there is no additional sharpening, resulting in the so called organic image. Sounds good and thanks to Deezid for pointing this camera out.

From memory the GH5II wasn't a bad update on the GH5, with a few useful (albeit incremental) improvements.  I think it didn't get a lot of attention because it wasn't flashy and due to the fact it wasn't the GH6, but my recollection is that it's definitely a better camera than the GH5.

Just watching Blooms review of the FX30 and he's got a little segment talking about Topaz and shows with/without comparisons...

5 minutes ago, TomTheDP said:

Shallow DOF makes images look higher res, which in my opinion makes that example a poor one if you are saying YouTube 1080p compression doesn't degrade your initial capture. 

When did I state that YT doesn't degrade the image capture?

3 hours ago, androidlad said:

 

1. The pixel-level read node design is similar to IMX610, only the implementation is different and dictates that it has fast conventional read speeds.

2. The physical pixels are 49 megapixels and the entire sensor is natively designed to be 49 megapixels, reusing the 4.2um BSI pixel design and using both analogue binning and digital binning together to achieve a 12 megapixel sensor.

3. IMX510 disables the all-pixel readout mode, so there is no possibility of an all-pixel readout, and naturally it cannot achieve 2x2 OCL AF, which is the biggest difference between it and IMX472.

4. Dividing IMX510's logical pixel into four physical pixels. The readout is achieved using 1:2 analogue binning before PGA and digital binning after ADC. The specifics are:
 A. 48 physical megapixels, divided into upper left, upper right, lower left and lower right in-group pixels.
 B. 24 mega pixels are read, binned in the form of upper left + lower right, upper right + lower left, dual stream 14bit readout.
 C. 2:1 pixel binning in the digital domain to generate 12 megapixels at 15bit, discard 1bit to 14bit output.
 D. The readout speed is around 21ms, approximating 48fps; when the precision is reduced to 12bit, 96fps can be achieved.
 E. The ADC does not have an 11bit mode, so it cannot achieve the faster 24M 11bit -> 12M 12bit.
 F. The digital binning discards 1bit of precision regardless of the mode of output, a waste of performance deliberately designed into IMX510.
 G. In one video mode, the internal readout of two 3.84K/128fps 12Bit ADC streams are digitally binned, but the resolution is not twice that of 3.84K. The precision and resolution are wasted.

5. Due to the uniqueness of the readout mode, IMX510 cannot achieve any 2x1 OCL in-group AF, and the orthogonal readout pixel groups cannot be used for phase detection. Therefore the only phase focusing design for the IMX510 is masked PDAF. A focusing method using 2x2 OCL AF will only be available when the all-pixel readout mode is unlocked.

6. The hardware performance of the sensor goes well beyond the limitations of the "IMX510" name.

7. If this sensor were to be a normal Bayer sensor, the readout speed would depend only on the total number of analogue pixels before the ADC, due to the pixel readout design. Thus 48 megapixels at 24fps 14bit. For this a Modified Bayer CFA can be used, which is suitable for pixel designs with 2:1 analogue signal binning - maximising its performance and enabling dual mode switching between high resolution and oversampled high speed shooting:
 Crop to 16:9 to achieve 8.5K/57.7fps 12bit, 2x4.35K/115.5fps 12bit respectively; crop slightly to 7.68K/64fps 12bit, 2x3.84K/128fps 12bit.
 Notably, its 2x3.84K/128fps 12Bit readout truly has double the resolution and achieves IMX301-like oversampling performance (Sony F65RS).

8. The readout speed of any column-parallel ADC design of an image sensor must be scaled by the line readout speed, by the total number of pixels multiplied by the number of columns, and at the same level of precision comparing:
 A 48 megapixel 14bit 24fps sensor reads at a larger scale than a 12 megapixel 14bit 48fps sensor, but we cannot call it a greater total number of pixels read out, but rather a faster readout, measured by miliseconds.
 
 At a given precision, readout time (the time taken to read a frame), readout scale (how many pixels are read in a second), and readout speed (how many rows of pixels can be read in a second by a column of ADCs), are three dintinctly different and important metrics.

Interesting.

Any idea if the circuit is physically modified from the fully-functional 49MP version, or is it crippled afterwards?

The reason that I ask is that (my understanding) of CPU manufacture is that they only manufacture the highest clock-speed version of a particular model, and then they test all the chips off the line to see how fast they can actually go.  Some will fail at the highest speeds and only work at lower speeds so get labelled and sold as slower clock-speed versions, and if they need to sell more lower-speed ones then they just disable some fast ones.  The whole idea of over-clocking rests on this premise.

I figure that maybe it's cheaper to just make the fanciest version of the sensor and then disable the more advanced functionality afterwards?  Not that this helps us as good luck unlocking it, just curious.

4 hours ago, scotchtape said:

I'm trying some really cheap Chinese lights.

I actually found one really good 300W but unfortunately it only works with 220V - so if you're in 220V land look up ZSYB LED on ali express ~ $180USD!!!

Comes with remote and the metrics with my C800 read very good, nanlite and aputure level.  Fan is also quiet - amazing! I bought a 110V>220V transformer and it works.

Only works on half power here with 110V 😞

Ordered a different one to test that is even cheaper but works with universal AC 😄 still in the mail.

I have a  4x nanlite FS300 array which was amazing at the time for price/performance with the fan mod, but on a recent shoot wanted even more lights, found even cheaper lights now 😄

Am looking forward to a cheaper 600W fixture, but the current crop of 600/1200Ws are that they are overbuilt for mass market and quite heavy, 4x 300W are lighter and cheaper and take up less space so it's hard to justify getting a 600W/1200W unit, way more $$$, heavier, and takes up more space...

I'm thinking at least 3 more years before we see any of the cheaper bigger boys that are lighter. 

I'd be doing some serious A/B tests between the cheap ones and your reference lights, especially if running them at 110V...   but maybe they're fine - I'm not sure how LEDs work under-voltage.  

2 hours ago, deezid said:

Yes, the oversharpening is definitely showing with every kind of lens I tried.
I really hope for a lower sharpening setting with a newer firmware update. Already talked to Panasonic about this issue.

These slashcam charts really show how bad it is
GH5 II


GH6



The GH6 looks quite crispy despite the lens I'm using. Not great, especially with skin, hair, foliage etc.

Are you able to also post the GH5 chart for comparison?

I tried finding it on the site, but I can't seem to find the high-res ones..  Maybe my non-existent German is the issue 😕 

2 hours ago, TomTheDP said:

Shallow depth of field with nice lighting and super sharp lenses is maybe not the best representation of the struggle of HD compression on YouTube. Throw more movement, shadows, longer DOF and it really starts to fall apart IMO, at least compared to 4k. 10 vs 50mbps is going to make a difference. 

I have also noticed some content such as big studio film trailers seem to have a different quality HD than the standard uploader. 

My comments are about resolution, in the context of downsampling, not bitrate.

2 hours ago, The Dancing Babamef said:

that's literally ARRI. 😆  😆

Yes, but if your comments about downsampling were true, then it wouldn't matter if God himself uploaded a video to YT, it would still be........

13 hours ago, The Dancing Babamef said:

washed away because the compression that youtube uses makes the fine detail into mush anyway

But, it's not, and therefore, it isn't.

3 minutes ago, PannySVHS said:

Panasonic needs to fix the streaking. It´s kinda like the issue blue dots, which occured with the Lumix S series und saturated blue led light. Panasonic fixed the issue pretty soon after it was reported to them by strong user response.

The GH6 is a flawed product with that issue, even if being a compelling one.

Without the streaking I would love to give this camera a try and would assume to keep it for good. Plus, if it only had a S16 crop like the GH5 has. Unfortunately the GH6 does not offer that. It would be awesome to have an S16 mode in all the aspect ratios of the full sensor modes, such as 4to3 and additionally 1.66 ratio with full width of S16, which would be around 12.3mm.

One thing I'd miss would be the 2x digital zoom, which in 1080p mode would still be oversampled.  The 2x on the GH5 is great and I use it a lot, and it's definitely better than the 1:1 mode which is a 2.5x crop.  

I'm still hopeful that some of these little touches will get into a future firmware update.  Panasonic still has a decent firmware update owing (I can't remember if it's USB recording or USB charging that was promised but still hasn't been enabled).  My understanding was that the GH5 took a number of firmware updates to really unlock its full potential.

3 hours ago, The Dancing Babamef said:

People. When uploading to Youtube, ignore all the downsampling crap. It only applies if you're not compressing the footage again and again. It sounds good on paper but even scaling 1080p to 4K and then watching that "1080p" as a 4K video on youtube gives it a higher visual quality. 

All the pixel binning and noise reduction gets washed away because the compression that youtube uses makes the fine detail into mush anyway.

There's a lot of opinions about how good YT is or isn't, but I'm not so sure.

Here's a video from ARRI that is "only" uploaded in 1080p, but just looks fantastic...

I own both the OG BMPCC and BMMCC cameras which are native 1080p sensors, and even shooting in RAW or Prores HQ and processing them in post, I still seriously struggle to get an image as detailed as the above, even though the above has been seriously compressed by YT.  The BM 1080p cameras have a slightly softer pixel-to-pixel transition, simply because they're not 1080p 4:4:4, whereas downsampling cameras are all going to be 1080p 4:4:4, and YT has enough quality at 1080p to show these differences.

With my GH5, the difference in resolution between the 4K mode that's downsampled from the 5K sensor and the 4K 1:1 mode is definitely noticeable, even though the 4K 1:1 is a very small crop and even if you adjust ISO, SS and aperture to create the cleanest and sharpest images possible.

5 hours ago, FHDcrew said:

Did you mean downsampled 4k to HD is hard to distinguish from 4k?

I have found that to be true in the past.  I've shot quite a number of resolution tests with the GH5 and have struggled to be able to tell which shots were which, even when I knew which were which, until I found a particular tiny detail in the frame that was the giveaway.  If I wasn't pixel peeing then there's no way I'd be able to tell.

I've also found that you can easily compensate for quite significant resolution differences by just adding some sharpening in post.  The resolution purists are mostly just judging sharpness, not resolution.

@hyalinejim @Skropi

Do you get streaks if you shoot:

• outside at night from streetlights / signs etc?
• during the day if you get the sun just out of frame but hitting the lens?
• during the day if you get the sun in frame?

I think those are probably the only situations left that I would shoot that haven't been mentioned already.

31 minutes ago, TomTheDP said:

I would be interested to see how much the streaking is noticeable in practical situations. The RED raptor has a streaking issue due to its "stitched together" sensors.

Well, I couldn't find an actual Xyla test image, but the waveform plot doesn't show any meaningful bump in the noise levels next to the brightest patch vs the other side of the frame, so I'm guessing that means that there isn't likely to be any streaking within the DR of the camera.  Of course, how many stops above clipping you need to go before streaking is visible above black levels is unknown, but the test images I've seen have had pretty serious clipping on the areas that the streaks originate from.

Someone with an actual GH6 could setup a test, if they had the time and inclination, but from the tests I've seen online the streak behaviour varies significantly in magnitude and behaviour depending on the ISO values.  Some values were more than others and some values had a lighter streak and others had a darker streak, so it would be a complex test.

3 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

I'm talking about the kind of situation where the walls are dark, the window is in frame, the subject is in the room and is backlit by window light only. Here, you're likely to see streaking. But it's just not a very attractive shot anyway so it's not one that I would take, so I don't need to worry about streaking.

But if I had to then the best solution would be to light the room. Then the brightness of the room comes up relative to the window and then streaking is not going to be noticeable. As part of this strategy you could ND the window. But I like to travel light and make things easy for myself and in this case I would rotate the camera-subject axis by 90 degrees and shoot so that the subject is side-lit by the window and now the result is like a Vermeer and there is no streaking.

I know there was an influential video that showed streaking and it was a black studio with white strip lighting. Yes, here you'll see streaking because you have bright whites adjacent to dark blacks. But again, this is not a situation I normally encounter. I have seen streaking on my camera when I've sought it out to test if it was there - it is. But I've yet to see any streaking in my normal usage of the camera, which is reassuring. That's not to say it will never happen. But I had actually forgotten about it until yesterday, reading this thread 😂

I wish every time I encountered a terrible shot I could just turn 90 degrees and get a Vermeer!

33 minutes ago, hyalinejim said:

I regularly have a talking heads interview shot in an interior where a window is in the frame. This is the situation where you'd expect to see streaking. But the difference in stops between inside and outside necessary to see streaking is so huge that I would never choose to shoot in that location regardless, because there would be too much backlighting with or without streaking

Other than that, high DR scenes I shoot would be daylight exteriors in full sun. I've never seen streaking there. You only see it when very bright areas are adjacent to very dark, I think.

Thanks, this is enormously helpful.  It's so hard to judge things like DR from just looking at footage and even if someone tells you the difference then that's often not helpful either as I have no idea what the stops are when I shoot, but your descriptions give me a sense of it, so thanks.

It seems that actually it wouldn't be an issue for me as I am basically shooting in similar situations to you, and while maybe I might have an outside/inside shot be very different, it's not a normal occurrence.

The other factor in this would be the quality of the LEDs..  things like flicker, WB, and CRI are all considerations that cost money but you really don't want to skimp on to lower the purchase price.

47 minutes ago, newfoundmass said:

I know that a lot of YouTubers have relationships with B & H and Camera Canada to get loaners. I suspect thats one of the reasons it feels like some of these folks have immediate access to every camera. 

I imagine, depending on the YouTuber, they can pay off these cameras via advertising, sponsorship, and affiliate links pretty quickly. At one point Gerald's "studio" was a room in his old apartment that he continued to rent for that purpose even after moving out. He films using an A1 and A7sIII, which is over $10,000 in cameras. So he's probably doing really well. 

$10,000 isn't much.  Lots of YouTubers will also have a dedicated cinema camera setup for their permanent 'newsreader' setups, like an FS7, FX6, or even FX9, in addition to their multiple R5 or A7S3 bodies that sit on a shelf and can be seen randomly in the background.  

One data point that stands out to me is Monica Church, who is a lifestyle influencer and also more recently a licensed real estate agent, and in this video actually spells out her income from each:

TLDR:

• She has ~1.5M YT subs, with mostly 50-150k views per video, about 35 videos in the last year
• She's also active on other platforms too, and likely has lots of followers there too, so revenue is likely to be from cross-platform posts and eyeballs
• She says she's signed brand deals up to $120K (although who knows how many videos/posts that would involve)
• She says that prior to starting in real estate (which seems to be a huge amount of work) she was making $500k/a as an influencer, but then that went down to $300k/a and the real estate made $200k that year (IIRC that was her first year doing it)
• I know she's used a modern BMPCC camera (not sure if it was 4K/6K) but she's not a tech YouTuber so doesn't talk about the gear

I suspect she's probably got a more monetisable audience than McKinnon etc, as she talks about all kinds of things that young twenty-something women are spending money on (rather than just cameras) but also this audience has greater lifetime value as if you can grab someone as your customer in early adulthood then you might have them as a daily/weekly customer for life, whereas that's not what happens with camera equipment which is only likely to be a few thousand a year.  

Influencers are (mostly) like old money - they don't want you to know how much money they make because you won't react well to it and there's no up-side for them if you do find out.  This is obviously different if you're an influencer trying to look rich in order to influence people, but most have influence these days due to how relatable they are, not how rich and elitist they are.

42 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

Yeah those social media shoots where they're doing ALL THE ASPECT RATIOS at once (4:3 / 1:1 / 9:16 / 16:9 / etc) in the same shot are when I find myself unable to be tall enough to boom from out of frame, even with all my 6'3" / 1.9m worth of height, and I have to steal an apple box to boom from. 

Nope. Quite the opposite in fact. Microphones such as the Sennheiser MKH816 ceased to be very popular decades ago. 

(still, that's one of the reasons the Sanken CS3e and CS1e are two of my favorite microphones)

Nah, the response instead has been to just make everything sound like a reality tv show instead. 

You get a lav! You get a lav! You get a lav! Everyone gets a lav! 

How strange..  

I remember shooting on the top of a hill right next to a large city and the boom op using a very directional mic to aim at the talent (only having to capture one person talking per setup) and essentially 'thread the needle' because on either side of many of the setups were noises like lawn-mowers, motor boats, etc.  The audio was by far the biggest challenge for the shoot and was what caused the most time during filming.  We even had to alternate between aiming up vs aiming down due to the odd helicopter that was flying by.  The width of the pickup pattern saved the audio on that shoot, giving us only a few shots that we had to ADR.

6 hours ago, hyalinejim said:

Mine has it and I know because I went looking for it, but I have yet to see it in any of my clips that I shot in "real life", if it makes you feel any better!

How much do you shoot with really high DR conditions?

I seem to be shooting quite a lot in conditions that exceed the DR of the GH5 so would imagine that those would run the risk of streaking.

4 hours ago, Phil A said:

I still have my GH5 because I couldn't pull the trigger on selling it. It's a camera I always had 100% confidence in, imho top notch user experience too, and I wish the S5 would have been just basically a carbon copy of its features and body with a bigger sensor (biggest deal breaker for me was the step back with the EVF; S1 obviously with a great EVF but just too big & heavy).

I also believe that the GH6 is a great camera with a huge feature set. But I've seen reviews where they said that the sensor is actually a downgrade to the GH5 when it comes to quality for still images, which is a big downside for a hybrid. There's the mentioned BMPCC4k, but that's a 4 year old camera with no signs of them updating it (looks like they moved on to APS-C, which would be more interesting to me if it retained a mirrorless mount).

Generally I look at these things sometimes a bit in a different perspective because I'm not working in a creative / art endeavor but in an industrial field where there is less emotion involved. It's good to have variety of choice and many different niche options, but Panasonic is heavily cutting prices and the people who do buy their cameras prefer to shoot with 3rd party lenses (because half of the M43 lenses nowadays are the same size as APS-C/FF) on 3rd party adapters while using 3rd party batteries. There was always that talk about Canon selling lenses over cameras when it was EF mount, seems for Panasonic it is pretty much the reverse. There is no real "manufacturer ecosystem" that people are locked in because they often buy nothing from the camera manufacturer besides the body. People like to talk about what corporations ought to do for their loyal customers, the good of mankind/art, etc. but in the end, when you look behind all the mission/vision talk, most big companies operate to make higher profit to increase shareholder value.

I have kept my GH5 despite other offerings being a pretty amazing in many ways, for several reasons:

• I was looking for a backup camera / tiny camera and ended up buying a GX85 which further locked me into the MFT ecosystem, and I really don't want to have to re-buy all my lenses
• The GH6 has that horizontal streaking issue that Panasonic don't appear to be motivated to fix, and I don't feel motivated to risk having to fix in post (although I think with much careful fiddling it could be done)
• The GH5 can look great and although it's not the best colour science in the world, my ability to colour grade is definitely the weak link in my setup
• I started studying award winning productions in the same genre that I shoot (and I mean studying seriously, breaking down 45 minute episodes sometimes frame-by-frame, dissecting audio and sound design, etc) and the more I looked at Emmy Award-Winning stuff the more I realised that the images looked OK, but it was everything else around that (editing, sound design, narration, music, etc) that made it great 
• It's reliable, I enjoy using it, and keeping it is free....  which is good because despite me buying it in 2018, the pandemic has meant that I didn't get to use it on nearly as many trips as I had planned to do before being tempted to upgrade

Some months ago I bought a BM Resolve Micro colour grading panel with the goal to teach myself to grade the way that the pros mostly learned (using the basic tools but using a control surface) and kind of justified the purchase to myself by saying I would buy it to learn instead of buying a new camera.  I had planned on just putting in an hour or so grading practice per day, but I got distracted with other things (life!) - however I found that I got noticeably better for every two hours or so I put into grading.  I have a huge backlog of footage from past trips that a skills upgrade will improve but not new camera can influence, so I'm more motivated to upgrade myself rather than the camera.