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I never thought about that, but yes, that makes sense. When I was doing stills I would shoot exclusively RAW images as the JPG versions always clipped the highlights (which is madness, but there we are), so if the file sizes of those doubled/tripled/quadrupled then that would potentially be a big deal and most people wouldn't really want 48MP over 12MP / 16MP / 24MP. I mean, 12MP sounds pretty low res, but it's the same detail as 4K RAW video, which is plenty good enough for most purposes. Of course, the storage requirements of shooting RAW stills is laughable compared to that of video, but for stills-only shooters it might be a thing.

These little things really make me wonder what Canon are doing. I mean, if one Canon development team-lead spent one day at CES writing down all the things that people suggested then things like this would be added to every camera without any real challenges at all - if they already have a function that puts frame guides on the screen and a menu to choose between different ones, then adding more should be only a day or two worth of work for an engineer. This seems relatively plausible. A WFM requires that the image (or a low-res version of it) be processed and a graph generated from that analysis. My guess is that they might not have a spare chip available to generate the WFM, or (if they can do it in preview mode but not during recording) it might be being generated by a chip that is only busy during recording (eg, for NR or compression etc). False-colour, on the other hand, could simply just be a display LUT, which requires no additional processing requirements as the functionality to apply a display LUT and a recording LUT are already present.

Another way to look at it is that for the same sensor read-out (data rate), you can have: 8K with 26.8ms of RS (that's what the A74 gives in full-sensor readout mode) 4K with 6.7ms of RS (roughly on par with the Alexa 35) I know which of those I'd prefer. Unfortunately, video is so complex that much of the camera-buying public (from parents to professional videographers) simply doesn't know any better and are therefore subject to the "more is better" marketing tactics. In cameras, and also in life, I've come to realise that every statement that is worthwhile begins with "well, it's actually more complicated than that, ...." but I've also come to realise that most people tune out when they hear those exact words. There is one thing that I am quite puzzled about, which is why they don't use the extra pixels to increase the DR of the camera. Especially considering that DR is one of the hyped marketing specs that gets used a lot. For example, if they took an 8K sensor, installed an OLPF that gave ~4K of resolution, and made it so that each colour (RGB) was made of a 2x2 grid of photosites of that colour, they could either: Average the values of each group of 4 photosites to lower the noise-floor by a couple of stops, or They could make each of the photosites in the 2x2 grid have a different level of ND dye, in addition to the RGB dye, potentially giving that hue (RGB) at up to 4 different luminance levels If they did the latter, spacing the ND dyes perhaps 3 stops apart (which is lots of overlap considering each photo site will have at least 10-stops of DR on its own), then the photo site with the most ND would have 9 stops of extra highlights before clipping, potentially giving 20 stops of DR when combined with its neighbours in that 2x2 grid. This wouldn't need to include two separate ADR circuits the way that ALEV/DGO/GH6 sensors work, it would only need a very simple binary processor to merge the 8K readout into a 4K signal with huge DR. I mean, wouldn't Sony marketing department love to have a camera with 4K and 20 stops of DR? That's more than ARRI and would make headlines everywhere. Plus, it can be done with existing tech and just a single extra chip in the camera. Of course, they'd charge $10K for it, but still.

Those look awesome! (The middle one is geoblocked, but the others are fun). However, at this kind of viewing angle, I think that even an uncompressed RAW 720p image would look detailed and high-quality. Most movie theatres are high-quality 2K, and they look far superior to 4K YT due to the bitrate differences, despite the cinemas being much larger viewing angles than most YT setups. I think the true feature of those billboards is the HDR, not the resolution. Maybe they are very high resolution images, and maybe that is visible in person with a telescope / binoculars, but I just doubt it's visible to the naked eye at that distance.

Looking really good! I'm no expert, but it looked pretty close to a 16mm film look to me. Potentially an earlier 16mm film perhaps? My understanding is that 8mm film was pretty noisy at first but advances in the stock mean that modern 8mm is better than 16mm used to be, and that modern 16mm is now better than 35mm used to be, etc. In my brief explorations, a bit of blur and some grain and a bit of a push to the colours (or a subject with limited hues) really does wonders to knock the digititis out of an image.

@PannySVHS @John Matthews @canonlyme I've been meaning to do a codec test on my GX85, so might use this thread to motivate me to do it. Any suggestions for how / what to shoot? I'm thinking a prime lens stopped down so it's nice and sharp, potentially with a moving subject (assuming I can find a time when there's a bit of wind to make the trees nearby move a bit).

Just catching up on this thread, and the only thing I can think to say is Damn! Those images from @OleB are just wonderful. Great subject / lighting / lens of course, but the sensor in this thing truly does not disappoint!

You've got it backwards.... rumoured cameras are absolutely killer, it's the ones that get announced and released that are disappointing in almost every aspect! Just read any "what camera should I buy" thread - there's always "wait for the X to be released" recommendations 🙂

This is how I feel about Sony as well. I suspect if I was much better at colour grading, or had a professional colourist to do it for me then that might change things. Fuji, on the other hand, really delivers in the X-Factor department, despite being technically not as good in a number of ways.

What kind of hi-res ads are around? I haven't seen anything like this. and what kind of high-resolution are we talking? you can blow things up pretty seriously before the pixels become visible..

I firmly believe that almost everything can be quantified, but this one falls very far beyond the point of what is practical. The GH5 tests I saw with the person stepping into and out of frame had the AF recognise a face and change focus across a range of reaction times - sometimes it was fast and other times reluctant, and occasionally the person would just stand there being ignored like a camera nerd at a high-school dance. There aren't any easy way to quantify this. GH5 testers couldn't even get the test to replicate, providing a number of hilarious examples were the person was walking around saying how bad it was and it tracking them just fine, and other testers saying it was really good and it doing quite badly. One YouTuber who got the C70 when it first came out admitted in a follow-up review that he had to stop using the C70 until it had a firmware update or two because when it first arrived it had trouble recognising faces of darker-skinned people. IIRC he had to hire something to use on commercial shoots because the C70 wasn't ready yet. Canon can't even test their AF properly and it's one of their key brand differentiators! If you were to quantify AF performance, not only would you have to have a dozen or so metrics (speed to recognise a face, how out-of-focus the face can be before it recognises a face, maximum tracking speed, how much of the face has to be visible, how far around the side of the face it detects, how bad the lighting has to be for it to recognise a face, etc) but you'd really struggle to quantify the GH5-style lack of reliability except to have an enormous sample size. Peter McKinnon made a promo video for his new product, and at the 6:12 mark, the camera goes from focusing on the object: to focusing on his face: the two frames above are 2 frames apart. Why did the mighty Canon PDAF randomly choose that moment to change focus to his face from the largest object in the centre of the frame? Heck knows, but there were even previous frames where more of his face was showing and it didn't choose those times to change focus.... Here's the video linked to that time - judge it for yourself... That's an AF problem right there. People tend to think that Canon PDAF or Sony eye-detect PDAF are perfect but in reality they stuff up from time to time, and they tend to think that GH5 is completely useless when it actually gets things right quite a large percentage of the time. I've seen shots in vlogs where Canon PDAF cameras just randomly focus on the background when the persons face was visible the whole time. They're rare, but I've seen at least two that made it to the final edit - we can only guess how many others ended up being cut. Any methodology that quantifies AF performance would be useless if it ignored the lack-of-reliability problem (because it would declare the GH5 AF to be great when it's obviously not) and it would be wrong if it gave Canon and Sony a perfect score when they obviously aren't quite there, despite being impressively close. Sure, you can quantify some aspects of AF performance, but to be even remotely useful, you'd have to test so many variables and some of them would require such incredibly large sample sizes that it just wouldn't be practical.

Personally, I'd really appreciate the extra digital zoom capabilities, but for shooting 1080p (as I do) the 6K sensors are just as good and most cameras don't give you the digital zoom options that I'd really like, so the resolution of the sensor is secondary in that sense. Also, if the battery life is crap and it overheats, then it's giving me zero footage rather than even sub-optimal footage, a pretty fundamental issue. The other issue is that if you're using the sensor to get a 4x digital crop (1080p --> 8K) then your lenses will be by far the limit to the quality rather than the sensor. You might find that a 6K sensor upscaled to 8K has the same level of fine detail as an 8K sensor without scaling. Assuming you have a fast enough machine. Many people would argue that any decent machine can edit 4K, but with many cameras shifting to IPB, 10-bit, h265, decoding that footage in real-time is no small feat at all. If I end up with a GH6, which lacks the 2x zoom function from the GH5, then I'd probably just program a mode to be 4K 1:1 and swap to that and then crop in post. Hardly ideal, but would give me a bit more reach and still be downsampled to 1080p.

8K (and more!) seems to be coming, if we want it or not. How important is it to you and what would you use it for?

Unusable is (normally) a word that is relatively useless because: It says that the AF performance falls below some specific threshold of performance that is not quantified and isn't disclosed, so there's no way to know if it will be good enough for your needs. I have determined that Canon and Sony AF is unusable for my needs (seriously - I'm not being dramatic) and I use MF because of that. The word is normally used by people that mostly shoot their mouths off online, but rarely shoot anything other than camera tests (if they shoot at all!) 🙂 If only! The primary purpose for 8K cameras is to sell 8K TVs, so there's no way they're going to let overheating of 8K MILC cameras get in the way of selling 200 million TVs each year! It there any chance they'll release one for this camera? The giveaway might be the little port that it plugs into... Considering that 8K is 16x the data of 1080p, and 6K is only about 8x the data of 1080p, there's quite a substantial difference.

My bad! I didn't see the thread when you posted it. Nothing to see here, please move along....

Was it Fuji that had a screw-on fan that attached to the back of the camera and took power from the camera? or am I remembering another brand?

I think this is an aspect that gets overlooked by people that aren't out filming on their feet all day. My own equivalent is that I have to be able to hold my camera in-hand for a whole day, only resting during breaks for food and bathrooms etc. If it's not in my hand then it's not ready to film and so I miss shots and we all know that even barely usable footage is still better than the shot you didn't get. This is one of the reasons I sold my Sigma 18-35, it was just too heavy.

The press release doesn't say a whole lot: https://company-announcements.afr.com/asx/ams/0f93042b-44f6-11ed-810a-2616002949eb.pdf Atomos states that: "it has completed development of a world class 8K video sensor to allow video cameras to record in 8K ultra high resolution" they "acquired the intellectual property rights and technical team from broadcast equipment firm, Grass Valley five years ago to develop a leading-edge 8K video sensor" and, they are "actively exploring opportunities for commercialisation and is in discussion with several camera makers who are showing great interest" Does anyone know anything about this? @androidlad perhaps? Could this mean that cameras without the Sony sensor look might be forthcoming? Could Atomos be moving into the camera industry? Their external recorders are what, 70% of a camera already - just lacking a sensor and some mics and chips to connect everything up?

Remember kids... when venturing into new camera territory always wear your protective equipment - you never know what dangers lurk in the dark... Has anyone seen a glimpse of the dreaded hammer?

I'd take a 20-bit in-camera audio over a 16-bit one any day... plus the preamps are still likely to be better than most MILCs! But "on a production" really is the differentiating factor, considering that my production is me out in the jungle (urban or otherwise) waving about 1.5kg of camera equipment around and generally hoping not to stick out too much 🙂

If we put a Nagra and a GH5 into a particle accelerator and smash them together do you think that would work? I mean, surely 1992 tech could fit inside the 2017 GH5??? 🙂

I'm still using my GX85 as my pocket cam for small outings and it will be my backup camera for bigger trips with my GH5. While not being the best image quality outright, it's a pocketable fully-manual camera (with focus and exposure assist tools!) MILC with 4K 100Mbps codec, IBIS, and a tilt-screen plus an EVF, it's still one hell of a package.

But what it did make me think of was that maybe someone else should put a much nicer sensor on a board and then see about getting a RAW signal off that. Can you buy sensors from Fairchild individually?

I did contemplate the Raspberry Pi camera when the RAW hack came out, but I realised that it doesn't matter if it gets a RAW hack or not, the hack won't improve its limited DR, ISO performance, and the fact that you'd have to go DIY on the colour science. If I learned anything from the Alexa 35 release, it was that ARRI have an entire department just dedicated to tuning the sensor, and another entire department dedicated to processing the data that comes off that sensor, and both of those happen before the ARRI-RAW data is written to the card. Who is doing that on the Raspberry Pi camera? Some engineer who probably doesn't know anything about imaging except for implementing the standard circuit that the sensor manufacturer put in the spec sheet.

I think that's a direction that many dominant businesses are going - IIRC it's often called a "walled garden" or "closed ecosystem". Essentially, by making people buy everything from you, you can make your products shittier and people will still stay because you've made it harder to leave. If Sony makes their cameras work with other lens manufacturers then you can take your lenses with you to your new system, but if you own Sony everything then there's more things to re-buy, and therefore, a higher cost to switch brands.