kye

Check the other threads.... they're still alive and well.

Yeah, the ergonomics (and grip especially) on the XC10 was second to none.

Greater resolution comes at the expense of every other spec.

Announcements like this are just wonderful... All it took was a pair of press-releases and all of a sudden dozens of people with no training or experience instantly turn into patent attorneys and corporate lawyers specialising in mergers and acquisitions and market strategists etc, and not only that, they also instantly gained insider knowledge about market caps, sales figures, product strategies, etc, and just when you'd think that it couldn't get any better they also become R&D experts in both hardware and software design! With a shift so radical in capability, even the hardened skeptic must believe there is a higher power involved.

Not always, but sadly it's hard to do. The challenge is that for synergies to emerge the management from the more powerful company needs to have the humility to recognise that they don't know all the answers and that there are better ways of doing things. Unfortunately, "not invented here" is a very common mindset and different is eradicated rather than celebrated.

It's definitely cute, but I think it's probably not good. I couldn't find any reviews or sample images, so I suspect it might even be a low-res sensor that just upscales to 44M in software. It's probably the same sensor and firmware as those first generation 40+MP smartphones. If retro is in, then a bit of blur is part of the style, not a failure of lens design or MTF curves!

I've stopped trying to understand the younger generations in terms of tastes etc.. The other day we went out to a nearby community event and my daughter (20) came, and was rocking one of these: I couldn't find anything online about it other than online stores and Reddit comments telling people "you're in the wrong place - you have a digital camera".

Thinking about this more after posting, and after going down a small and enjoyable rabbit hole of watching video of rock bands play live, I think the majority of the effort is getting good angles and then putting in the work in the edit. I think the camera work during recording is good when you've got lots of good roaming cameras, but you don't need them. If you were doing stills and just setup a bunch of static cameras and hit record, then took stills during the concert, then took all the static footage and edited it together, applying creative filters, cutting as much as the style of music permitted (cutting frenetically for a smooth jazz performance wouldn't work, for example..), and cropping with motion in post (push-in zooms, push-out, pans, and even cropping in on someone and following them like it was shot that way live), could all be combined into a decent end result, despite there being no active cameras during the concert. But, adding my usual disclaimer, time is money and that stuff all takes time, so if the budget doesn't permit it then that might be out of reach financially even if it's possible artistically and logistically. I keep thinking that it might be fun to edit music videos, but then I remember that would involve clients and deadlines, and then it doesn't sound like fun anymore!

Man, that would be something! This Nikon/RED thing came from left-field, but a Canon/Arriflex announcement would leave me not knowing what to think! In terms of what this means for the mirrorless market, I think it's potentially a good thing - I'll be waiting to see what Nikon does with this in the next few years. It's well respected in post-production for being a good codec to edit and colour grade (efficient with computer resources etc). The people who know how to colour grade don't really care much about the image from the high-end cameras because they're all flexible enough in post to get what you want from them, but the codec performance is a real thing.

Nice work! The shooting style was sort of loose and a bit who-gives-a-f*ck which actually suited the song and the way they were singing it. Coverage is always an issue, which is why I value speed of shooting for my home videos, because it means I end up with more to work with in the edit. If you're filming rock-n-roll and the dirtier style of music then you could lean in to the grittier style and have angles that are gritty too. For example, an older camera with a super-wide looking up at the singer, or even a few action cameras plopped around the place would give you lots of options and lots of backups to cut to. The quality will probably be bad, but you can make them B&W, blur a little, add tonnes of grain, and now they're super-8 angles and things are fresh. Just find something to mount them to, strap a USB power bank onto each one to give them infinite battery life, put in a large but cheap SD card (which is fine because of the low data rates), and then just set and forget. Cameras from companies like the SJ-Cam are easily affordable and these days shoot 4K etc. I'm reminded of Painkiller from Judas Priest: It is quite obviously dirty and distorted on purpose, even having slow-shutter, radically stretched / warped shots (as short cut-aways), etc. Even the heavy contrast and radically clipped highlights/shadows lean into the aesthetic. This is a much heavier song, but there are things that could be learned. If you want to up your game then it might be worthwhile sitting down and analysing a few great videos like this one, even just watching them at 25% speed on YT reveals a bunch of useful stuff, like lots of inserts where it doesn't matter if the music is sync'd or not (like the singer staring at the camera) which are useful because you can use them anywhere in the edit as long as the movement lines up on the beat, etc. You can also lean into the effects, like rotating hues, strong filters like Instagram etc. Also, a 360 camera mounted high and off to the side could also be great - not only would it give a high-angle of the band but can also give great angles of the crowd and show that the band is super-popular (assuming it's a real gig). I understand all this is subject to the time and budget constraints you have, and margins can be super-tight for this stuff, but just some ideas..

We all know the camera and imaging industry is being disrupted heavily, first with the move to digital that sunk Kodak, then with smartphones slowly eating the whole industry from the bottom up, and now right at the start of generative AI. In situations like this market consolidation is an enormous game of 9-dimensional chess, so this move will be the result of more analysis than a person could read in a week, even if we had post-graduate qualifications in corporate law, economics, and accounting. It's not like Nikon was sitting on a huge pile of cash to begin with - in this phase of a market disruption where the manufacturers are literally fighting to stay alive if this wasn't a great match for the two companies across many/most factors then it will be a mistake that might cost them everything.

I'm reminded of the pattern in automobile manufacturers where the fancy sportscar brand that isn't profitable is purchased by the mass-market manufacturer that is profitable, and then in exchange for the sports brand being propped up the high-powered engineers get sent on excursions to the parent company to talk about how to tune the suspension and tweak the engine for a new hot-hatch variant. But, in this case, I'm really not sure who is profitable and who isn't... Simultaneously I'm optimistic about the RED tech trickling down to Nikon, but also pessimistic about that because now Nikon has a cine line their first job will be to protect it with a cripple hammer.

WOW indeed! Let the speculation commence!! Payday for Jarred.....

Gerald just dropped a video talking about how he has discovered that camera overheating tests are almost completely unreliable. TLDR; he tested the same camera in the same environment with the same settings, and got results ranging between 55 minutes and 8.5 hours. Here's the video, which talks about it in much much greater detail: I think this pretty much means that camera overheating is an un-testable risk for any camera without a fan. This is because: The tester probably didn't tell you what ambient temp they tested at The tester definitely didn't tell you what airflow and ventilation was present The tester probably didn't test all the modes you will use The manufacturer might update firmware after the testing and completely invalidate the data The test won't have been in the situation you're recording in and, lastly, in case you're still with me... The test is probably a random number generator anyway I think that overheating is now officially the camera boogyman. Sceptical of overheating in general? I've personally missed moments when my iPhone overheated........and that's a camera that no-one has identified as having a thermal management problem.

Possibly, but you know Sony - only the latest releases are updated and the rest are dead to them!

Yeah, I think I'm just a bit frustrated overall TBH. I'm also fighting with Resolve over half-a-dozen small issues, to the point where I'm genuinely considering writing my own colour grading plugin where I can get what I want. I'm also rapidly becoming frustrated with the colourist forums too, as recently I randomly heard a snippet in a podcast that was a simple and beautiful answer to a question I asked several years ago and got zero helpful replies to, but that everyone involved in colour for the last 30 years would have done hundreds of times on the average project, so now I'm wondering what the quality of the rest of the info on there is. I also watched something a number of months ago that was right at the cutting edge of colour science tools which was what I was thinking about but no-one is talking about. I know it's a sign that I'm progressing beyond a certain level of knowledge/skill, but I just find it frustrating to be seemingly going against the current in yet another area of this stuff. What does this all have to do with MFT cameras? (apart from being frustration in general..). Well, the better I can capture things in camera the less work I have to do in post.

Yeah, but remember, our situations have almost nothing in common. You're shooting dreamy images for someone else to pay you money and doing so in a situation where you're expected to be taking up space and using as impressive a camera setup as possible. I am shooting environmental images for myself in situations where I'm discouraged from taking up space and where having the smallest possible setup is to my advantage. As far as my understanding goes, if I was doing what you do then I'd also have the same thoughts as you. I imagine that if you were doing what I do then you'd also understand why I have the priorities that I do. It's easy to look in at a situation from a distance and see enough of it to have a good overview, but to be far enough from the details that the subtleties aren't apparent. The FF user telling the MFT user who wants small cameras that FF is just as good as MFT is like the cinematographer telling the wedding shooter that an FX9 is just as good for shooting wedding videos as a mirrorless, and completely missing that the price, size, weight, workflow, and a dozen small details make the proposition impractical at best. The comparison probably isn't bulletproof and you could probably find weaknesses in it, but I've had enough issues in the field with the size of my XC10 and GH5 that I can pretty confidently say that the considerations involved are real, even if they aren't obvious to outsiders. I mean, the other recent thread from @John Matthews was about cameras substantially smaller than the GX85!

Not really. All I want is a GX85 with a modern sensor, so Dual ISO and higher DR. I don't need / want LOG, 10-bit, 422, ALL-I, RAW, PDAF, a flippy screen, dual card slots, 6K or more, mic-in, etc, etc, although if they came with no penalties then I wouldn't hate having them. In the real world though, they do come with penalties - huge ones (see rant at the end of this post). Absolutely. Yeah, this thread was more of a temperature check, just to make sure there wasn't something I'd forgotten, and to have another thorough think-through of it. I'm not sure I'd swap to another system right now even if it was free. The GX85 with 12-35mm still feels on the large side, so casually stretching to something 50% larger isn't a casual proposition at all. That's my feeling too. Panasonic has said there won't be more compact cameras, but has also said over and over that they're fully behind MFT, and having spent a long time developing the dual-gain PDAF sensor in the GH6 it would be pretty easy for them to capitalise on that investment by doing refreshes of the rest of the lineup. Hell, even if things trickled down and they released a GX camera with the sensor and processors from the GH5, that would be a good outcome for me. I'm actually deeply suspicious about the current size comparison between MFT, S35, and FF cameras, and how they're all a similar size and weight. The FF bodies with IBIS do tend to be heavier, but are the same size, and something smells fishy to me. If a sensor is smaller then it takes less power to run it, and it takes FAR less power to move it around for IBIS. The sensor is also a lot lighter, and the IBIS motors will be dramatically lighter. This means that if all else was equal the batteries should be smaller or last longer, and the internals should be smaller and lighter. I understand that the screen is independent of sensor size, as are lots of other things in the camera, but when combined with a smaller sensor with a lower resolution the processors should be smaller. The camera module from the iPhone is practically microscopic. BUT, that's not what we're seeing. I suspect it's a combination of lowered IBIS performance (the motors not being able to move as fast or as far, but no technician out there will get their shit together and actually make a test setup for this), combined with the manufacturers just not trying, which I think is quite sad. What this means in practice though is that it should be easily possible for a GX sized camera with modern components and design to offer a serious challenge to the specs of the larger S35 and FF cameras. Now I've moved to zooms, I seem to be swimming against the prevailing winds of the camera market once again. I want MFT zooms to be F2.8 or slower, a standard 3x (~24-70mm) or 10x zoom ratio, and as small as possible. I'd be happy if the attempts to make them smaller meant that they were 12MP or less in resolution. Instead, the market has put making the fastest and sharpest lenses known to man as the first priority, relegating size to third priority (there is no second priority), and because everyone is shooting wide open they've managed to get the whole industry to basically stop discussing anything else except 150fps animal-eye-detect focus performance. When I think about a FF camera with an F2.8 lens I think of it having too shallow DoF for my compositions, and by the time I stop it down I now need the second base ISO just to give it a normal exposure after the sun has gone down. It's been a long journey for me, but now MFT seems to be the sweet spot of DoF and exposure to create the right aesthetic in a sensible amount of light, which makes the AF performance far less critical, and when combined with a 4K sensor the data rates aren't stratospheric, the lenses can be budget friendly, you can do it on affordable SD cards internally, making the whole camera package smaller. ....not to mention you don't need a supercomputer to edit the footage. The "better" cameras on the market seem to have "improved" every aspect, but the challenge is that when you "improve" one aspect you make all the others far worse, in a never-ending game of "one step forward, six steps back, and how will you be paying for this today sir?".

Ha! What a great word! 🙂

CineD says so. I've kept a spreadsheet of all their DR tests and random mentions, and the following image appeared in one of their early reviews before they got serious about publishing the lab tests - it includes both the P2K and GH5S: They haven't tested the external RAW update, so if you want to assimilate your GH5S into the collective then that might give a bump? DR is a tricky beast though, depending heavily on how you test it and the NR applied, etc, so I'd suggest the above is a rough statement rather than a definitive result without any caveats, because we don't know exactly what they did and why in the test.

It does seem to be a case of the missing Panasonic GX-series camera with modern sensor. Revisiting the lineup, each with their smallest equivalent of a 24-70mm and a 24-240mm, here's the GX85, the A6700, the FX3, and the FP: The A6700 seems to have good options in the 18-55 and 18-135mm variable aperture lenses, which aren't too big. The FX3 would be the choice for Sony FF due to its high-ISO performance, and the tiny 28-60 really is tiny. The 24-240 is a lot bigger than the 14-140 on the GX85, but it's pretty small for FF. Lastly, the FP seems to only have OIS options for 24-105 and 28-200, but they're not in the camerasize database, so pictured above is the 24-70/2.8 which is a tank. Canon and Nikon are notably absent. By the time the FX3 and FP are in the mix, we've deviated so far from the GX85 that we may as well be having an open house. I guess the summary is that there isn't anything in MFT, but if I wanted to completely re-buy everything in my entire camera bag, there are options that are larger, incredibly more expensive, and better, but no-where near better enough to make me consider any of them for a single second. The more I think about it, the better the AI options in post seem.

I suspect it's a symptom of how the camera processes the image rather than a limitation of 8-bit images. I know this because the images you posted to the forum will be 8-bit images, so if it was a limitation with all 8-bit images then it would be visible on all images posted. I can see it, when zoomed radically and saturated and being pointed out, but suspect that it wouldn't be visible under normal circumstances. If that was the price to avoid overheating and storage anxiety while recording then it would have to be a pretty specific set of circumstances for that to win out over the increased creativity.

Well, that rules them out, which is unfortunate. Yeah, it has to be MFT. Not only to share my existing lenses with the GX85, but also because the FF lenses are gargantuan in comparison and pretty sparse really. Not only would it be too large (and "Smallest" is literally the first word in the title of this thread) but compatibility is another whole thing that just isn't a factor when sticking to a single lens system. Yeah, it's just the frustrations of when I hit its limitations, which when I'm travelling is a multiple-times-per-day sort of thing, and is often in a that-would-have-been-the-killer-shot-from-this-location-but-the-camera-couldn't-do-it sort of way. I'm fully aware that I want a camera that can do a wide range of things very very well, but you can't fault someone for trying to improve things. The thing I find fascinating is that even if I had a million-dollar budget for a setup, I still couldn't get what I want.

10-bit is always better than 8-bit, and 4:2:2 is always better than 4:2:0, but the question is if that difference is actually visible / meaningful. If you're doing very little grading in post then 8-bit vs 10-bit and 4:2:0 vs 4:2:2 probably doesn't have any visible or meaningful difference. But I suggest doing a test. Just find a bunch of scenes around the house (or not out of the way) and shoot the same composition in each mode and then just load them up side-by-side and look at them. If the 8-bit 4:2:0 shot doesn't make your stomach turn then just go with it. In the end, if you can lessen the impact or eliminate overheating, that you can lessen or eliminate the impact of running out of SD card space, then that means you can relax more while recording, you could shoot more, you can have extra time and energy and headspace that was previously devoted to worrying about or managing these things. If you can have more headspace and be more relaxed while shooting then the way you use the camera, and the way that you behave while recording will be better. If you behave better then what is in front of the camera might also be better. So, realistically, the option is potentially of having a very slightly worse recording of potentially much better material.

It's in that camp with the GH5 as being on the large side.. Realistically, I like the GX85 but just want some upgrades in DR and low-light, and in the absence of that existing I've worked out that I could have two setups, one for running around and one for slower situations where I don't have exactly the same requirements. So the GH5S is better than the GX85, but is larger and has worse DR than the P2K, so it's sort of wins and losses in comparison. Considering I already own a GH5 and a P2K, it's a tough sell to buy a whole new camera for essentially no net benefit. I know very little about Olympus lineup and was secretly hoping that someone would go "there's always the Olympus XYZ - it's perfect!".... what models might suit?