eatstoomuchjam

I, for one, would like to welcome Zhiyun's marketing team and/or their spam bot to this forum. As to that specific light, if it doesn't come in an ugly leather case and have Cam Mackey's signature all over the light and all of its accessories, is it even worth considering?

Wouldn't any new camera sales be heavily skewed to new releases?

I have the same vague impression, but I'm not sure. I never really went looking for it. But as you said, if there's some polarization, it stays consistent as the ND is dialed up or down. Definitely, it's one of the dangers of vND. Also with wide angle lenses during the day, the sky can end up looking funky and not just different.

Map Camera are pretty transparent with what's selling well - though what's selling in Japan might not be as big in other markets. https://news.mapcamera.com/maptimes/2025年11月-新品・中古デジタルカメラ人気ランキング/ Their top 10 lists for new and used cameras are quite a bit more varied than lensrentals' list. Even the much-maligned X-Half makes it to the top 10 list for used!

e-ND filters (at least the ones I've seen) are LCD panels with what is effectively a single very large pixel, so yes, it won't have some of the drawbacks of a vND, especially including no X when dialed up. I've never noticed any polarization with mine which is the inline filter for the EF mount on Z Cam. They are also effectively infinitely variable (if someone wants to nitpick that, feel free) so they also make it less important to have a clickless aperture, if you're one of the people who needs stepless exposure pulls on a regular basis. As for color accuracy, that'd depend on the quality of the LCD panel used, I imagine - but at the very least, I would expect it to stay consistent throughout its range. I'd also be curious in the future if someone will come out with an electronic ND that allows for gradations or split filtering, etc. Landscape photographers would be all over it.

The BF is beautiful. If I found one used at half price, I would probably take it. B&H has one used right now for about $1,700 which gets into a range where I daydream for a minute, but I'd be much more interested at $1,100-1,200. It's the same thing that makes the X-M5 tempting. The X-Half is... not for me, at all. Not at any price. I think that a lot of the FX2 irritation is that they released it so close to releasing the A7V. But I also suspect that it's only a small number of people who bought it who want the A7V now.

I'm glad that it sounds like they'll be open sourcing what they finished, at least.

It takes its core from CinePi, but the people working on it are attempting to make it accessible with a better GUI, buttons pre-configured, etc. If you visit the CinePi discord, the AltCine folks are pretty active there and seem to be working with the full blessing of the CinePi core developers.

It's also interesting to watch a number of the same people who claimed that others were monsters if they weren't in tears over Kirk's murder who are now falling all over themselves to defend the president's repulsive post about Reiner - or if not defending it, becoming deafeningly silent about it. It's almost like they're a bunch of hypocrites or something...

For a still image? Photons to photos has never measured one - their highest measured DR is between 13 and 14 stops on some Phase One. They have the A7V and the GFX 100 II about equal at ISO 80/100. If you want some landscape photos from my GFX 100 II, I can certainly share a few. For video, it's not exactly a mirrorless (but same sensor as in the mirrorless S1R II), but supposedly the Ronin 4D 8K in DR expansion mode has 16.3 total stops on the cined chart, but like most cameras, a lot less than that at a usable SNR.

There isn't a single camera in the entire GH line that wouldn't be usable today. If you want 4K, you'd need to go GH4 or newer. If you want reliable video autofocus, the only option is the GH7. For the best low-light performance, the GH5s is probably your best bet (though I'm not sure if the GH6 or GH7 have great low light performance). The older models struggled more in low light. With the GH1 and GH2, hacking them for more bitrate is suggested for best quality. The most popular models were the GH2 and GH5, but the GH7 seems also to be well-regarded.

There have been numerous stories over the years, apocryphal maybe, but they were coming out even when the media loved Muskrat... anyway, the stories were frequently about how employees of companies like SpaceX believed him to be an absolute idiot and upper management believed that their main role with him was to block him from getting in the way. One of the most famous stories was about some fuel tank that was fracturing in flight. The engineers had some ideas, but Muskrat came up with some idea to put a layer of fast-set glue/resin on the outside that would stay liquid - and when the cracks started to appear in the tank, the adhesive would leak out and set, automatically healing the crack. All of the best engineers in the company said that the idea could not possibly work and explained why it couldn't. Yet, Muskrat insisted on an all hands on deck and everybody worked non-stop with the vessel and the resin until... Muskrat finally acknowledged that the idea couldn't possibly work. It sort of fits with a man who has basically failed upward for most of his life - such as how he got fired as CEO of PayPal after nearly running the company into bankruptcy with his bad ideas, but still owning a bunch of stock so that when Thiel transformed it to a profitable company and sold it to eBay, Muskrat came out with billions. Would SpaceX exist without him? No. Would Starlink exist without SpaceX? Also no. Did he invent Starlink? Also no. Would Neuralink exist without him? No, and who cares? It's a good accessibility play for people who can't otherwise operate a computer, but for the rest of us, do you know anybody who is loudly complaining that they don't have some shitty device in their head that will ultimately be used to shovel ads directly into their brain? Do you spend every day glaring at your computer wishing that your brain could directly control it? For Tesla, he didn't invent it at all. Outside of having a strong first mover advantage in terms of modern electric cars, they aren't very good. Quality control has always been lacking. Muskrat decides that for full self driving, they don't need industry-standard tools like proximity sensors, but instead they'll rely only on cameras. He did, apparently, invent the truck that looks like a small child drew it and which is almost universally reviled. So yay. Otherwise, what has Muskrat invented? Hyperloop - the dumbest mass transit invention in the history of humanity? 12 years later, there isn't a single operating hyperloop that you can go ride. And it turns out that vactrain concepts had existed for years before he "invented" that too. So... has he had a single novel idea in his entire history? Or is his "genius" really just in ways to exploit existing wealth to extract more money, mostly from the government?

The canal is not in South America. It's in Central America which is considered to be part of the North American continent. There's basically no part of South America where a canal would make any sense. As far as oil, I wouldn't be surprised if we decided to take a real interest in Guyana, given the recent coastal oil discoveries there. Brazil's oil is already more or less in the hands of multinational companies. For minerals, I'm sort of surprised that we haven't taken a more active interest in Bolivia's lithium reserves, but I suppose that Chile and Argentina have both commercialized their adjacent ones enough to sate our appetites for the time being.

Well, with Venezuela. As of now, there's minimal/no saber rattling with any of the other 11 other countries.

The woman with bubbles at 1:00 or so or the sun behind the mountain at 1:50 or so are more challenging scenes than the baby and the rolloff in both looks really rough to me. The image at 0:49 also looks pretty bad to me, as do the highlights in the water at 0:40ish. It's great for a camera from 20 or so years ago, but in modern terms, I'd expect better from any mid-tier hybrid. Like with most things, in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, it can look great - but so can a Nikon ZR or a Canon R6 III. 😃