eatstoomuchjam

There's a lot of "well...." and "it depends" in there. - If you have a manual focus lens with FF gears on it, the R4D is infinitely better, in that it can do it at all (after you buy the focus gear for additional money and spend time calibrating the lens) - If the subject is within between 1.5m and 4m of the camera, the R4D might be better (it's really good here, but I haven't tested the S1R II which might also be very good there) - If there is haze in the air, the S1R II will probably be infinitely better. Haze reflects light which makes lidar throw up its hands and give up - If focusing closer than 1m or so, R4D can get weird because of parallax (the lidar unit sits above the lens - this becomes more relevant the closer you get) - If focusing more than 4-5m away with r4d, the lidar keeps doing alright until about 10m or so and then it just doesn't work at all and calls it infinity. This is fine with wider lenses, but awful with long lenses. That's probably also why the calibration doesn't understand that there are lenses longer than 100mm or so.

I own one. It's a fantastic second camera. There's no way I would want one as my primary camera. Pros: - Image quality is brilliant - Integrated gimbal and 4th axis (the whole reason for the camera to exist) - Very flexible to use in many scenarios with options like the Flex unit - Raw license is now $1 (too bad I didn't wait!) - The 8k is one of the best low-light cameras on the market - Probably matches really well with the S1R II - Lidar autofocus works really well (within its limitations) - Subject tracking mode is really fantastic - Integration with high bright remote monitor is amazing - Swappable lens mounts means you can use DJI's DL lenses, Sony E mount lenses (I had infinity calibration problems and sold the E mount unit), L mount, M mount, and thanks to third parties, EF mount and PL mount lenses Subject tracking, in particular, is great for stuff like vehicle mounting. The high bright + flex integrations also allow for some really cool creative stuff if the flex unit is mounted on a monopod, for example (think jib/crane shots, zooming into spaces, etc) Cons: - A really awkward camera to use for non-gimbal stuff - Weirdly inflexible (like if you choose ProRes, it'll be ProRes HQ, if you choose PRR, it will be PRR HQ except in hfr modes where it will be PRR standard) - To get the better recording codecs (ProRes 4444/PRR), you need to use DJI's special media ($800/TB + $300 reader) - Lidar autofocus doesn't work past around 10m - Flex unit is expensive - High bright remote monitor is also expensive (plus needs transmitter for more $) - A bit heavy (I use mine with Ready Rig most of the time so I don't think of the weight much) - 6k model has fairly poor RS, 8k model allows choosing really bad RS or less DR - Even though many lens mounts are available, lens selection is very limited by gimbal capacity, if you don't want to use the 4th axis, you can use more lenses if you add a counterweight, but the 4th axis is really one of the big selling points - TB50 batteries, though you can get third-party battery plate replacements for v-mount or TB51 (I just have 3 TB50's - when they crap out, I'll switch to the Alvin's v-mount plate which I ordered early on, but didn't end up using (yet)) There are probably more of both that aren't coming right to mind. Glad to answer any specific questions.

This is always the problem with any AI discussion. I abhor GenAI, but I do like the ML tools in various software that they refer to as "AI" (even though it's really just a better magnetic lasso or something like that).

I picked up the Nikkor after watching CP's review and doing some searching and seeing how many people described it as not only the worst lens Nikon ever made, but also possibly the worst zoom ever made. They might be right, but I'm sure I'll find the right time to use it someday. I'm not sure if this true of all of them, but mine also has the problem that when I put it on an EF adapter, the back of the aperture selector is so tight against the edge of the adapter that it can't even possibly be moved. I had to use a pliers to take it off to make sure I didn't do something wrong. Maybe there are other EF adapters that would work better, but for anything I'd use the Nikkor to shoot, I'm sure I'd want it wide open anyway. I'm looking forward to watching the video on the Makinon. I've not heard of that one before - and if it's still $30ish on eBay, I guess there's not a reason not to buy it.

I'm not sure of the current prices, but I have an old Elmar 35mm f/3.5 which is one of the most gorgeous pieces of glass I've ever seen or used. Also, I have an old Elmar 90mm f/4 collapsible which is pretty gorgeous. I'd take the 90/2 'cron over it any day, but I'd shed no tears if the 90/4 were the only portrait lens in my bag. Sorry neither one is even remotely adaptable to EF, though!

The reason that I've been avoiding (and maybe others have to) mentioning the GH7 has nothing to do with low light and everything to do with it being as large and heavy as a lot of FF bodies. If you're willing to go that big, you could also get an EOS R5 or a Z6 III.

Just pointing out that "weather sealing" is useful for more than just filming in the rain. It's also protection against dust (which is a very common problem in arid areas). It's protection against something in your bag breaking open and leaking on the camera. Or your tent leaks in the rain at night and you had your camera sitting out. Or you just drop it in a puddle/fountain/shallow water for a second. And yes, it is good to understand how weatherproof something really is, but simply having gaskets around a lot of the buttons and on the lens mount is a big deal. And sealing on a zoom lens can be even more important in a dusty area so that zooming the lens doesn't suck in a ton of dust.

The S9 isn't weather sealed, though, is it? It's not the only consideration, but I'd definitely consider that a "would be nice" for a multi-year bike tour which will probably include a lot of camping.

An OM-3 with a 14-140mm and a small M43 prime barely takes up any space. An action camera barely takes up any space. A phone is probably coming anyway. That's a primary camera and two backup cameras. For lights, if they're needed at all for the style of documentary being done, a small pop-up reflector weighs almost nothing and can do a lot. Combine that with one or two Aputure MC's and maybe an ultra-portable light stand and you've got a workable lighting setup. Don't want the reflector? Include a white t-shirt or hoodie in the package and use it as a bounce. It'll look ridiculous on set, but I've made it work with worse. The MC's are also nice because they have a magnet built-in so with some creativity, you can find a place to put them without necessarily needing a light stand (if it were me, I'd bring at least one small one, though. For mics, a DJI mic 2 kit and one of the tiny Deity or R0de on-camera shotguns? The Mic will pair with an Action 4 and can also record internally. Total weight of that entire kit? <2kg Not bad for a setup that can record fantastic-looking video (in the right hands) and capture acceptable audio! Need a tripod? If it were me, I'd skip a traditional tripod and go with something like a Cobra 3 monopod with the little "tripod" that folds out at the bottom and a foot pedal to unlock the top. With such a small and light camera, it'd be stable enough (I'd set a bag on the feet on a windy day) and with a fluid head or ball head on top, you can also fake a slider, a dolly, and to some extent, a steadicam. That's another 1kg or so. Don't want to offload media using the phone (this is doable with a modern iPhone and a USB-C hub these days) or want to edit on the go? Add an M4 Macbook Air which adds just about 1kg more. It'll be plenty for just about any editing OM3/action camera/phone video. The rest of the stuff mentioned that's needed (sleeping bags, etc) is all a sunk cost in terms of weight for a long biking trip.

I'd be apt to leave that to the micro 4/3 enthusiasts like @kye and @John Matthews. My guess, and please do take this with a huge grain of salt, as I haven't owned a real micro 4/3 camera in years, is that the camera body suggestion will look something like a GX85 or OM-3/OM-5 II for small/light/sealed, but I don't follow m43 enough to know off the top of my head which have 10 bit. If the Panasonic 14/2.5 or 20/1.7 are weather sealed, they could be alright. Otherwise, the humble Panasonic 14-42mm kit lens is not bad. The Olympus equivalent might be alright too. You'd probably want one of the primes for low light.

If it's being mounted to the bike, then yes, any of the current crop of decent action cameras would be a good choice, especially assuming that some parts of the tour would be in the rain or dusty areas, etc. Even better yet if they can pair directly with the manufacturer's wireless microphone system (DJI and Insta360 both do this). This can also be augmented with any halfway decent modern phone. Otherwise, if you wouldn't want to go the action camera+phone route, I'd find the smallest and lightest camera on the market with decent weatherproofing and go with that, making sure that all of the lenses are similarly weather-sealed. There are lots of used options, especially that are M43 mount, that would be good fits for small and light and can give better results than an action camera. Better than 1080p is nice, but as far as I know, any festival will still accept it as a resolution. More than 4K is realistically unnecessary unless you plan to crop/reframe in post.

This whole thing is a really silly take. I can absolutely afford the RX1R Mark III and I can also say it's too expensive and there's no way I'd buy it at that price. And being mentioned in the same sentence as the Q is not a win when the sentence is "this damn thing is nearly as expensive as the Q, but isn't even a Leica." Otherwise, Fuji could just kick up the price on the X Half to $6,500 and enjoy that sweet victory. Obviously some people are going to buy the RX1R III. That was never in doubt. There are always some people who will pay any price for something they want. That's not to say that it's priceworthy.

I think that the elephant in the room at this point, at least in the US, is that camera vendors were already overcharging for the newest models - and now tariffs are pushing them to the point of just plain unaffordable. Fuji's price increases hit today - the GFX 100 II went from $7,500 to $8,300. GFX 100RF just went from $4,900 to $5,400 - making it now more expensive than the RX100 III, though still not by a lot. It seems likely that a bunch of manufacturers will boost prices all over the world to maintain some consistency and to force the rest of the world to at least partially finance the US tariffs (which is probably one of the reasons that the Sony is so expensive everywhere). If so, I wouldn't be surprised if that's a thing that reduces camera system changes and greatly decreases new camera purchases... also since the US economy is already starting to show signs of distress due to poor management from the current administration.

Absolutely - it's a fantastic price for just the body and I'm envious that you found it! If it were me, I'd still at least make a request that they give a partial refund since the item wasn't as-described and then I'd just take whatever they suggest, whether it's $20 or whatever. It never hurts to have an extra $20.

Can you contact the seller and ask for a partial refund since it's missing the lens? Seems worth a shot, at least!

In the meantime, that video got changed to private. Must have accidentally jumped the gun on making it public. Dang, DJI have a lot of leakers on this one.

Oh yeah, most definitely true! When I used Parsec in the past, it was when I was playing around with game streaming and that's often more latency-sensitive than something like using my video editor, though I'll also need to see how it is for frame-perfect transitions/effects that I want to align to audio. But for me, the use case isn't to reuse underpowered machines to backhaul to another machine - my M2 Max is powerful enough for anything I want to do (though I'm likely to buy an M5 something after they're released since my warranty on the M2 will probably be up around then) and I can just pick it up and carry it with me. For me, it's more about putting the editor on something with fast access to the underlying storage. Even though wifi has come a long way, it still sucks, in my experience, for editing high-bitrate footage from a nas (proxies would help, I'm sure). I'd be likely to still do color (and maybe fine tune audio/video sync edits) with the laptop on a wired connection through the dock, but as a silly example, I did a 48 hour film project a few weeks ago and at some point, one of the people is hallucinating some burnt toast talking to him. We ripped a little mouth in the bread. For the 48, I just warped the image for the hallucination, but now that I'm working on the extended cut, I'm animating the little mouth to move with the words. I suck at vfx since I barely ever do them and don't like them much so it took me a bit over an hour to get the first 3-4 words done. The next clip has about 10-12 words. They should go a bit faster now that I figured out what I'm doing, but... still probably a couple more hours. I'd rather do that lounging on the couch while watching a movie at night vs hunched over my desk. Maybe Parsec is my shortcut for that. That and there's another part with a transition that I can't nail down to where I like it, would rather play with that while comfy on the couch too.

Looks like someone decided not to wait for the embargo to lift before posting his review:

You might be talking me into reinstalling Parsec and trying this out, but for different reasons. Usually I edit on my Macbook (The lower-end M2 Max) and it's totally fine, but when I'm at home, I prefer to edit off my basement NAS instead of from external drives and I use a postgres database on a server next to it. But if I don't plug into the network (which means sitting at my desk where the dock with 10ge is), editing video is not great (and editing photos in Lightroom ain't great either). But I have a windows gaming PC also set up near the desk which has a pretty decent setup with a nice GPU. I suppose I could just parsec to that while on the couch or in bed and do my editing, with the main catch being that I need to use Windows shortcut keys. That or I wait until there's a decent deal on an M4 Mini with 10ge (there have been some solid deals, but they're always for the base model with only 1ge)

I never tried editing with Parsec, but it's a good idea! How does it handle color management? Or is that done by Better Display?

I'd also say that lens sharpness is relevant only in some contexts. A 35mm f/2 lens on a high-end point and shoot really needs to be "sharp enough" - and has to find the balance between sharpness and being too clinical. Unless you're taking pictures of a brick wall 30 meters away, chances are that the 35 has all the detail you'll ever need. Keep in mind that the previous camera using that lens had 45 megapixels - jumping to 61 is not huge. If I were only interested in still photos, the RX1R II would almost hands down be the choice, especially if I found a good deal. Flippy screen and cute lil' pop-up EVF like the RX100 series? Sign me up. Some of the other ergonomics look better on the new camera and it can record in 4K, barely. Is that worth thousands of dollars more? Not for me. Could be be an interesting camera in 5 years when the used price (hopefully) drops it more than 60%? Yes, it could be. Would I take it over a GFX 100RF that costs less? Absolutely not. My most frequently-used lens on the GFX 100 is the 32-64 and that's also an f/4 lens. Very sharp too. You can really count the molecules in those bricks in the wall 30 meters away.

For me, Stalker is one of the most gorgeous films ever made. I feel inspired every time I watch it!

I was going to say that's a crazy markup for about $0.10 in plastic, but then I saw that beautiful cloth bag that is included and it all made sense. 🤣

Yeah - I was talking as an alternative tiny camera for the people who might be a target market for the rx1r iii. 515g (a7cr body only) is closer to 498g (body+lens of rx1r iii) than 723g (a7r v). Though they're all big enough that they won't fit in a pocket, unless you're wearing some Matty G cargo pants. (Maybe someday, some vendor will make a decent quality digital Olympus XA-1 - come on, OM System! Get with it) The ergonomics on the V look a LOT better, as you said. But sorry if I was unclear that I meant the specs on the sensor look similar between the two cameras. I'm willing to bet that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference in still photos or 4K video taken on the A7CR and A7R5. 😃

I agree that I doubt they would intentionally deal in stolen goods. I just have heard that in my country, there isn't a very good centralized database for stolen cameras - so even for stores that want to do the right thing, it's really hard to know. Given the high percentage of my gear that was purchased used, I sort of assume that some of it was sold to the store by someone who didn't acquire it through honest means, regardless of intent.