eatstoomuchjam

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...

On 12/14/2025 at 5:07 AM, Andrew Reid said:

I want to see it.

Real world subjects only (like landscape scenes, people, and so on).

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?

1 hour ago, Geoff_L said:

contain a canal of major interest for international maritime trade

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.

1 hour ago, Geoff_L said:

mineral ressources/oil

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.

43 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

Laying the ground for a full on war with South America, to seize their oil and natural resources.

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

28 minutes ago, zlfan said:

i think that baby's face is one of the challengest situations, dark shade, interwoven with the sunshine areas. this demonstrates that the 27h has some mojos.

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.  😃

3 minutes ago, zlfan said:

what is the point of shooting with film rolls? maybe because the film rolls are expensive, only exclusive to the big budget films?

The effective resolution of properly-exposed modern 35mm film is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5K if I remember right.  But as above, a lot of people aren't so likely to care about that.

Unless the varicam had some sort of miracle sensor, though, 35mm negative film will have much better dynamic range and much, much more pleasing highlight rolloff.  It's still seen as king of rolloff - and on a film with a 20 million dollar budget, the cost of shooting on film vs Arri vs anything else is basically an afterthought.

36 minutes ago, zlfan said:

although there is argument that 2k projectors can be replaced with 4k projectors or 8k ones, on the other hand, 2k projectors have been there many years and nobody complains about the lack of resolution on the big screen about the movies shot with 35mm film

I think a lot of people would be surprised to learn how many movie theaters are still projecting in 2K.  Movie theater projectors are expensive as hell and overall profits for theaters are down compared with 10 years ago.  Exhibitors aren't going to rush out to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on anything that doesn't have a direct positive impact on their profits.  Being able to count the pores in the lead actor's skin doesn't put asses in seats or sell more candy.

34 minutes ago, sanveer said:

should a sitting US president be openly influencing the fate of an entire industry, for his own or his family's personal gains?

No, but it turns out that a lot of our guard rails are imaginary.

40 minutes ago, enny said:

 YT videos ?

Why not?  Tito's channel is excellent.

Looks like a fine camera and it's overall a nice improvement over the A7 IV.  It is a little weird to see it being released right on the heels of the FX2 which still uses the older sensor.

That said, even though 4K is plenty, it is weird to see a major vendor releasing a new model that tops out at full frame 4KP60 and cropped 4KP120.  For a mostly video shooter, the A7S III is about the same price used as this one is new.  It has pretty similar dynamic range performance and the RS is like 9ms vs 14ms here.  If I remember right, the older camera also doesn't need to crop in to get to 120fps.  Or get a used ZV-E1 with most of the performance of the A7S III for 2/3 the price of the A7 V.

For a hybrid shooter, it makes more sense - but approaching the new camera from a purely video perspective, it's really a "meh."  It's not a terrible choice and people are going to shoot decent stuff with it, but it's sort of hard to imagine existing Sony shooters swapping up to it and even harder to imagine people who are invested in other systems changing to it.

A compressed format seems a lot more appropriate for that use case than raw.

And while it's not nearly as ridiculous as the EOS R5's overheating problems that were almost entirely caused by the Canon 🔨, when you bring out an S1R on any number of shoots for a long time, someone's bound to start going on about how it overheats.  I still get that when I bring out my R5 for slider shots/suction cupping to windshields/etc.

"Aren't you worried that's gonna overheat?  I heard that camera overheats a lot."
"They corrected most of that a while ago and I'm pretty sure it'll make it through this 45 second take, regardless."

1 hour ago, ND64 said:

Suddenly Gerald finds no problem in DR and 10 stops is good enough to declare "cameras peaked". 

R5 Mark III?  Hope/assume that's a typo and it's for the R6 III.  😱

12 minutes ago, Kino said:

One possibility is that Sony is leaking this info to keep its FX9/FX6 customers from jumping ship to other brands/systems. Otherwise, I don't see how we get such detailed specs for an unknown and unannounced camera.

I'd be truly shocked if the main sources on all of the ____rumors sites weren't the marketing teams for the various camera manufacturers.  These days, those sites function as a pretty major portion of their pre-release marketing as well as allowing them to do sentiment/market analysis based on how people react to the rumors when posted.

Media Division did a deep dive.  Big improvements for sure.  They were able to trigger overheating in some pretty extreme scenarios, but it no longer seems to be a likelihood in any reasonable shooting situation.

How about Black Magic Design to buy them?

COMING SOON: Arri Pocket Cinema Camera 24K

8K sampled from 12K should be really good 8K and it's basically how you'd get 4:4:4 quality from a bayer sensor.

If the FX8 specs are as-rumored, it could be a real hit.  Though if Sony try to sell it for $6K+, it'll be a really hard sell.  If they don't, it'll be cool to see the prices drop on their existing camera line-up.

52 minutes ago, Davide DB said:

The situation is worse than I thought, and this information is hard to find. The last column is hidden at the bottom of this table. The table is different for every camera body. This is for GH5MII

Ugh.  And to make it even worse, they don't use human-understandable names for the lenses, but use model numbers.  You know, for all the people who say "I'm gonna shoot this with my H-H014."  Plus they put NG for all of the Olympus lenses - wonder if that means that I was wrong about the ones that I thought went to linear when you engaged the clutch or whether it just means that Panasonic couldn't be bothered to check them.

"I'd like to manually focus this, but first let me consult the table in my user manual to see if manual focus works with this camera/lens combo..."

Some of these criticisms are primarily valid for older/shittier focus-by-wire systems, though.  The Canon EF 85/1.2L has a famously terrible focus-by-wire system that made almost nobody ever want to use it - not only is it non-linear, but it's also a little bit laggy.  Of course, its focus motor is also slow and a bit loud.  I still use mine sometimes, though, for photo shoots - the image is really nice and models who are staying more-or-less still are a decent use case for a slow AF motor.

Anyway, the Panasonic 20/1.7 pancake is in a similar situation.  It's old, relatively noisy, and slow, with no ability to be switched to linear response.  It's fucking awful to use in manual focus mode for that reason - and yeah, AF mode also aint' great.

On the other hand, I think most or all of the first-party lenses for Fuji GF are focus by wire.  They're either linear or switchable to it (and I set the option in the camera and immediately forgot since there's no way I'd switch it back).  When manually focusing, the damping is nice and the lens is responsive and accurate.  It really feels like focusing a proper lens.  Though many of those lenses also fall into your category of spending a lot of money.

I think that all of the PanaLeica lenses are either linear or close enough to it that it felt linear to me.  Some of the older ones are pretty affordable now - like the Summilux 25/1.4 asph goes for about $300 used.  Worth confirming that they all have linear response, though - I only had a few when I shot M43 and that was a long time ago so I could be misremembering.  Otherwise, I feel like the Olympus lenses with a focus clutch also were linear-ish, but maybe I'm crazy there too.

As to the thinking behind a "non-proportional" focus was, I think, that for photos, you could get rough focus quickly by turning the dial fast and then get a really precise critical focus by turning slowly.  At least that's what they said.  I think the bigger thinking behind it was "we can make this lens for less money as well as simplifying the design by removing the coupling between focus ring and lens elements"

I also just saw that this is from the same company that did a kickstarter for the Alice camera.  I think there are still crowd funding backers waiting for delivery on that one - the campaign ran in 2021.

Here is a reddit thread where the OP deleted their message, but you can see a lot in the comments about huge delays with the last camera and as of 2 months ago, the company was responding to people saying that they're finally shipping.

https://www.reddit.com/r/photography/comments/1brpul5/deleted_by_user/

According to one comment, the new camera seems to just be the same as the old camera (due to the previous version losing in a trademark dispute in court), but with a new name and software.  So... at least that means there's less risk on them taking 4+ years to ship this one.

Anyway, my recommendation is now even more strongly to just get a used OM-5 or similar.  Buy from a reputable used vendor and it'll be in your hands in a few days.  If they actually ship this camera someday and you're loving what you see from it, you can sell the OM-5 and buy the Caira at that time.

1) This didn't go well for Sony when they released the QX100 and QX10 years ago.  It also didn't work well for Olympus with the Air A01.  Of course, none of them stuck a stupid bullshit "AI" label on the end of the camera name so who knows, maybe that's what was missing.

2) Fuck GenAI.  Of all the things I want integrated in my camera, that's at about the rock bottom of the list.

3) Note that at least 3 of the 6 testimonials that they include (screenshot below) don't actually say anything positive about the camera. "That's very different" is not an endorsement.  In fact, where I live, saying "that's different" is usually a form of backhanded insult.

4) It looks like it only supports wifi connection to the phone without a wired option.  In a best-case scenario, screen lag will be tolerable.  Go to any reasonably-crowded urban area, though, and enjoy the slide show and/or "connection lost" messages.

5) Even though they say you can choose from over 100 M43 lenses, I'd be worried about magsafe supporting any moderately heavy lens.  Even if it does, the camera will be really unbalanced.

6) When Caira goes out of business, there will be nobody left to update the app and the camera isn't usable without it.  Cross your fingers that Apple doesn't change some necessary API during an OS update.

7) Super early bird pricing is $695.  You can go buy a used Panasonic G85 in like new condition for about $430.  You can get an OM System OM-5 in like new condition for about $760 or in excellent condition for about $690.  The G85 is cheaper and pretty good - at least on a spec sheet, they seem similar - a little bulkier, maybe.  The OM-5 should be at least as good of a camera, also is quite small (not as small, of course, but very small by modern camera standards), and will keep working whether or not OM Systems stays in business or decides they want to stop making cameras.

8 ) Phone cameras are already very good these days.  Mine is more than good enough for any of the sort of images/videos that they seem to be promoting on their site.  If not, I'd probably just get a newer/better phone and not some janky add-on.  🙂 

9) Small company + Kickstarter means you'll probably be waiting a good long time and/or never actually receive the order.  Even though they say they have 500 mainboards already in stock, actually building and shipping hundreds of units is a really hard challenge that a lot of kickstarter projects don't take into account - and sometimes not even due to fault of the creators.  My 4x10 film camera that I ordered from an established brand (Ondu) who already made/shipped lots of pinhole cameras for years beforehand took WAY longer than expected, at least partly because suppliers kept sending out-of-spec parts to them.  The owner is a really great guy and we had some nice conversations when I asked my camera hadn't come despite that he said they were caught up on orders (turned out that their tool to collect shipping information lost a bunch of responses so he had to go manually collect them from a lot of people).

So anyway - for me, Caira is a hard no.  I'm basically the opposite of their target market, though.