eatstoomuchjam

I've had my Z-Cam F6 for a couple of weeks now. It's amazing what they have packed into this little camera. They gave me early access to the firmware they released yesterday which had a lot of color improvements. I also own an S1H and although i planned to sell one or the other, i'm keeping both. The S1H makes run and gun doc work easy. So when i'm hired to shoot behind the scenes footage by the studios, it'll be with the S1H. It will also serve as a B-Cam to my EVA1 for EPK interviews. The Z-Cam F6 on the other hand has strengths i'd want in a cinema camera that I'd use on productions where I'm not flying by the seat of my pants: shorts, features, dramatic documentaries. I'm loving the pairing of my SmallHD 702 Touch with the F6. I know they recommend the PortKeys BM5 because it can control the camera, but I wasn't a fan of the UI or the quality of the screen.

Are you making Netflix commissioned productions?

If you are: you'll have plenty of budget to hire Varicam/Venice/whatever!

If you are not: then that list doesn't matter at all.
 

I don't notice a major color shift after the swap, though I no longer have any unmodified hero 5's to compare it with.  I'm pretty sure I got the lens from Amazon.  If you search for "M12," they have lots and they're mostly pretty cheap.
I don't have a modified RX0 (or an unmodified RX0).
As far as the modified GoPros...  the Hero 5, I still use as a car camera.  I have a couple of unmodified Hero 7's that I can use as car cameras if I want to go back to a wider angle or if it's extremely rainy or dusty.  
I haven't used the Ribcage Hero 7 for a lot of useful stuff, but I'll be starting to use it more in the near future, now that I got a holder that makes the annoying GoPro microphone connector a little less annoying.  One of the reasons I'm always hunting for wide angle D mount lenses with sufficient coverage is that I'd love to use it as a vlogging camera, especially when in areas where I'm iffier about carrying around fancy-looking cameras (I've used the RX100 V for that, but even it draws some unwanted attention that something looking like a Frankencamera might not).  It's mostly a fun/tiny camera where I can use my C/D mount lenses.  I also want to use it in some upcoming short film projects in places where a GoPro might otherwise be used, but where the fisheye is not desirable.  I may also try using it as a car camera with a fast lens sometime when it's getting dark enough that a standard Hero struggles. 

Unlike the others here, I've had pretty good luck with Ribcage products... to as much of an extent as can be reasonably expected.

I first bought their kit to convert a Yi 4K+ to C mount and I somehow botched the installation, but they were willing to help me un-botch it in the end.  Ultimately, I found that C mount lenses were extremely difficult to use with the Yi because...
The internal screen is tiny and not very high-resolution.  This made critical focus nearly impossible, even when using a loupe. There is no HDMI output option to use an external screen to check critical focus.  It is possible to use an adapter to get composite output, but none of my external screens are composite... 
  More recently, I bought a pre-assembled kit with a Hero 7 Black.  This is a vastly better experience.
The internal screen on the Hero 7 is much better-quality than the Yi and there is an option to digitally zoom in which is very useful for focusing.  This is a little bit awkward, but works OK The camera has HDMI output which can be useful for focusing if I already have another screen, but this has limits - in video mode, the HDMI output is very laggy.  In photo mode and timelapse mode it's very fast... but it is pretty awkward to have to change modes constantly in order to focus. Image stabilization is not very well-optimized for longer lenses so they end up still feeling sort of shaky I have found that a number of D mount lenses have sufficient coverage for the 1/2.3" sensor in the Hero 7.  I'm still looking for a wide angle option without a hard vignette, but lenses in the 10mm and longer range seem to cover sufficiently... which is at least enough for a very minor telephoto with around a 10mm lens.  I'm hoping, though, to find a 5mm or so D mount lens with enough coverage.  Unfortunately, D mount lenses aren't super common on the used market.  In this regard, the 1" sensor (2.7x crop) in the RX0 would be very strongly preferable. Whatever the Ribcage looks like internally or how much electronics purists turn up their nose at it, the camera feels plenty solid from the outside and mine has been banged around quite a bit.  It still seems to be doing alright. The Hero 7 has HEVC at around 78 megabits/second.  I would be curious to compare its output vs the RX0 with semi-cruddy HEVC-S at 100 megabits/second.  In addition, the Hero 7 can handle 60 fps in 4k where the RX0 is only capable of 30 fps.  On the other hand, the RX0 can output 4K at 422 for external recording if you don't mind bulking it up a little bit. The Hero 7 also has 2.7kp120 and 1080p240 options and I think both can be used continuously.  The RX0 has 1080p240.  Assuming that it's like my RX100 V, this mode will be limited to only a few seconds.  I'm not sure how much any of this matters since the quality of all of the above is fairly mediocre. The RX0 has Slog.  The Hero 7 has ProTune.  I think both are usable enough with moderate dynamic range scenes. The RX0 almost definitely will work better in low light than the Hero 7 - and in addition, it's possible to use a speed booster with the Micro 4/3 mount where I am not aware of any decent-quality C mount speed boosters. In the end, I thought about buying the Ribcage RX0...  but ended up deciding it didn't have enough advantages over the Ribcage Hero 7 to make it worth the swap.
This is reminding me that I want to use the Hero 7 variant more... I suppose I'll make an effort to bring it with me the next time I go shooting. 

Big things are happening!

I just received my E2C which is the smaller budget version of the E2.  It can shoot 4k at up to 30fps in ProRes and it costs only $800 (I got it for a little less due to early bird preorder)!  I'll be doing some comparisons of it vs my bigger E2 tomorrow, hopefully.
 
Also, for the full-size E2, Z Cam just released firmware 0.86 which, among many other nice improvements, adds 4kp160 (2.4:1 instead of 16:9).  I hope to find something that is moving tomorrow to play with that as well. 

Big things are happening!

I just received my E2C which is the smaller budget version of the E2.  It can shoot 4k at up to 30fps in ProRes and it costs only $800 (I got it for a little less due to early bird preorder)!  I'll be doing some comparisons of it vs my bigger E2 tomorrow, hopefully.
 
Also, for the full-size E2, Z Cam just released firmware 0.86 which, among many other nice improvements, adds 4kp160 (2.4:1 instead of 16:9).  I hope to find something that is moving tomorrow to play with that as well. 

I won't use the term "color science" because it's really dumb in the context of a fairly simple matrix operation to map values read from the sensor to values to be output to a file.  However, the colors coming right out of the camera look really nice to me - and the footage is really flexible.
The camera's biggest weakness right now is audio.  It really needs a powered mic to get decent performance.  The engineers have promised an improvement with the next firmware release.
The camera's second biggest weakness is CAF performance.  It's really decent for contrast AF and is generally passable, but not a thing I would rely on for anything I cared about (though the human tracking mode is surprisingly good).  For this, they are experimenting with add-on modules (ultrasonic and lidar have both been mentioned).  We'll see what comes of that.

Other than those two things, just about everything is really great.  It's really shocking how much things improved between the E1 and the E2.  If they didn't have the same logo, I wouldn't believe the cameras were made by the same company.  I'm really happy with my purchase and I'm likely to jump on the preorder to get the APS-C camera with a m43 mount. 

I won't use the term "color science" because it's really dumb in the context of a fairly simple matrix operation to map values read from the sensor to values to be output to a file.  However, the colors coming right out of the camera look really nice to me - and the footage is really flexible.
The camera's biggest weakness right now is audio.  It really needs a powered mic to get decent performance.  The engineers have promised an improvement with the next firmware release.
The camera's second biggest weakness is CAF performance.  It's really decent for contrast AF and is generally passable, but not a thing I would rely on for anything I cared about (though the human tracking mode is surprisingly good).  For this, they are experimenting with add-on modules (ultrasonic and lidar have both been mentioned).  We'll see what comes of that.

Other than those two things, just about everything is really great.  It's really shocking how much things improved between the E1 and the E2.  If they didn't have the same logo, I wouldn't believe the cameras were made by the same company.  I'm really happy with my purchase and I'm likely to jump on the preorder to get the APS-C camera with a m43 mount. 

The P4K doesn't really have "better codec options" at this point unless you mean braw - and that will probably be less of a competitive advantage when ZCam release the first version of their raw implementation sometime this month.  Otherwise, the ZCam has ProRes HQ at up to 4kp30 and ProRes 422 at up to 4kp60 as well as h.265 with decent bitrate.  If you tested months ago, the quality of 4kp120 has improved since then - they upped the bitrate on it a bit.  In the next release, they are upping it more (I think to 500 megabits/second).

And you're very likely right about the A73 sensor - or something similar to it.  In general, if you check the features of a Z-Cam vs a list of modern Sony sensors, you'll find that they align really nicely.  It's why people keep asking about 4kp120 in the bigger sensor cameras and getting turned down.  None of the bigger Sony sensors support it.

The BMPCC4K is a great camera and a fantastic value, no doubt about it, but the E2 is also excellent and I'm glad I bought it over the BM.  I love that I can rig it on a big heavy shoulder rig with huge EF lenses and F-970/V-mount batteries for long life... or I can throw on a tiny Micro 4/3 prime like the Panasonic 14/2.5 or 20/1.7 and put in an F550-type battery and have a super tiny light camera.

The lack of a built-in screen is mitigated very nicely by being able to wire in my phone as a screen which I very much prefer to using wifi - it gives me an excellent 5" or so low-latency screen with a built-in battery.  Not bad.

The P4K doesn't really have "better codec options" at this point unless you mean braw - and that will probably be less of a competitive advantage when ZCam release the first version of their raw implementation sometime this month.  Otherwise, the ZCam has ProRes HQ at up to 4kp30 and ProRes 422 at up to 4kp60 as well as h.265 with decent bitrate.  If you tested months ago, the quality of 4kp120 has improved since then - they upped the bitrate on it a bit.  In the next release, they are upping it more (I think to 500 megabits/second).

And you're very likely right about the A73 sensor - or something similar to it.  In general, if you check the features of a Z-Cam vs a list of modern Sony sensors, you'll find that they align really nicely.  It's why people keep asking about 4kp120 in the bigger sensor cameras and getting turned down.  None of the bigger Sony sensors support it.

The BMPCC4K is a great camera and a fantastic value, no doubt about it, but the E2 is also excellent and I'm glad I bought it over the BM.  I love that I can rig it on a big heavy shoulder rig with huge EF lenses and F-970/V-mount batteries for long life... or I can throw on a tiny Micro 4/3 prime like the Panasonic 14/2.5 or 20/1.7 and put in an F550-type battery and have a super tiny light camera.

The lack of a built-in screen is mitigated very nicely by being able to wire in my phone as a screen which I very much prefer to using wifi - it gives me an excellent 5" or so low-latency screen with a built-in battery.  Not bad.

The P4K doesn't really have "better codec options" at this point unless you mean braw - and that will probably be less of a competitive advantage when ZCam release the first version of their raw implementation sometime this month.  Otherwise, the ZCam has ProRes HQ at up to 4kp30 and ProRes 422 at up to 4kp60 as well as h.265 with decent bitrate.  If you tested months ago, the quality of 4kp120 has improved since then - they upped the bitrate on it a bit.  In the next release, they are upping it more (I think to 500 megabits/second).

And you're very likely right about the A73 sensor - or something similar to it.  In general, if you check the features of a Z-Cam vs a list of modern Sony sensors, you'll find that they align really nicely.  It's why people keep asking about 4kp120 in the bigger sensor cameras and getting turned down.  None of the bigger Sony sensors support it.

The BMPCC4K is a great camera and a fantastic value, no doubt about it, but the E2 is also excellent and I'm glad I bought it over the BM.  I love that I can rig it on a big heavy shoulder rig with huge EF lenses and F-970/V-mount batteries for long life... or I can throw on a tiny Micro 4/3 prime like the Panasonic 14/2.5 or 20/1.7 and put in an F550-type battery and have a super tiny light camera.

The lack of a built-in screen is mitigated very nicely by being able to wire in my phone as a screen which I very much prefer to using wifi - it gives me an excellent 5" or so low-latency screen with a built-in battery.  Not bad.