eatstoomuchjam

Another vote for "buy used from a reputable dealer with a return policy" when possible - both with camera bodies and lenses.  They usually have a 30-day return policy as well - so that gives you some time to test the camera.

Personally, for the most part, I don't buy extended warranties and if you're going to buy one from a third party, try to do some investigation to understand whether people are happy with it when they try to use it.  I do carry extra camera insurance, though, for a bunch of my stuff.

On the rare occasion that there is a problem with the camera, you can send it back to the manufacturer for repair, even if it's out of warranty.  It'll just cost you a bit to have it repaired.  For me, over the last 25 years or so, I've definitely spent less on repairing cameras than I would have spent on extended warranties for all of them.  YMMV

We all know that cameras produce (sometimes dramatically) different images and image quality, and yet we also know that within a given price range those same cameras typically use the same sensors from Sony and are recording to the same codecs in basically the same bitrates.  It's maddening!
So, WTF is going on?  
Well, I just came upon this talk below, which goes through and demonstrates some of the inner workings in greater detail than I had previously seen:
It's long, but here's my notes...
Firstly, how you de-mosaic / de-bayer the image really matters, with some algorithms being higher quality and require higher processing power:
(Click on the images to zoom in - quality isn't the best but the effects are visible)


If you're not shooting RAW then this will be done in-camera, and if your manufacturer skimped on the processor they put in there, this will be happening to your footage.
If the camera is scaling the image, then the quality of this matters too:

and if the scaling even gets done in the wrong colour space then it can really screw things up:

There's more discussions in there, especially around colour science which has been discussed to death, but I thought these might be illuminating as it's not something we get to see that much because it's buried in the camera and typically it's not something we can easily play with in the NLE.
All these add up to a fundamental principle that I have been gradually gravitating towards.
If you're shooting non-RAW then shoot in the highest resolution you can shoot in, and just un-sharpen (blur) the image in post.
Shooting in the highest resolution means that your camera will be doing the least downscaling (or none), and most glitches and bad processing will be at the pixel-level, which means that the higher the resolution the smaller those glitches and errors compared to the size of the image, and un-sharpening de-emphasises these in the footage.  
You might notice that all of these shortcomings make the footage sharper, not duller, so the errors have made your footage sharp but in a way that it never was - it's fictional sharpness.
Also, the more modern displays are also themselves becoming sharper, so it's no wonder that footage all now looks like those glitch websites from the late 90s that were trying to be cool but looked like a graphic designer threw up into them...

FilmLight (who make BaseLight which is the Resolve competitor that costs as much as a house) seem to be on a mission to get deeper into the image and bring along the industry on that journey, and I'm really appreciative of their efforts as they're providing more insight into things we can do to get better images and get more value from our limited budgets.

Thanks for this!! I ended up finding one that had the upgrade and it wasn't that much over my budget.
Thanks for the input guys. I ended up going with the S1 only because of ergonomics, the full size HDMI as I use a monitor and having no record limit. I know in the S5 you could just start and stop again but when shooting interviews in a multiple camera shoot the no time limit just makes things a bit easier.
It gets here on Saturday and I got a couple of Canon FD primes ready to go. Really excited about this.
Thanks so much everyone

If you want to minimise the risk buying used, buy the body from a major dealer who will provide a decent length warranty and allow you to return it if you're not happy with it e.g. in the UK, Wex offer a 45-day return period and provide 12-month warranties on used gear. MPB offer 6-month used warranties, as do some of the other major UK dealers.
If you want long warranties, buy new and then buy an extended warranty from the manufacturer, or wait until the manufacturer offers a free extended warranty as a sales promotion on new bodies.

Thanks but the compliments must be addressed to Kenjo McCurtain to begin with. "The man" behind this piece of work. I've just tried to serve of a little help : )
There's team work, of course. So, everyone also has a role to play there for sure. This is the outgrowth of a collective effort without doubt. To each their own, anyways :- )

Let them stand in their beach. The most unique cinematic is the less competition we have... LOL : )
BTW...

MAKE-BELIEVERS will have national release in Japan...
 
Ikebukuro Cinema Rosa on April 13th.
https://www.cinemarosa.net/lateshow.htm
〒171-0021 Tokyo, Toshima City, Nishiikebukuro, 1 Chome−37−12 1F
 
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11530452/

22 pages on...  and nothing has been learned.

Since one of the stated reasons for documenting the journey was accountability, how did your first night of shooting go?

For AF-S, unless you're shooting really fast-moving subjects (sports, race cars, etc), nearly every AF lens made since 1995 will be fine.  Even stinkers like the Canon EF 85/1.2L are workable. 
With DFD, Panasonic made AF-C CDAF about as good as it seems likely ever to be.  If not for the pulsing on still subjects, it would probably be enough for most projects.  My GH5 was always frustratingly close to being usable with AF.
Sure - people make a big deal of super fast apertures and extreme shallow DOF these days, but f/5.6 at 140mm is still relatively shallow, even on M43.  Heck, even the RF 800/11 has relatively shallow DOF on FF.
I'd add "Don't make yourself miserable by hauling around a boat anchor on a strap around your neck all day and night."

The size and cost of the 14/2.5 and 20/1.7 sure make them compelling lenses to own and carry around with you, that's for sure.  I don't know what the AF is like on the 20mm but all I do is frame up a composition, do a single AF-S via a custom button, then hit record and maintain the focus distance during the clip.  I shoot short clips for the edit, so I don't need or want AF-C.  From that perspective the 20mm might be just fine.  The alternative is manually focusing with peaking, which would likely take longer than most AF.  
Speaking of AF speed, I read something the other day - it said that Panasonics DFD sped up their CDAF, and I realised that I never see a CDAF Panasonic camera doing that thing where the focus racks the whole way to one end and then the whole way to the other end before acquiring focus, it just seems to do a quick jitter and it's done.  I never thought about that being DFD but I guess it is.
I watched a lot of landscape photographer YT (Thomas Heaton etc) and they made a strong case for landscapes being shot with wide lenses and ultra-long lenses.  Some of those shots that show just the jagged peak of the mountain or the lone tree or castle on a distant hilltop can be the most stunning.
Some time ago I realised that DOF depends not only on aperture but also on focal length, so although a variable zoom gets slower as it gets longer (making the DOF deeper), it's also getting longer as it's getting longer (making the DOF shallower) and so I did a bunch of math to calculate DOF of the same composition.  I posted the results in some other thread somewhere here, but the summary is that a lot of variable aperture zooms are almost constant DOF lenses, when taking the same composition (ie, if you double the focal length then you'd be twice as far away for the same composition).
Here's the table of the 14-140mm lens.  The "Mid DoF" column is the DoF of a mid portrait shot (chest and up) and the "Close DoF" is just top of shoulders and up:

It's not constant DoF but it's pretty close.  
I then realised that for my environmental portraits, where I want the subject in focus but the background should at least be recognisable, I didn't want something that just had the subject floating in a sea of mush.  Also, nailing focus is more important to me than shallower DoF, and if the focus isn't going to get it perfect every time, and also pick the right focus subject each time, or if there are two people next to each other but slightly different distances from the camera because I'm not standing exactly 90-degrees to the line between them, then I'd rather the DoF be a few meters rather than the shot be missed.
The other reason to have a fast lens is the low-light capabilities.  FF obviously has the advantage because, all else being equal it gets 4x the amount of light onto the sensor, but this has to be balanced against the DoF which will also be radically shallower for the same T-stop.  So if you don't want to shoot with a razor-thin DoF in low-light then you have to stop down.  I find that in practice this would level the playing field in many compositions.  Not all of them of course, and the seemingly greater investment in sensor technology from Sony in the larger sensors is also a factor, but it makes the topic more complex and far less one-sided than it might first appear.
Yeah, it's definitely a case of "get the shot" first, "make the scene better by not making everyone uncomfortable" second, and "have a rig with a great image quality" third.

Reasonably well thanks - will write it up soon!

Since one of the stated reasons for documenting the journey was accountability, how did your first night of shooting go?

Gotcha - if you're more comfortable with the 35mm equivalent FOV, a 17ish vs a 20ish mm m43 lens makes total sense - and if you value AF, it's not your best option by far.  From what I remember, it's a bit noisy and slow.  I'm sure the Olympus 17 or the Panasonic 15 is faster.  For me, the 14/2.5 and the 20/1.7 were no brains to keep in my kit when I was still using M43 because they were just so tiny.  It felt silly not to bring them, especially since they're both really decent lenses.

For me, the 75/1.8 was always useful for either portraits (though one has to stand a little further away than I like) or for landscapes (as I age, I like telephoto landscapes more and more - just choose the little bit of the scene that I want).  The fast aperture let me get pretty sharp stuff even when shooting from a moving car or train without having to crank the ISO on a smaller sensor.  At this point, I have a Summicron-M 90/2 ASPH so unless I'd need autofocus, I'd just prefer it for that sort of landscape shot (and on FF, it's a really nice length for portraits, to boot).

Anyway, if you don't mind the aperture limitations of the 14-140 when it's racked to 75mm, you're definitely set there.

For me, my travel kit contains a few redundant focal length primes - though they're less for the faster aperture now and more for being smaller/lighter/nondescript.  Does 1 extra stop on the Fujinon 63/2.8 make any substantial difference than the 32-64/4 racked out?  Not really.  Is there any appreciable difference in quality on the prime?  Not really.  Are people more likely to ignore me when it's on there?  Yes.

Since one of the stated reasons for documenting the journey was accountability, how did your first night of shooting go?

My intention is to document this journey here and I’m doing it for the entirely selfish reason of keeping myself on it!

These images are really about what the camera captured - with colour grading there is a huge latitude to change things in post, which is where the taste and preference comes in.  The challenge is what you have to work with in the first place.
In the thread about colour grading 8-bit footage I showed that there is huge latitude to push things around in post - to the point that you can bring things up by 4-stops without ruining the image:
Of course, if your highlights are clipped then there's basically zero ability to change it in post!
After reflecting on things after posting the images above (and also of reviewing a bunch of other shots I didn't post) I think that the images look and feel like reality somewhere in-between the two extremes I posted.  I can't recall how much I had to stop down to pull the highlights back into range, and it probably varied depending on the situation, but it might be a case of maybe shooting a stop under what the GX85 wants to shoot at that might give a nice middle ground.
I must admit that the highlight blooming on the lens is quite nice, giving a sort-of magical feel to the lighting, while not making the image to surreal in daylight situations or being impossible to use with strong light-sources.
There's always more lenses to add to the kit!!
I used to shoot exclusively with manual primes and I worked out that for the travel work I do that the following were the right lengths:
16mm equivalent FOV:
This is used for WOW!! shots..  buildings and landscapes. It also does crowded interiors too.  Going wider than this makes things look too distorted, and going longer doesn't give that WOW!! factor.


I forgot to mention it in my equipment summary, but I have the iPhone for the super-wides during the day (it isn't good enough at night unfortunately) so that compliments the walk-around zoom lenses.
35mm equivalent FOV:
This is for environmental portraits, which is essentially the main subject of my work.  I shoot mostly travel with family and friends and the subject of these films is the people interacting with the environment.  Combined with the distance I am normally standing away from the subject, this is about the right FOV.  
If I went wider then the people are smaller in the frame than I'd like and if you get closer to compensate then lens distortion becomes undesirable.




It's also good for landscape shots too:

80mm equivalent FOV:
For things that are further away.  When I first started travelling with the 3-prime setup I took the Helios 58mm F2 with a non-speed-boosted adapter but found the 116mm equivalent FOV on the GH5 to be too long - it was too much of a gap and I found myself swapping from the 17.5mm prime to the Helios and then swapping back.  The gap between the 35mm FOV and 116mm is a 3.3x increase in focal length.  I have since bought a M42-M43 speed booster which remedies this.



So now that I've moved to the GX85 and the crop factor in 4K is 2.2x, the FOV of the lenses is:
Laowa 7.5mm F2 is 16.2mm FOV TTartisans 17mm F1.4 is 37.4mm FOV (2.3x previous) Helios 58mm F2 with SB is 90.6mm FOV (2.4x previous) The 20mm F1.7 would be a 44mm FOV, which is a bit too tight in my experience.  
Of course, if I use the 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 zoom during the day and 12-35mm F2.8 for walking around "well-lit" places at night, the only use for the primes I would have is for very low light situations where I can shoot slower and take the time to MF properly.  In terms of what those situations demand, I'm not really all that sure.  
The Olympus 75mm 1.8 might be a useful addition for super-tight low-light shots, although it might be a pretty specific lens.  I want to capture what I see, so it's not a case of going out with a lens and finding the frame, it's a case of going out and experiencing things and capturing the most that I can.  What use cases would the 75mm f1.8 capture that the 14-140mm F3.5-5.6 couldn't?
If I had the budget, the 20mm F1.7 is so small that I could easily fit it into my bag, but the 15mm F1.7 is also a lot smaller than the TTartisans 17mm F1.4 as well that either one would work just as well, except that the 15mm is wider.  The 4K from the GX85 can always be cropped slightly without much impact to image quality too.  
I already own the 17mm F1.4 so it's not a case of having a preference, although the 20/1.7 is 2.7x the price of the 17/1.4 and the 15/1.7 is 4.4x - so budget might have had something to do with it!  I was using only fast manual primes, but now I've come to value AF over DOF, so the primes are relegated to low-light duties, however if I could get fast AF primes then that would be desirable too.  It's probably something I'd look at upgrading to over time, assuming I stay in the MFT system, of course.

The 50mm f/1 Noctilux vignettes like crazy on full frame.

I'm thinking about replacing my old Pana 20mm F1.7 (with slow and noisy AF) with the Oly 17mm F1.8. I find I commonly use around 18mm as a focal length on zoom lenses, so having a fast (and quiet) prime at that length makes sense for me.

Script and partial shortlist written. Ready for action tomorrow night when wife is out, so hopefully no interruptions!

For me, my willingness to use kickstarter is perversely whether or not the company already has a track record of delivering quality products successfully, either through kickstarter or through other platforms.  Like recently, I backed a 4x10 film camera being made by a guy who has been selling a well-regarded line of pinhole cameras for years.  I'm very confident that it will ship eventually.  I've thankfully only been burnt a couple of times on pretty small things for products that never delivered...  products that delivered and were awful?  That's another story.
Anyway, as I said, my interest in it, if I have any at all after it's released, would be as something I can mount on the back of a telephoto lens - or as something that can turn a pretty normal portrait lens into a long telephoto.  Could be nice for travel where (at present) a long lens (200mm+) is a big and heavy thing that I often leave home.

Yes, that’s fair enough and should there be a situation where there was some provenance or personal connection, I would also make an exception.
’My’ experience was monthly updates of a company swanning around the world, asking for evermore amounts of cash for increased swanning. Until they pulled the plug and refused to allow anything or anyone else to carry out the project 🤨

Yup. Had my fingers (wallet) burned over a revolutionary tripod I backed. I can't remember how long the saga went on for, but it was at least 3 years and painful for all involved. Never again!
But in regard to this product, maybe I am just not the market, but nah, I'd rather go with any number of alternative existing options or my phone. Surely this kind of thing these days is so niche it's near pointless? But what do I know...

Yeah, phones are getting really good now, with RAW and Prores and Apple Log and recording to SSDs.  The thing I think is missing is a wide-angle selfie camera.  Trying to film yourself using an ultra-wide but without being able to see yourself is possible but hitting record, then turning the phone around, and shooting while presenting a bright image of the frame to everyone around you is strange and awkward on almost all levels!
I don't know if the diopters for action cameras also have NDs.  They might, considering that a diopter is as technical/geeky as an ND would be, but action cameras are practically designed inside and out to have a short shutter, so it kind of goes against the whole ethos in a way.

You assume correctly.
 
Yeah, I'm not saying in any way that it's perfect or that I don't get why a lot of people prefer a wider angle.  It's why Sony came out with the ZV1 II - I just wish they hadn't taken a note from Canon and taken away a useful feature for every other useful feature that they added.  The next time I buy a new iPhone (probably when the new one is announced later this year), it might even remover that use of the ZV1 for me since the newer ones can apparently record to an SSD now.
I assume that there are also close-up diopters for those action cameras that also feature ND?  One of the reasons that I shy away form using any of my action cameras for that kind of thing is that it's annoying to have to remember all of the necessary accessories and it's a bit fussy to have to put them on/take them off when the light changes (e.g. when walking into a building).  With the ZV1, I just push a button and an ND filter pops into place.  🙂 

Also, even if I were still regularly vlogging, I definitely wouldn't be trying to do it at the Vatican.  When traveling abroad these days, I pretty much bring the GFX 100 II and a few lenses (and maybe a DJI Mini 3, depending on where)...  and maybe a film camera, depending.

Cool you have a setup that works for you.
I guess the thing that I noticed with the different focal lengths was that you needed the width to make it look like you weren't holding a camera.
I assume this angle is the ZV-1 on the handle?

Whereas this is a GoPro on a similar handle:

It just doesn't have that same "I'm holding you as far away from me as I can!!" sort of vibe 🙂 
I do recall parts of Asia also having signs up that said "No selfie sticks", as well as places like the Vatican IIRC?  The Vatican also doesn't allow tripods either, so not sure how the handle would go if it splits into legs.
Make Art Now also got a reasonable frame with the Insta360 Ace Pro by putting a diopter on it to shorten the focal distance:
But, in the end, it's what's in front of the camera that matters 🙂