solovetski

Decision made, I am getting one.
Why? Because I have spendyitis vulgaris?
Nope. Because it's only the second time in my life I have been inspired by a camera.
The last time was Spring 2011 when the original Fuji X100 was announced.
I drove 200 miles to a trade show in March to see and handle the thing and knew instantly it was right for me so preordered and had one of the first available in the UK.
It arrived the day prior to my first wedding of the season so I took it alongside my pair of Nikon D3S's with big boy zooms.
It was an instant revelation shooting bridal prep right up to the point the battery ran out of juice which coincided with the end of bride prep. Oops.
Viewed the files when I got back and preferred them over the so called 'pro' camera files. There was a certain 'filmic/organic' look to them that has never been replicated by any camera I have ever used.
I bought some more batteries and increasingly used that little guy over my pro cameras before actually shooting a large chunk of the season with just the X100.
With hindsight, that was a little bonkers so as soon as the X Pro-1 was announced for the following year, I preordered a pair plus all 3 launch lenses and dumped the big Nikon stuff.
Again with hindsight, it was probably a bit much/too little but I traded 'image quality' and joy of use for outright capability and range.
Nothing has come close since.
OK, the X Pro 2 did and so did the XH1 and more recently, the S1H, but none of these have really captured the intangible magic that the original X100 did.
Today, I reckon a X100V might, but I think I have been there and done that now and it would not be another 'X100 moment'.
I am pretty sure the Zf will be. I'm not expecting to get those same 'filmic/organic' files that the original X100 produced. I think that was off it's time, but instead, at the very least, the ethos and joy of using such a set up. But so so much more capable and without the shortcomings (crap battery life, super slow start up time and AF) of the X100.
My education and career was for 5+ years on F2's or 3's, - it's that long ago, I'm not entirely sure so there is some heritage there just as my first proper camera was a Fuji STX2 that my grandparents gave me for my 16th birthday, which fostered a sense of nostalgia when I went fully Fuji in 2012.
I have maybe 7 seasons left in this industry. We'll see about that, but 30 years I think is probably long enough and I think I am heading back to my roots and Nikon to see out those years.
Not 100% committed yet, but I do have a need now to have something relatively lightweight and compact and around 35-50mm for at least 50%+ of my stills work so am going to get a Zf with the 40mm f2 SE lens as a very minimum for that very purpose.
Beyond that, it's in Lumix's hands... They either produce a S2R or S2H within the next few months, or it will be Nikon all the way for me. It might still be Nikon regardless, but I need to give Lumix that chance because it will be a big and relatively costly move.
Or it could even be a Nikon/Lumix mix as my S1H could easily be re-purposed into the mix as my dedicated static longer form video capture tool at which it excels.
 
 

I hope that unlike the Z9/Z8 that Nikon have got their supply act together otherwise it could be a long wait to get one even at the new price.
It looks to have the same/similar processing clout in it as the big cameras so who knows whether that might be an option further down the line.
Unless RED have got a super specific patent on "RAW video shot at above 23.89999999 fps inside a camera shell that looks quite reminiscent of classic SLR cameras from the 20th century made by a manufacturer whose name begins with N and who were founded on 25 July 1917 at roughly midday local time".
Because they might well have 😉
 

I've worked with a film director Chinese-Portuguese from Macau I simply find unique, even though to come to my mind another one from past also 'cause the way they work with female characters:
https://wolffianclassicmoviesdigest.wordpress.com/2019/07/07/george-cukors-way-with-women/
 
I invite everyone of you to pay attention to her career... here is her most recent motion picture released in China these days (September 28, 2023), more specifically Hong Kong production -- where she got her master's degree after graduated from Taiwan:
 
Her debut as director is this one:
https://www.cgiii.com/trailers/item/sisterhood

I would probably only use high resolutions (4K and up) for projects with a heavy amount of VFX which is where I would find the ability to scale and reframe useful. Or if I specifically want that super crispy look. In term of visual quality FHD and 2K are more than adequate for narrative films. Most movie theaters are only projecting 2K DCP. 35mm film prints were only about as sharp as 720p. I even kinda prefer a softer look, and I suspect a lot of others do considering how many people use high res raw shooting cinema cameras, and put vintage lenses and diffusion filters on them. Many of my favorite films are shot on 16mm, and I've always loved that soft, grainy look. 
I'm a big fan of/greatly respect David Fincher, who uses the highest resolution cameras he can for more flexibility. I personally don't like shooting this way. I prefer to have less flexibility in post. I get optional paralysis and would be too tempted to keep tinkering and tweaking endlessly when the options are limitless. It's easer to force my choices in production because the options and time are limited enough to allow me to make some snap decisions, or to force other decisions. I'd rather get the look I want in-camera.
I'm more interested in seeing how upscaling software will advance. The martial arts action film The Raid, which was shot on the Panasonic AF100 (remember that camera??) is being upscaled/remastered in 4K and the frame grab samples released by the director look good.
 

F1.2 was the maximum, or F1.0 if you count the EF 50mm F1.0
F1.4 was the norm, a balanced option much smaller than F1.2
Look at the size of an EF 50 1.4 vs the F1.2, much smaller, or smaller still the Canon FD or Olympus OM 50mm F1.4
It's tiny
F1.8 or F2 was for sharpness, F1.4 for portraits, softer skin, more ethereal look.
Now in the mirrorless day, there's not many RF lenses at F1.4.
They're either enormous F1.2, or cheap shit.

My recent purchase decisions have very much been lens driven and the R3 has been on my radar for a while as the near perfect body for me as I prefer a built in grip to a detachable one, but at the same time do not care for the weight.
So Z9 vs R3 = a win for the R3.
But then it falls apart for pretty much the reasons Andrew stated.
My favourite lenses are the Tamron; 20-40, 28-75 G2 and 35-150, only available or can be adapted to Sony & Nikon, ie, I could stick all of those on a Z9 but none on a Canon.
Also, the Sigma Contemporary line; 20, 35, 65, 90, 105 and 28-70. Sony or L Mount only. I like these for video work as they have both an aperture ring (well the primes do) and a manual focus switch which is part of the overall combo why I shoot L Mount for video.
The only lens I actually like in Canon RF mount is the 28-70...but it is monstrous...and if I was to choose the R3 as my next stills camera, although I could live with this combo, it's not a 'one and done' combo because I could live without going wider than 28mm, but need longer than 70 and there isn't that much scope to crop with the R3.
But having said that, it's still a near 2.5kg combo when the Sony A7RV + Tamron 28-75 is only about 1.5kg and can be cropped hard.
Lenses have been my issue for well over a decade, partly because I have avoided Sony and to be fair, with good reason as until recently, I have found Sony cameras to be a bit meh. The A7RVa was the first that actually ticked the box and the A7RV even more so and I am struggling to see a better option for me for stills than that A7RV + Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 G2 combo as it ticks...well every single box.
Canon though, they have never been able to entice me into spending any money with them. Owned probably 50+ cameras but never a Canon.

I can say I personally switched away from Canon (despite LOVING their cameras) when my R6 got lost because of the RF mount. When I bought it I figured more options would quickly become available, but there's just no reasonably priced upgrade path, unlike with L mount. You either buy crappy plastic 1.8 primes or 2500$ ultra amazing lenses.

I've been looking at film, not as the ideal reference to replicate, but as a data-point to help understand what we are seeing.
What I have been noticing is that on film, finer detail is present but at a lower contrast ratio, whereas digital keeps the same level of contrast regardless of the size of the detail (up to the sensor resolution limits, and subject to the lens characteristics of course).
For example, here's an image from Game of Thrones, shot on Alexa/RED:

and here's a closeup:

Notice that the individual strands are basically as bright as the larger areas of his hair, right up to the resolution of the file.
Same with this closeup of an image I posted earlier:

There is a little bit of contrast loss in these examples, but lenses and compression are also in the mix too.
Contrast that with this shot from the original Blade Runner, which was obviously shot on film:

Here's a closeup from the above:

Note how the individual strands have far less contrast with the background than the more solid areas with many strands of hair.
Here is the MTF chart of Kodak Vision3 500T, which confirms these observations.

So, what is the actual resolution?
<snip> see below.....
Ironically, digital sharpening methods have a completely inverse response - they increase the contrast on fine detail rather than decreasing it.  
So, digital cameras take a readout from the sensor that has an essentially flat MTF curve, and then apply a transfer function that does the exact opposite of what film did.
Awesome..... screw you too!
Food for thought.

The a1 has by and large flown under the radar so its diminishing price on the used market does make it an interesting proposition a bit down the road to do a poor man's 10% of the price / 90% of the image version of the Burano with one.
Need a name though.
Base it on the Venice* obviously, so it has to be something with lots of canals.
But a bit more rough and ready to reflect the price.
And a bit more northern for the dourness and attitude.
Right, the Birmingham it is then.

 
* Fun fact is that Birmingham is one of the gazillion places referred to as the Venice of the North but in actual fact it should be that Venice is called the Birmingham of the South as Birmingham actually has more miles of canals. All built by order of The Peaky Fucking Blinders presumably.

As you can see here with this Sony rep and his Zeiss CZ.2 lens, shaving those precious millimetres off the camera has revolutionised the way he shoots.
And that is before you even get to the main raison d'être of a 1.4kg weight saving vs VENICE 2.
That 1.4kg is crucial and a game changer when you have 35kg of tripod head, rails, cages, matte box, monitors, EVF and lens attached.
He must really feel the difference in his back all day long.

Here is one of our most adventurous and creative shooters, Nino.
As you can see the size of the BURRITO is once again a total game changer here as it allows the lovely new Cooke to move back a few cm making it necessary to break your wrist to reach it.
The added advantage here is that your hand forms a lens hood, reducing that nasty flare from the single coating!
And as we can see, the ENG style rig high up on the body definitely isn't unbalanced with a high centre of gravity from all the shit mounted on the top handle!

Finally we have the more minimal rig here.
The 2.8kg BURRITO clearly needs the 68 rods under it and a tripod head the size of a bus. Otherwise the whole thing would collapse, giving an unprofessional aura to the shoot.
I think that is an absolute brick of a battery on the back which is all part of the absolute game changing form factor as a cinema camera.
Have you EVER seen a rig like this before!?
REVOLUTIONARY!!!
Yours for only $25,000!
*Or just get a Sony a1 with same sensor from cash converters

SONY BURRITO

Great read and recap! Thank you! @kye I feel, like my LX15 is almost everything i need in the image quality department but that is for my personal work of course. Or maybe beyond? I got inspired by this great but slippery camera to shoot personal stuff again. The slippery tiny body forces me to shoot, frame, move and conceptionalize in the moment with care and dedication. The odds of ergonomics become a challenge and by practice actually great. Realizing its advantages, there are many of them, this camera has indeed become my favorite personal camera. It equals my love I had for my old time favorite, the legendary G6.
Image quality is plenty. That 8bit codec in 4k is the same as in the GX85 and punches far above its weight. Grain, texture, color palette are beautiful. I shoot in vivid for gradeabilty in post. I got this advice from reading Harrison Kraft giving advice on his LX. Ooc colours are okay in this profile, in other profiles really gruesome what made me diguise this camera right after purchase. Thanks gosh I was wrong about it.
Another thanks to kye for elaborating on pushing the color in the color profile or at least not berobbing the camera of it, due to the logic that the processing is before codec compression.
So, filming in vivid and taming the peak of highlights down to around 768 in post and the image becomes already much better. Working knee and toe, saturation, coolness and warmth and I am already close to what i like. That is in the classy 8bit 4k, no 10bit in sight or needed, cheek in tongue.:) The HD 50p 25mbps codec on the other hand is pretty gruesome. On a side note, the tiny 10mbps codec for 25p 720p on the GX85 is surpisingly strong, which sounds admittedly silly. But that's what I had to find out on accident when I filmed an important family celebration in 720p glory. Of course I was silently screaming "Shyte, I fxxxked up big time this time!" when I wanted to drool over some of my cinema verité awesomness. 😊 But surprise, it held up pretty good regarding achievable hues and color work. Just another example how good even now super affordable or cheap 8bit 709 cameras have become. A Sony A6000 with the 50mbit codec update is an interesting prospect in that regard and would be the ultimate 1080p S35 8bit 420 somewhat pocketable hybrid cinema camera. Lotta categories of greatest cameras. So every fan finds their altars. 😊
Lens on the LX is beautiful. Such a magnificient rendering in all focus lengths. Btw, as many of you know, in 4k the LX15 has only 2/3 inch sensor estate. Still trumping a G6 in lowlight, despite the m43 sensor of the G6, which is four times the area size. I call the LX my personal 16mm cinema pocket cam. I don't mind the missing S16 and be happy with close enough to 16mm powerhouse.:)
Here is a repost of Harrison Krafts video. Thanks to this guy I started doing personal work again.
 

Another great bit of advice I got in my early days was to go study paintings.  Particularly Vermeer's and Caravaggio's.  
As an idiot that didn't understand what made a nice image work and a bad one fail, just analyzing and deconstructing the craft of painting helped a ton.  Absolutely brand-dead simple ideas like having your subject brighter than the background (contrast) confounded me as a newbie, but once I started seeing the techniques like that in practice I couldn't unsee it, and I got better.
Which is why I'm pretty camera agnostic these days.  There's so many fundamental techniques that need to be in place and exercised to create awesome images.  Grabbing the most expensive camera/lens doesn't accomplish that for you, it only assists.

I've learned a lot about film-making over the years, most of it came through discovery and experimentation, but the best film-making advice I ever got was this...  
See how much contrast and saturation you can add to your images
This probably sounds ridiculous to you, and I can understand why it would, but hear me out.  Not only is it deceptively simple, but it's hugely powerful, and will push you to develop lots of really important skills.
The advice came from a professional colourist on some colour grading forums after I'd asked about colour grading, and as I make happy holiday travel videos it seemed to be a logical but completely obvious piece of advice, but it stuck with me over the years.  The reason I say "over the years" is that the statement is deceptively simple and took me on a journey over many many years.  When I first tried it I failed miserably.  It's harder than it looks...  a lot harder.
The first thing it taught me was that I didn't know WTF I was doing with colour grading, and especially, colour management.
Here's a fun experiment - take a clip you've shot that looks awful and make it B&W.  It will get better.  Depending on how badly it was shot, potentially a lot better.
It took me years to work out colour management and how to deal with the cameras I have that aren't supported by any colour management profiles and where I had to do things myself.  I'm still on a learning curve with this, but I finally feel like I'm able to add as much contrast and saturation as I like without the images making me want to kill myself.  I recently learned how the colour profiles work within colour management pipelines and was surprised at how rudimentary they are - I'm now working on building my own.
The second thing it taught me was that all cameras are shit when you don't absolutely nail their sweet-spot, and sometimes that sweet-spot isn't large enough to go outside under virtually any conditions, and that sometimes that sweet spot doesn't actually exist in the real-world.
Here's another fun and scarily familiar experiment - take a shot from any camera and make it B&W.  It makes it way better doesn't it?  Actually, sometimes it's astonishing.  Here's a shot from one of the worst cameras I have ever used:

We're really only now just starting to get sub-$1000 cameras where you don't have to be super-gentle in pushing the image around without risking it turning to poop.  (Well, with a few notable exceptions anyway...  *cough* OG BMPCC *cough*).  Did you know that cinematographers do latitude tests of cinema cameras when they're released so they know how to expose it to get the best results?  These are cameras with the most amount of latitude available, frequently giving half-a-dozen stops of highlights and shadows, and they do tests to work out if they should bump up or push down the exposure by half a stop or more, because it matters.
Increasing the contrast and saturation shows all the problems with the compression artefacts, bit-depth, ISO noise, NR and sharpening, etc etc.  Really cranking these up is ruthless on all but the best cameras that money can buy.
Sure, these things are obvious and not newsworthy, but now the fun begins....
The third thing it taught me was to actually see images - not just looking at them but really seeing them.
I could look at an image from a movie or TV show and see that it looked good (or great), and I could definitely see that my images were a long way from either of those things, but I couldn't see why.  The act of adding contrast and saturation, to the point of breaking my images, forced me to pay attention to what was wrong and why it looked wrong.  Then I'd look at professional images and look at what they had.  Every so often you realise your images have THAT awful thing and the pro ones don't, and even less often you realise what they have instead.
I still feel like I'm at the beginning of my journey, but one thing I've noticed is that I'm seeing more in the images I look at.  I used to see only a few "orange and teal" looks (IIRC they were "blue-ish" "cyan-ish" and "green-ish" shadows) and now I see dozens or hundreds of variations.  I'm starting to contemplate why a film might have different hues from shot-to-shot, and I know enough to know that they could have matched them if they wanted to, so there's a deeper reason.
I'm noticing things in real-life too.  I am regularly surprised now by noticing what hues are present in the part of a sunset where the sky fades from magenta-orange to yellow and through an assortment of aqua-greens before getting to the blue shades.
The fourth thing it taught me was what high-end images actually look like.
This is something that I have spoken about before on these forums.  People make a video and talk about what is cinematic and my impression is completely and utter bewilderment - the images look NOTHING like the images that are actually shown in cinemas.  I wonder how people can watch the same stuff I'm watching and yet be so utterly blind.
The fifth thing it taught me was how to actually shoot.
Considering that all cameras have a very narrow sweet spot, you can't just wave the damned thing around and expect to fix it in post, you need to know what the subject of the shot is.  You need to know where to put them in the frame, where to put them in the dynamic range of the camera, how to move the camera, etc.  If you decide that you're going to film a violinist in a low-bitrate 8-bit codec with a flat log profile, and then expose for the sky behind them even though they're standing in shadow, and expect to be able to adjust for the fact they're lit by a 2-storey building with a bright-yellow facade, well... you're going to have a bad time.  Hypothetically, of course.  Cough cough.
The sixth thing it taught me is what knobs and buttons to push to get the results I want.
Good luck getting a good looking image if you don't know specifically why some images look good and others don't.  Even then, this still takes a long time to gradually build up a working knowledge of what the various techniques look like across a variety of situations.  I'm at the beginning of this journey.  On the colourist forums every year or so, someone will make a post that describes some combination of tools being used in some colour space that you've never heard of, and the seasoned pros with decades of experience all chime in with thank-you comments and various other reflections on how they would never have thought of doing that.  I spent 3 days analysing a one-sentence post once.  These are the sorts of things that professional colourists have worked out and are often part of their secret-sauce.
Examples.
I recently got organised, and I now have a project that contains a bunch of sample images of my own from various cameras, a bunch of sample images from various TV and movies that I've grabbed over the years, and all the template grades I have developed.  I have a set of nodes for each camera to convert them nicely to Davinci Wide Gamma, then a set of default nodes that I use to grade each image, and then a set of nodes that are applied to the whole project and convert to rec709.
Here's my first attempt at grading those images using the above grades I've developed.  (This contains NO LUTs either)

The creative brief for the grade was to push the contrast and saturation to give a "punchy" look, but without it looking over-the-top.  They're not graded to match, but they are graded to be context-specific, for example the images from Japan are cooler because it was very cold and the images from India were colourful but the pollution gave the sun a yellow/brown-tint, etc.
Would I push real projects this far?  Probably not, but the point is that I can push things this far (which is pretty far) without the images breaking or starting to look worse-for-wear.  This means that I can choose how heavy a look to apply - rather than being limited through lack of ability to get the look I want.
For reference, here are a couple of samples of the sample images I've collected for comparison.
Hollywood / Blockbuster style images:

More natural but still high-end images:

Perhaps the thing that strikes me most is (surprise surprise) the amount of contrast and saturation - it's nothing like the beige haze that passes for "cinematic" on YT these days.  
So, is that the limits of pushing things?  No!
Travel images and perhaps some of the most colourful - appropriate considering the emotions and excitement of adventures in exotic and far-off lands:

I can just imagine the creative brief for the images on the second half of the bottom row...  "Africa is a colourful place - make the images as colourful as the location!".


In closing, I will leave you with this.  I searched YT for "cinematic film" and took a few screen grabs.  Some of these are from the most lush and colourful places on earth, but..... Behold the beige dullness.  I can just imagine the creative brief for this one too: "make me wonder if you even converted it from log...."

 

I can see Nolans point of view, I personally had to disconnect the internet in my work office because its too distracting, even told my boss to get me one of those dumb phones since we were required to take phone calls.
Only three times a day did I connect to the internet, when I came to work, after lunch and 30 mins before the workday was over, and all of that, was to check and reply to emails as those are primary source of tasks including updating the progress on various jobs online. 
I really hate working on computers in general for the simple fact its easier to draw concepts on paper than it is to make one in a computer says it all.
It even went to the point where if I had no idea what to design or create, I had to walk out the office, go sit somewhere, and I probably sit there for 2 -3 hours just drawing madly in my notes until the boss had enough of that and I quit 6 months later for burn-out. 
The world is so connected today its honestly mind blowing when people complain they are "lonely" in life, well I wonder why? Most people sit in their little echo-chambers feeding narcissism and other toxic attitudes, the days of social gatherings ended and I am so thankful to have actually lived in an era before social media just so that I personally know what it is like having to meet friends and go out do something, we used to go photography trips together a lot, but no one wants to do it, why? Oh they got smartphones now, it take pictures, they are bored of it.
Thats another problem, ease of access, makes things boring, there no struggle, there no challenge to anything thats easy, why work hard when you can work easy? Right? What took a team of 3 people to make a magazine design, is now pushed onto suckers like me who have deadlines in 1 week. 
The thing how Nolan was missing out is true to many extent, people making groups in social media and chatting away, but in my 14 years of experience, I never seen these groups ever do anything productive, its always toxicity brewing eventually. But if you were to meet out for a drink, thats rarely the case mostly because everyones too drunk to care. 
 
I miss the analogue world, and while I do appreciate the modern wonders, too many side effects.

Peter Doyle (colourist on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc) speaks about how closely we can reproduce the colours in the real world.  Spoiler: no.  (linked to the relevant timestamp)
 

Yeah I had the same concern watching YT reviews before I bought an R7, I think it's mainly the users though, not the camera. 
I have both the R7 and the Lumix S1 plus som GH5s. Definitely a bit lower DR on the Canon compared to the S1, but not a big deal overall. Watching where you put your exposure and doing a good rolloff curve in post is much more important than actual numbers in my opinion when it comes to DR though. Seems pretty close to the GH5s IMO

I never thought about it that way but I think you're right......  Sony delivers enormously expensive firmware updates, they just come with a free camera!

At least…
I think they should have either launched the GH6 sooner than they did, or waited even longer and gave it PDAF.
For me, it was a moment like when Fuji released the XH1 only to pop out the XT3 6 months later.
GH6 and S5ii…
I know we can’t always have everything we want, when we want it and the GH6 ticks a lot of boxes for many but the lack of phase and the need to shoot what is it, 2000 iso to get the most DR requiring a lot of ND? 
I went off it at that point and tried an OM-1 which I loved…except not so much video.
M4/3 died for me then. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, just that APSC and FF offers me more of what I personally want.
I would like to see the format developed and who knows. I never say never, just what works.

The wait for the GH6 was years.
I suspect any GH7 might not be perhaps as long but I wouldn’t imagine anything sooner than 2025?
Just speculating…

Was this color graded? Yes, heavily (and no LUTs) like all of my videos, to create the "illusion of reality."
Think National Geographic video of meerkats - no film-like color tints or distortions; rather see the habitat and watch the activities of its inhabitants as if you were there. But with humans, unlike with animals and birds, one cannot hide or wear a disguise or shoot with an enormous lens.
Some good stills too:

I don't think so. It looks like zoom lens for Canon XL1 camcorder. It has 3X 1/3 inch CCD sensors and "an exclusive XL lens-mount system". You can put EF lenses on that camera (with special adapter) but You cannot put this lens on C100 camera.

Just to share a little personal story - the S5 II really restored my fun in shooting little personal video's. I shoot almost daily for work and I always swore by large cinema camera's. I'm one of those crazy people that thinks an Ursa mini is the perfect body shape. (part of this is copied from a Reddit comment I made earlier but I thought it would be interesting to share here).
For the longest time I was really torn up between having a kit that is able to capture what I consider to be professional quality and something that I actually would WANT to bring with me on a walk or a day out. I carried a little Pocket 4k (GREAT camera) with me, but by the time you rig that out to shoot comfortably with a monitor/filter holder/NDs/mic, you’re still carrying something that takes up most of your bag and it just sucked the fun out of it for me. On a job, no problem, for home video’s it just wasn’t worth it for me. I was really looking for something I could just pull out of a bag pack and shoot.
So then I bought a Canon R6, and honestly that camera’s video quality was such a massive step back from even the Pocket 4k that it just wasn’t worth it for me (esp. dynamic range but also the out of camera colors). Also just awful awful video assist tools on that camera.
The S5 II kinda hits all the marks for me: very small, good enough dynamic range, good colors, good monitoring tools and good AF (better than the R6 in my opinion) on my EF lenses. That last thing (combined with it being newer, so longer firmware support) pushed me over the edge when compared to the S1H by the way. I don’t mind pulling manual focus at all, but if I’m shooting on a 3 inch screen, the AF is really nice to have. Never felt like I could really trust it with the R6 but the S5 II has really really good autofocus.

Here's somethign small I shot with it:
 

I knew it.
I went to Perth WA for an entire week once and it was just too quiet.
You could pull up for instance and park right outside a restaurant on a Friday evening without a problem.
There was a big movie being filmed around the same time elsewhere and they needed a lot of extras, so it makes sense now why the artificial city of Perth was so quiet.
My brother lives there now. Says he does but now I realise that is a lie. My own family lie to me. What is this world coming to?
Must dash, I have Aslan and Mr Tumnus coming round for breakfast shortly.
Conspiracy theorists 🤣

Ah!  When I read "S16 sensor size pocket love" and I saw the lovely organic colour grade I took the word "pocket" to mean the OG BMPCC...  You did very well!
The more I learn about colour grading (and other post-production image manipulations), the more I realise that the potential of these cameras is absolutely huge, but sadly, un-utilised to the point where many cameras have never been seen even remotely close to their potential.
The typical level of knowledge from solo-operators of cameras/cinematography vs colour grading is equivalent to a high-school teacher vs a hunter-gatherer.  I am working on the latter for myself, trying to even-up this balance as much as I can.
As you're aware I developed a powergrade to match iPhone with GX85 and it works as a template I can just drop onto each shot.  Unfortunately I am now changing workflows in Resolve and the new one breaks one of the nodes, so it looks like I will have to manually re-construct that node, which I have been putting off.
I've also been reviewing the excellent YT channel of Cullen Kelly, a rare example of a professional colourist who also puts knowledge onto YouTube, and have been adapting my thinking with some of the ideas he's shared.  One area of particular interest is his thoughts on film emulation.  To (over)simplify his philosophy, he suggests that film creates a desirable look and character that we may want to emulate, but it was also subject to a great number of limitations that were not desirable at the time and are likely not desirable now (unless you are attempting to get a historically accurate look) and so we should study film in order to understand and emulate the things that are desirable while moving past the limitations that came with real film.
I recommend this Q&A (and his whole channel) if this is of interest:
As I gradually understand and adopt various things from his content I anticipate I will further develop my own power grades.  
I'm curious to see how you're grading your LX15 footage, if you're willing to share.

Wow, that is small!  I'd love something that small..  it's a pity that the stabilisation doesn't work in 4K or high-frame-rates.
Having a 36-108mm equivalent lens is a great focal range, and similar to many of the all-in-one S16 zooms back in the day.  I love the combination of the GX85 + 14mm f2.5 + 4K mode crop as it makes a FOV equivalent to a 31mm lens.  I used to be quite "over" the 28mm focal length, preferring 35mm, but I must admit I did find the 31mm FOV to be very useful when out and about, and having the extra reach is perfect for general purpose outdoor work.  I want to upgrade to the 12-32mm kit lens, which gives the GX85 a 26-70mm FOV in 4K mode (and 52-140 with the 2x digital zoom for extra reach).