Internal 32-bit float stereo paired with lossless 120mm reach from a 20mm lens — all inside a genuinely pocket-sized 10-bit 1-inch sensor gimbal camera?

[Emanuel]

2 hours ago, kye said:

You make excellent points, but it really comes down to your perspective.

The detail from the 8K will be completely irrelevant, except in cinemas, where exactly zero people will ever watch this footage.  The extra DR will absolutely be visible, even on smartphones, even with a film emulation applied, and especially because these cameras are designed for wide FOV shooting outdoors where there is a high probability of having huge DR (and even the sun) in the frame.

We can look at images in controlled lighting, this is true.  However under such conditions the vast majority of cameras from the last decade will look just fine.  In fact, if the older cameras have the same bit-depth in their codecs but less DR then they might look BETTER than the modern cameras as the bits will be less stretched!  
So if we're going to compare modern cameras in very controlled conditions then the comparisons should include the vast hundreds of models released in the last decade or so, but if you do mention them then people go berserk because these older cameras fall short in other areas, and you can make a good argument that the controlled tests are nice but not entirely sufficient for evaluation.  In which case, the stunning differences in DR between these cameras is now back in the consideration and the DJI is miles ahead of the Luna.

To summarise that a bit, if you're taking everything into consideration then the DR really matters and if you're not then why aren't you comparing dozens of older cameras, and if you desperately want a tiny gimbal but only shoot in controlled conditions then isn't that a niche application so narrow that it really can't be justified to evaluate the cameras overall?

In terms of me reminding people that lower DR 1080p cameras are fine for many practical tasks, this is true, but modern camera releases have basically nothing to do with practical tasks at all.  There is no justification for 8K codecs.  Period.   The justification for 8K sensors that let you crop 2x for a 4K image is borderline but fine.   Then there's 17K - seriously...   Most camera discussions departed reality long ago and the discussions about this or that camera have the same rigour as discussing which super-hero can win against which other super-hero.

Fair enough, and I think “it really comes down to your perspective” is already much closer to what I have been saying from the beginning : )

 

I would only question “completely irrelevant”, 'cause and when you immediately acknowledge the principal practical justification for an 8K sensor:

Cropping twice into a 4K image ; )

That is precisely where the additional detail becomes visible in the comparisons posted above, particularly with the tele shots and whenever the image is cropped and magnified.

8K is also useful for extracting high-resolution frame grabs : P

 

So yes, I concur that the Pocket’s additional latitude may be much more valuable in a wide, uncontrolled, high-contrast exterior scene. The Pocket 4 Pro remains high on my wish list, of course : )

But in a shot requiring additional reach, reframing or magnification or yet, genuine DSMC use ; ) the Luna’s resolution may be the advantage that actually matters too : )

Which brings us back to perspective, purpose and the particular shot, rather than to any single universal verdict on the two cameras.

 

Let alone the POV Head Tracker, detachable screen, internal 32-bit float stereo audio (all game-changers) and the rest of the Luna’s modular shooting concept ; )

 

E. :- )

[kye]

2 hours ago, Emanuel said:

Fair enough, and I think “it really comes down to your perspective” is already much closer to what I have been saying from the beginning : )

 

I would only question “completely irrelevant”, 'cause and when you immediately acknowledge the principal practical justification for an 8K sensor:

Cropping twice into a 4K image ; )

That is precisely where the additional detail becomes visible in the comparisons posted above, particularly with the tele shots and whenever the image is cropped and magnified.

8K is also useful for extracting high-resolution frame grabs : P

 

So yes, I concur that the Pocket’s additional latitude may be much more valuable in a wide, uncontrolled, high-contrast exterior scene. The Pocket 4 Pro remains high on my wish list, of course : )

But in a shot requiring additional reach, reframing or magnification or yet, genuine DSMC use ; ) the Luna’s resolution may be the advantage that actually matters too : )

Which brings us back to perspective, purpose and the particular shot, rather than to any single universal verdict on the two cameras.

 

Let alone the POV Head Tracker, detachable screen, internal 32-bit float stereo audio (all game-changers) and the rest of the Luna’s modular shooting concept ; )

 

E. :- )

Everything you said above can be copied and pasted a decade from now when people are arguing if a 32K sensor is better than a 16K sensor.

On the 32K sensor you can crop in more..  it's great for high-res frame grabs.. cropping in 9 times instead of 8 times!

The problem with such discussions is they're unconnected from reality.

What CAN you do with an 8K image that you CAN'T do with a 4K image?  Both have enough resolution for cinema.  Both have enough resolution to pull frames and print them on billboards.  Both have enough resolution to win an Oscar...  etc.

All this is beginning to sound like people arguing they need a 150MP doorbell camera to be able to live with themselves.

[eatstoomuchjam]

5 hours ago, kye said:

The detail from the 8K will be completely irrelevant, except in cinemas

Minor nitpick: 8K will also be largely irrelevant in cinemas!  At least near me, many of them still broadcast 2K on most of their screens, with maybe one or two set up for 4K projection.  Only the most eagle-eyed audience members could even theoretically notice a difference in 4K and 8K projection at a viewing distance where they could see the entire screen at once - and outside of maybe a nature documentary, even among those viewers, it's hard to imagine them caring much.

5 hours ago, kye said:

There is no justification for 8K codecs.  Period.

Not true. 
Aside from digital zoom without substantial quality loss, as you mentioned, a number of VFX use cases, especially those involving masking something out, are improved by having the highest-resolution source material available.

That and in theory, you'll get better color information putting 6K or 8K on a 4K timeline, assuming the use of a Bayer sensor.  Remember that it's necessary to guess at the values for 2 out of 3 colors for every pixel when debayering footage.  From what I remember, and I might remember wrong, this means that the readout from Bayer sensors is effectively 4:2:2.  Downsampling from 6K or 8K gives you something that is more effectively 4:4:4.

As to whether that matters to you, maybe none of it does.  In practice, modern debayering is very good and I'm not really sure that viewers are ever going to notice a difference in 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 once at 2K resolution or above.

5 hours ago, kye said:

Most camera discussions departed reality long ago and the discussions about this or that camera have the same rigour as discussing which super-hero can win against which other super-hero.

Correct.  A 4.6K Arri is still preferred in many productions to an 8K camera from another vendor.  The FX5 is going to sell a million bazillion units despite being released as a 5K camera in an era when all of the competitors are at 6K or higher (also assuming that some of the firmware weirdness and constant rebooting to change settings can be fixed).  There are still cameras being released today using the same IMX410 that was in my Z Cam E2-F6 that I bought in 2018.

The Ronin 4D was one of the best product ideas that DJI ever had (really, the Osmo Raw was, but the execution was too clunky).  They were never going to compete with Arri in the space where people use Arri - so take a real pain point from a lot of productions (gimbals are irritating to use/balance and are often disconnected in operation from the attached camera) and fix that.  Now you see the 4D showing up in all sorts of productions - because it's the best camera ever made and wins the spec sheet wars?  No.  But the quality is good and it's an elegant solution for some problems.

[Anaconda_]

Just chiming in to say I was working with someone recently who was extremely happy with his Osmo 4p. Never having to balance a gimble ever again etc.. However, they said the one problem with this cameras is they're too light, which makes it more susceptible to up and down movements when walking. Their solution, which really made me laugh, was to mount it onto their regular camera, Blackmagic 6kPro, and use that as basically a paper weight.

I'd stupidly assumed they were getting double angles of everything! 

[Emanuel]

17 hours ago, kye said:

What CAN you do with an 8K image that you CAN'T do with a 4K image?

That is precisely the point about limits, already laid out rather extensively in my post on the previous page... although I may have to start charging royalties if we keep returning to it ; )

  

17 hours ago, kye said:

The problem with such discussions is they're unconnected from reality.

No way : ) This discussion is precisely about how measurable advantages translate, or sometimes fail to translate, into real-world use.

Additional dynamic range matters when the contrast of an actual scene demands it. Additional resolution matters when a workflow requires cropping, reframing, stabilisation, VFX work, digital reach or high-resolution frame grabs. None of those are imaginary specification-sheet exercises. They are perfectly ordinary practical uses.

You may not need any of them in your own work, which is perfectly fair. But that is quite different from saying that 8K offers no valid practical advantage over 4K at all.

Reality is precisely where those limits are established ;- )

[kye]

This is a forum for people that shoot with budget hybrid cameras.

None of the above points relate to what anyone here is actually doing with their work, or whoever they're showing it to.  Completely contrary to that, Dynamic Range is something I struggle with in real-world shooting for a large percentage of the shots I take.  
The idea that they're somehow equally important is beyond imagination.

I'm done.

Feel free to continue the discussion about pocketable 8K gimbal cameras, 17K sensors, 150MP doorbells, 5000fps smartphones, or whatever theoretically true but practically irrelevant things you want.

[Emanuel]

22 hours ago, kye said:

This is a forum for people that shoot with budget hybrid cameras.

None of the above points relate to what anyone here is actually doing with their work, or whoever they're showing it to.  Completely contrary to that, Dynamic Range is something I struggle with in real-world shooting for a large percentage of the shots I take.  
The idea that they're somehow equally important is beyond imagination.

I'm done.

Feel free to continue the discussion about pocketable 8K gimbal cameras, 17K sensors, 150MP doorbells, 5000fps smartphones, or whatever theoretically true but practically irrelevant things you want.

Again? : ) Nobody said they are equally important. Not even close. That is not the position anyone here has argued at all, but a dismissive caricature of it, no less. And misleading. Period.

 

What has emerged from several contributions here, including yours and mine on the importance of DR, is simply that their practical value depends on the shot, purpose and workflow.

Extra DR matters in both controlled and uncontrolled high-contrast scenes, perhaps even more so in the latter. Fair enough.

In other cases, reach, reframing, stabilisation, VFX or high-resolution frame grabs may matter too. Budget hybrid cameras, you said? ; ) Correct.

Those are real-world uses as well.

So saying that none of this relates to anything anyone here actually does is rather sweeping, given that more than one person here had already pointed to practical uses for higher-resolution capture while also acknowledging its limits.

Nor is this only about one camera. More will come, including the Pocket 4 Pro with those extra stops, and naturally we will discuss where such advances matter and where their limits begin.

 

This is a camera forum : ) It is the right place for disagreement about cameras, specs, footage and real-world use. Not for theatrics, personal point-scoring, showing off or ego contests. None of us needs to perform as the final authority here, as so often happens on internet forums.

“More useful for one workflow” is not the same as “practically irrelevant to everyone else”.

Either way, life goes on, and so does this thread. Your contribution has been useful, as have those of others. We do not need to agree.

You are one of my fav contributors here, and clearly one of many people’s favourites too. That gives your words more weight, but also more responsibility.

Being a valuable contributor does not give any of us the right to be unpleasant to others. And that last reply was unpleasant. And unbalanced. Prima donna behaviour is no more attractive on a forum than on a professional set. In my work, I simply cross prima donnas off the list. I have neither the time nor the patience for them.

That is worth remembering for all of us. You, me, everyone.

And there is no drama here. This is only a disagreement about cameras. You were the one who announced you were “done”, as though an ordinary disagreement had become rather more serious than it really is.

Perhaps you're simply in a bad mood today (it happens to all of us). But your interlocutor should not have to pick up the bill & pay the price. Almost impossible to take a different position from yours without it turning personal (if not at first, up there you kept escalating until it did, at least this time...), as if disagreeing on a point meant challenging a supposed “authority” : X (phew)

No hard feelings anyway, count on it :- )

[mercer]

I question the need for 8K for any use. I understand some people shoot in uncontrolled ways and would rather reframe in post than compose their shot during capture. I understand people like Fincher prefers working this way. I understand that it is great to have extra resolution for VFX.

But how many users of these types of cameras need these features? We're not discussing sweeping Hollywood sci-fi epics.

That said, I believe the next huge indie film, shot from some kid in the middle of nowhere, will probably use one of these cameras.
 

So if having 8K slates helps the vision come to life... that's really great. For me, I'd rather have the extra DR and I'd love that Osmo Raw that @eatstoomuchjam referenced. Hell, I may be able to afford that now. Hmm. 

[Emanuel]

Go figure, I still have a 4K BenQ TK800 gathering dust 'cause, for what I actually need most of the time, our little 1080p GV50 units do the job perfectly well ; )

And then there are our 1080p XGIMI MoGo 2 Pros too. We actually bought several of them for our facilities instead of going for the newer MoGo 3 Pro or even the MoGo 4 (the latter even comes in a Laser version), although both were already available by the time we acquired ours.

And yet, I religiously keep my good old 22-year-old XGA (1024x768) BenQ PB6200 in my office! LOL : )

BTW, 768p has pretty much become our new norm for the MiniMax H3 work we've been doing locally on our Olares system, even though 2K is available in the cloud.

And there are some pretty good ways of bridging that gap in post anyway:

Topaz Video with Starlight Precise 2.5 when maximum quality matters, SeedVR2 through ComfyUI when we want to keep the whole workflow local, or simply Resolve Studio 21's Super Scale when we want to stay inside the NLE.

Different tools, different trade-offs, same principle.

 

For me, in the end, what matters with every new tech development is simply what we can actually do with it. Horses for courses. Nothing more.

No need to be fanboys of any particular brand, format, sensor size, resolution... or even of any poster here! : D

Brand-agnostic, format-agnostic, tech-agnostic ; )

 

Use whatever gives you something useful, for the sake of the art and whatever the state of the art happens to be. (E. :- )

[Ilkka Nissila]

8 hours ago, mercer said:

I question the need for 8K for any use. I understand some people shoot in uncontrolled ways and would rather reframe in post than compose their shot during capture. I understand people like Fincher prefers working this way. I understand that it is great to have extra resolution for VFX.

But how many users of these types of cameras need these features? We're not discussing sweeping Hollywood sci-fi epics.

That said, I believe the next huge indie film, shot from some kid in the middle of nowhere, will probably use one of these cameras.
 

So if having 8K slates helps the vision come to life... that's really great. For me, I'd rather have the extra DR and I'd love that Osmo Raw that @eatstoomuchjam referenced. Hell, I may be able to afford that now. Hmm. 

If you have 20 mm and 60 mm as the equivalent focal lengths that are available, the wider angle makes sense for including oneself in the footage, and showing a bit of environment, which must be a common thing in social media. However, at least I would preferentially shoot with 35 mm or 50 mm a lot of the time. By starting with an 8K sensor, you can get more detailed crops that mimic those lenses at least in angle of view. Of course, you lose light in cropping so the quality won't be the same as using one of the native options, but it is probably less damaged than if you start with a 4K sensor and crop from 20 mm to (say) 50 mm. I'm personally perfectly happy shooting in 4K with a 35 mm full-frame mirrorless camera and doing a bit of cropping doesn't really bother me, but the camera that I use makes the 4K footage by downsampling from 8K resolution, so even in the 4K file (typically for me Prores 422 HQ), there is a better starting point for cropping than if I had shot with a 4K native sensor camera (due to the Bayer sensor not registering all colors for all pixels natively). I think 20 mm would be extremely wide to shoot everything with (that's what the DJI Pocket 4P's magical sensor produces, 20 mm equivalent footage), and I'd want to moderate the angle of view a lot of the time to something in the 35 to 50 mm range. Thus the sensor resolution is likely to play some role in the practical quality that can be obtained. 

 

Although I like the idea of a camera that has a gimbal and can be just taken out of the bag and used, and I commend DJI for bringing the long-in-development LOFIC sensor into an actual consumer product, neither of these cameras (luma ultra and Pocket 4P) are really for me as I basically never do videos with myself in the footage, and the 20 mm equivalent angle of view is just not what I want from a video camera. Cropping (to get an acceptable angle of view) from a small-sensor camera is going to make noise more visible and detail less clear. I think use of a gimbal on a heavy full-frame mirrorless camera is painful for the setup that is required. Eventually I think some good compromises will arise, with moderately light total weight, internal (optical) zooms that don't require recalibration after FOV change, better integration of camera controls into the gimbal user interface, and some digital signal processing that is optimized to reduce the gimbal motor noise from on-camera audio tracks (this will require work on the motors themselves and the processing) are likely to make things more practical for me, but for now most of the time my gimbal is just not being used. 

 

With regards to the dynamic range, I'm used to slide film from long ago and when using it (for still photography) it was essential to photograph in what we called good light, which meant light that was suitable for the material, with no exposure latitude whatsover, and I still try to choose where I shoot so that the subjects and the scene will look good straight out of the camera where possible. With my camera the top video dynamic range is 12 stops and I've not run into anything that would make that feel inadequate, given the starting point of acceptable conditions for photography to begin with, in fact it feels wildly liberating what kind of post exposure adjustments are possible today. I would argue that if there is a situation which requires higher dynamic range, then alternatives probably result in better quality: use lighting for the main subjects in the foreground. If the scene can't be lit then shoot in a location which gives better results without lighting. Post-processing has its limits and I would argue it is not easy to mimic really good lighting on a scene with high contrast but no light (or too little light) on the subjects in post-processing. However, if you can use and benefit from 17 stops of dynamic range, by all means use it if available. I think my life is easier by carefully choosing where the original material is shot. 

[eatstoomuchjam]

10 hours ago, mercer said:

For me, I'd rather have the extra DR and I'd love that Osmo Raw that @eatstoomuchjam referenced. Hell, I may be able to afford that now. Hmm. 

I quite liked it, but do know that if you're trying to capture anything with sound, the fan noise on the raw is really obnoxious.  The image was pretty nice, though!