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"For Canon to offer such a tantalisingly beautiful 4K image in such an ill suited form factor at $12,000 is an avoidable situation because they could easily have put this sensor and 4K image in a C100 form factor for $6000 and owned the professional video world like they do stills with the 1D X. Sadly a huge added value with minimal overheads won the day."   I see where you are coming from.   However, we are on week 7 of an 8 week feature film shoot, during which we have gotten away with things using the 1DC that never would have been permissible with another cinema camera, including C100-500 range. The form factor of this model means we can basically shoot without permits - and as your article makes clear, when one says "shoot" with the 1DC one genuinely means shoot, in a movie camera sense.   You talk about the menus and how some things are buried and not custom designed for movie shooting and again I see where you are coming from - but there are some custom buttons. These can be used to immediately switch into a mode you arranged yourself earlier. Haven't done that yet, admittedly, so every time we shoot I first clear all camera settings and spend a few minutes selecting my preferences.   We are shooting the entire film in Portrait, as Canon Log didn't seem enough of a leap and Portrait in 4K has a great look that I don't expect to grade much at all: it's a lot more like shooting on film where you try to work 'in camera' to a greater degree than you did with digital video in its infancy...   We're using two 128GB CompactFlash Memory Card Professional 1000x UDMAs which I think are 140 speed or thereabouts and two batteries and have never run out of memory or power. If one is shooting cinema in 4K on this camera, you need two of each really, and then I don't see problems. To be honest, I am more amazed the camera can do what it does without noisy fans etc. You mentioned systems struggling with footage but using a Retina Macbook Pro and Final Cut we find the 1DC's 4K footage always plays smoothly and natively, provided the files are on the Macbook itself (when they play from an external drive, it's slow mo) so while I don't want this paragraph to seem glib, my point is that with good equivalent equipment, the progressive 1DC does not cause a problem. Indeed, one would expect it to need equally advanced gear to operate at this resolution 24 times a second.   The point I really agree with you on, though, is the crop thing. I am not technical, so don't really understand this issue. But what I would have preferred and expected frankly is them using the entire frame and down-converting that to 4K, not simply dumping anything that falls outside 4K. I have heard that doing it the way I suggest can create issues and this may have been why that was avoided. But frankly I don't accept that. They should have used the entire sensor and poured all of it into the final 4K image. One of the reasons we chose this camera (and avoided the small sensors of the Black Magic 2.5K camera and the ridiculous JVC 4K model) was the large sensor. This is an area where the whole 'twelve grand for this?!' argument does actually have some merit in my view.   The rushes are stunning, this rivals 35mm film and has its own look.   We can shoot a movie digitally and nobody really notices us!