Leaderboard

  It isn't an excuse. I don't need one to give Canon a hard time.   Facts speak for themselves. 5D Mark III is $3000 and D5200 is $700. Look at the video. They're giving similar results.   I don't shoot with a flat profile on a DSLR it doesn't make sense. You trade important stuff like gradation, good skintones and colour for like ONE STOP extra dynamic range, and increase noise especially in a low light situation. It isn't worth it. Both grade similarly and have similar dynamic range - in the daylight shootout you will see that.   Clean HDMI on the 5D Mark III doesn't yet exist so until that day comes you're just speculating as to what it might be like.

It's the eleventh hour for the GH2, but it will still be a few months before I have its replacement in my hands so I am still trying to get the best possible performance out of it. And I'd still like to hang onto it as a B-cam, but not until I work some issues out. I did a full-range ISO test of my GH2 with the Flowmotion 2.02 settings, starting at 12800 and working my way down to 160. I did this after reading a little more about the GH2 ISO bug. Initially, I had read that if you wanted to use ISOs 320, 640 or 1250, you had to switch the camera on and first go to [i]any[/i] higher ISO, and then back to one of these three to minimize noise. Then I did some more reading on Personal-View and apparently what you want to do is go to the next ISO increment up, and then back down to the desired setting (so if you want ISO 320, go to ISO 400, then back to 320; if you want 640, go to 800, then back to 640). This seemed to result in a MUCH cleaner image than my initial tests with the first image. The footage is pretty usable up to ISO 1250, at least with the Flowmotion hack. What really surprised me was this: [img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_13/gallery_18451_13_3510.jpg[/img] ISO 160 Flowmotion 2.02 Noise enhanced for visibility 500% crop [img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_13/gallery_18451_13_74801.jpg[/img] ISO 320 Flowmotion 2.02 Noise enhanced for visibility 500% crop This tells me that working around the ISO bug as I have talked about above, ISO 320 is actually much [i]cleaner[/i] than 160. In fact, it's the cleanest ISO (at least with this hack on my camera). Thoughts?

http://vimeo.com/60135187 Let's pit the $700 Nikon D5200 against the $3000 Canon 5D Mark III and see which one comes out alive.  

Novo Digital Camera have created a custom housing for GoPro 3 that lets you fit C-Mount lenses and even disable auto exposure using a custom CPU!   Pretty cool huh?   Apparently it's pretty complex (and thus we can assume expensive to make) so it won't be a product to buy, but they will be hiring them out.    Just goes to show how far you can go with a mod if you have the expertise...   More info here: http://www.viewfactor.net/blog/?p=331

Probably better in one of the D5200 topics, but...     From this thread: http://www.eoshd.com/comments/topic/2120-nikon-d5200-review/page-3

Even more impressive. My hat is off to you. That was a real feat to tackle all of that and come out with a product this good. Congratulations! 

Finally plucked up the courage to try a ML nightly build (today's) - the anamorphic squeeze in live view works & isn't disabled once you press Rec!   It can do: x1.25 x1.33 x1.5 x1.66 x2   The only downside is that it judders a bit when you pan, but this doesn't affect the end result - it also seems to highlight moire a lot more, so that's handy.   Hasn't crashed on my 60D all afternoon.   Oh! There's a new look interface!

  I'd be upset if a $700 was this close to the $3000 one for video as well!

  Appreciate some of your comments but it is clear I have a different opinion when it comes to Canon, price and image quality! I have physically tested the 1D X and I have seen a lot of original video files direct from the card, plus other people's very valid and comprehensive comparisons to the 5D Mark III and I still don't believe the image is that different. Maybe a very slightly better way of handling highlights and a different look to resolution when viewed very close-up but nothing to warrant the extra $3000. For you the extra seems worth it because of the better build quality and weather sealing. Not denying it isn't a nice camera but I have better things to spend $6000 on, especially since the Blackmagic Cinema Camera has the better dynamic range, smoother gradation, better colour, finer noise grain, less compression and much more creative workflow for half the price of the 1D X.   Canon do indeed have a whole lineup according to budget, it is just that the budget end of it is rubbish. Whoever is still shooting on a 7D, or 600D for example could be getting a better image for the same budget price tag from any number of rival cameras such as the GH2, GH3, D5200 and D7100. The budget Canon range still has some advantages but the video image is not one of them I'm afraid.   The upgrade path is crazy expensive too. It goes from the $1000 range pretty much straight to the 5D Mark III at $3000 - that's a lot extra for the 'little guy' as you put it. Then it doubles to $6k then doubles again to the 1D C level. The game has changed under $3000 now with the Blackmagic and a lot of strong budget DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.

  I disagree about not being able to judge picture quality from the raw footage but what you see here HAS in fact been graded quite heavily. What do you mean by 'not that similar'? To the 5D? It is very similar. Grades about the same - 5DtoRGB or not!     May I draw your eye to 1:00 on the shootout? Yes that is moire on the 5D Mark III shot - centre top - it twitches a bit towards the end of the shot. The D5200 actually has slightly less.     It's a real pain we've had to wait over a year for something that should have been in there in the first place. If they are going to start disabling stuff and reenabling it later maybe I can 'disable' part of my payment too and give them the extra money when it is de-crippled at some unspecific later point.     You're wrong.     You're wrong.

Hey guys. cheers for the comments. @ Andy, yes these are helios 44's. A superb base for the concept. They are sharp and characterful out of the box. 'tanks' as you say:) a superb design. I wouldn't say any 'improvements' are made optically, rather they have worse optical properties!, or should I say, properties lens manufacturers try to remove in order to get cleaner images. Obviously sharpness is maintained, but various tweeks are made to element coatings, tints are applied to give more or less temperature to element glow, to match or contrast the colour of the flares created by your choice of anamorphic lens, anti flare/glare properties are tweeked by machining the inside barrel and metal components. As a result these are less contrasty than a typical standard helios 44. -Almost to the point where you'd want a lens hood on bright days in order to limit the glare to only be prominent in situations where there is a light source in shot, at which point the magic happens. These are certainly not lenses for slick product photography shots, but more for a grungy look, or to add a bit more of a vintage look to the modern and sharp anamorphics which give the lovely bokeh and waterfall distortions but can often lack a bit of visual adhesive we see on the old panavisions and 16mm anamorphots. Once attached to the anamorphot they do a nice job of boosting the general rawness of the image and the lens defects that often result in creation of those lovely optical artifacts. @Brucker. Cheers man. The machining adds a bit of an industrial look to the old and tired helios form. Though these are crisp and sharp looking on the outside, they are graggy/grungy on the inside:). They are not a direct replacement to your standard tired helios 44 - Personally i would say you would want a standard helios in your kit alongside one of these, these are in no way better than a standard helios 44, but just different. If someone wanted a standard helios 44, but with the nice machined finish on the outside we can do this too. @Mondo. Glad you like them:) They will be available soon (within a few weeks). Just sorting out the information, packaging and deciding on the options that will be offered. We will be putting them up on ebay or as direct purchase slightly cheaper if it avoids ebay and paypal fees. I'll send over a sample to EOSHD and let him have a play. Will be nice to see what the master thinks

 

"A lot of people make the mistake of thinking low ISO means low noise. Low ISO means the noise starts showing up further into the shadows, but if your image is darker because you are using a too low an ISO, it will still have more noise. In most cases with cameras with hardware gain like the FS700, for example if you use 1stop higher ISO, your whole signal will be boosted by one stop and your noise might start showing up half a stop higher in the shadows, but that means you may have brought 1/2 a stop of your shadows out of the noise. This is a bit of a simplistic description, but you get the idea. The actual tradeoff will depend on the design of the sensor, but for hardware gain (up to a certain point, and some other cameras use software gain past that point) increasing ISO will usually give you less noise for the same scene, right up to the point when its too high an exposure and you have to stop increasing ISO to save your highlights. Really high ISOs are noisier because they are used to shoot scenes with very low lighting. Noise is worst when you have too little light or when you underexpose your images, but those are not the same thing, since you can have too little light, but you will only make the situation worse by shooting at a very low exposure by setting too low of an ISO value. This is why we have ISO/gain..."   ----   I saw that posting on a board and it raised some questions....   Let's say I'm shooting on a cloudy day (exteriors only) and I put my ISO from 500 up lets say 1000, and I put the ND filters down, will I have less noise than if I shoot with the 500 ISO? Thoughts?

  That is why I said effective f/stop. And according to the documentation, with the Speed Booster, the effective focal length and f/stop are indeed changed. I'm not confused.

I haven't seen a side by side test like this so I decided to create one. The video is uploading on Vimeo but I suspect that the compression will make it difficult to gauge, so here are some screen grabs. Please click to view full screen: [center][img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_14/gallery_18451_14_61391.jpg[/img][/center] [center]*I should also add that each stripe was sampled from the center of the image.[/center] [center][img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_14/gallery_18451_14_298073.jpg[/img][/center] [center][img]http://www.eoshd.com/comments/uploads/gallery/album_14/gallery_18451_14_670092.jpg[/img][/center] My previous tests concluded that ISO 320 was the sweet spot. However, when I did the same test this time, ISO 320 gave me a lot of macro blocking. Bizarre! I don't believe that I changed anything between last time's test and this one. To me, these images suggest that you'd be best off parking it in ISO 640 and leaving it there. It's also interesting that different ISOs seem to have different color casts.