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Yeah, both things are fine by me. Afterwards, where you explain what you bought, for what price, and so on... It'll be up to the people on the forum and me as a judge, to check whether it is within the spirit of the competition not just the rules. For example, if you find a total bargain but it costs £1000, and you sell the lens for £800, ending up with a fancy camera for £200... I'll score that very highly in the Treasure Hunt category, but maybe there will be a balancing category where people who only spent £100 on a camera body and used a £20 Russian lens but made it look amazing, out numbers your score in the Treasure Hunt. So key is to do well in all categories and be within the spirit of the cheap camera competition, not just to find the best bargain. Also, unless the lens is actually sold, until that happens you'd be outside the rules, always a temptation to hang onto the lens isn't there!! Yeah, the deadly possibility of being morally obliged by all EOSHD forum users to post your camera to the winner is there to stop people getting too spendy!!

The results of my morning walk yesterday.... Not an official entry (I may as well just put the camera in a box now in preparation for shipping it..) just a kind of proof of concept test. I went for the "it's rubbish, so mess it up and make it look like early film" but I know very little about early film, so there you go. Equipment used: Panasonic GF3, Super Takumar 55mm f1.8, generic 0.7x m42 to m43 SB. Graded in Resolve. Things I learned: It's difficult to focus on a fixed LCD screen with no MF assist functions It's kind-of pocketable and the tiny fold-out Manfrotto Pocket worked well for low angles on the ground, benches, rubbish bins, etc People really get freaked out... one guy walked into the middle of my shot, stopped, pulled out his phone and using selfie mode had a good look at me and took a photo. All the time I'm just standing there looking at the screen on the camera and thinking "get out of my shot! why couldn't you have just walked though it like a normal person!" I should have added way more film-grain in post to survive the YT compression The camera has no manual controls in video mode, but if you set the camera to manual stills mode, 1/50 and base ISO then you can adjust ND/aperture to expose correctly, then when it auto-everything's in video mode it should get a 1/50 with base ISO.... it should do, anyway. This wasn't shot with an ND, just in dark conditions, and some of these shots weren't set up right so shutter angles will be all over the place. I took a photo (RAW still) and video from the same location, then overplayed them in post to compare. Whomever manages to get 4k will absolutely kill everyone else.

Thought others here might find this interesting, although it was shot in NZ.... it was actually done a long way away from myself! Down in NZ's South Island.

@Mattias Burling that makes sense. I don’t care about winning, I see this as a way to mess around with some older cameras I’ve always wanted to test. In fact, the safe bet is to buy the cheapest camera possible since I could lose it if I come in dead last.

Here is an S1 frame grab with my beloved contax Zeiss 50mm 1.7, this was shot in HLG and hasn't been graded at all, just pulled from rec2020 back into rec709. I think the color and dynamic range speaks for itself:

Yeah I need to not cheap out and buy that one. Minimum focus distance on the 28mm with the one I've got is about 2 nautical miles.

I would think that peoples skill and creativity will be way more of a deciding factor that the negligible "improvement" 4K gives in a sub $200 camera. Post something online and it will. Same as everything else. Use what ever you like but it might be taken into consideration by people. If it feels ok, it probably is. Anyone ridiculing another persons work in a learning exercise is either jealous, an idiot or a bot. You only need to ever care about constructive criticism and there is never any ridiculing in that.

I was contemplating not entering because I was pretty sure I'd be last.. Maybe the 'cheapest camera you can find' is a better approach? I do like the sound of that

In my mind you can do whatever you want and then state your case afterwards. If it feels ok it probably is. The goal is a sub €200 camera and if it's €220 that will be taken into consideration. So if it's neck and neck between two videos and one was under budget it will win. I really don't think we need to have the rules in such detail for a friendly competition. Personally I'm not trying everything to max the budget, instead I will try to go as low as possible. I mean a store here has a used GH4 in the sub €300 so a G6 or GX80 is probably doable. But what's the fun in that

Yeah, @quivering_member.. we made Australia great again some time ago before it got trendy. ???

https://egpu.io/external-gpu-buyers-guide-2019/ https://www.notebookcheck.net/Aorus-RTX-2070-Gaming-Box-with-Dell-XPS-13-9380-Review.413819.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-RTX-2070-Laptop-Graphics-Card.384936.0.html https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-05-08-rtx-2070-vs-gtx-1080-7001 https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N2070IXEB-8GC#kf

Not to mention import taxes :O I once bought some headphones from overseas and got slapped with a $200 bill when it entered the country. Customs held it ransom until I paid them. Although even with the import tax it was still cheaper than if I'd bought it locally ? On top of that Australia's wages are significantly higher than ours. So we get to enjoy high product prices AND low wages (although on the bright side I guess at least our government doesn't hold refugees indefinitely in offshore detention centres to the point that they set themselves on fire and then prosecute them for attempting suicide)

As I started this mess I wanted to give an update some time later AVC-I at 400 Mbps beats the xxxx out of ProRes 422 and I could not see any difference to ProRes 422 HQ at naked eye and pixel peep Looking for explanations I believe is due to two things 1. intraframe predictive coding on 16x16 blocks that achieves high level of compression than standard discrete cosine transform in ProRes 2. CABAC entropy encoding squeezing additional bits without loss in the clips It is difficult to average what the benefits are compared to ProRes but is not difficult to see that they are at least 30% based on perceived quality As there are no fast enough SD cards this is limited to 30p on the GH5 but in terms of non RAW capture this appears to be very good And with this I think I have closed the case I opened myself

I am enjoying it. The firmware / V-LOG / codec is out in about 2 weeks and is already being tested. Definitely the most feature packed pro mirrorless cameras, more modern tech than the Sony bodies and one the best images you can get. Downsides? It's a big beast of a camera, definitely not 'mirrorless size' by the usual sense of it, definitely more like a DSLR with no mirror. Autofocus cannot be relied on for video and the Sigma MC-21 adapter has been very disappointing so far.

In this test they pit the Canon EOS R's DPAF against the Arri Alexa Mini with a dedicated focus puller, using a $100k focusing system. Keep in mind the Canon also supports touch to focus with a tablet or smartphone (though this was not tested). Which do you think did better?

So you enter two, one to win and one to lose and you have to send a camera to yourself!

I was pondering getting one of these to deliberately finish last with and spite the winner ! But I then discovered that, shockingly, the money they change hands for wouldn't actually fit in the budget. Must be because they are CCD and not CMOS so ergo must have more mojo .

There's other T3 drives with those speeds. I think it's a way faster bus than USB 3.1 https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1431353-REG/samsung_mu_pb1t0b_am_1tb_x5_portable_ssd.html

Great stuff. I think it was obvious from a visual perspective that it was shot on a phone, but after 10 seconds it wouldn't matter any more and it would all be down to the acting and story. I maintain that phones are very useful for what they do, which is essentially a camera with a slow / wide prime lens. Time spent not film-making because of equipment limitations is time wasted. I think discussions about equipment are fine as long as you're already shooting with what you have.

I love your search button! LOL : -)

I get the impression that it is a lightweight solution. 1080p it looks like tops. I know nothing about it but what I read in like 2 minutes or less lol. Another few to use. https://www.epiphan.com/blog/cloud-video-editing-platforms/

For those of us who are already editing from an external SSD, it's not really any different to plug the SSD into a desktop computer than it is to plug an eGPU into your laptop computer. It's more of a reverse docking. I keep all auxiliary files in my dropbox folder which are synchronized between my laptop and desktop, so the process is more or less seamless. But I get it that some people don't want to have 2 computers, especially if they're Apple users. Lately I've been toying with the idea of doing all of my editing remotely by running Premiere on my desktop computer and casting/remote desktop it to my laptop. What would have been even better would be to use a public cloud for editing. Should be possible, and should be able to give performance much higher than what we would get on our personal computers, but I haven't heard of anyone using it or anyone providing good cloud editing solutions.

Kipon with Close Focus is always my go-to for MFT. Takes care of the long focus distance inherited by the Leica mount.

Great video. Well I can see this not going to be an easy challenge!

Welp, ordered the Ninja V. We'll see how it performs.

The entire point of an eGPU is that it's an expansion for someone who needs a laptop (for whatever reason) but wants to edit quickly when they're 'docked'. I'll use my eGPU to create proxies, and then to do final editing and grading on the original footage when I've finished the edit. It will also be useful for doing quick edits. Surely someone here has gone down this path?

Really well done. I am sure the Bride and Groom were thrilled with it. Congrats.

I think a lot of people base their dislike about Smartphones if they have an older one., and by older I mean even a 2 year old one. My iPhone XS just kills my iPhone X I had and the X killed the iPhone 8 I had before it. They have been improving at a amazing rate. So unfortunately unless you keep up with the latest and great phone you are Way behind compared to say your friends 40D, because Canon has made nearly Zero gains on their lower end cameras. They used the same sensor for years and years. The Canon 80D my son had was a big let down output wise. Soft photos and soft videos. The DPAF was nice, but that was about it. A big, fat clunky body to boot. The EOS M I have has a better output than the 80D had, or no worse I think. Even the CS is better on the EOS M. Not a fan of the modern look they have now on their DSLRs. But sure if I was going on a vacation of a lifetime a Phone would not be my top choice. Probably a 1" mirrorless camera of some sort, or a m4/3, even the Canon M50. But in some places you probably are Only going to get away shooting with a phone.

I've only had an S1 available to me for about two weeks now. I've shot more stills than video — raw files hold detail really well even at 12800 iso — though I haven't quite gotten the hang of how the sensor fully works, recoverable detail almost seems split between shadows and highlights and will just take some practice and getting used to. Pretty robust sensor though! For video, the HLG profile is holding dynamic range very well, definitely a leg-up on the GH5 and NX1 that I'm coming from. Color seems fantastic. I've used the 24-105 kit lens for a couple quick, close-up b-roll shots and autofocus worked surprisingly well. Manual focus, even by wire, is surprisingly good too, lots of options and is repeatable. Ergonomically I like the camera — nice and beefy grip — some of the buttons are a bit spongy for my taste though. I shot a quick interview handheld the other day just using the video enhance IS (similar to the GH5's IS Lock) and I was definitely feeling the weight of the camera by the end of it, especially with the vertical grip. I'm very excited to see the big new VLOG update though, 14 stops of DR and V-gamut, this is going to be a beast of a camera.

I could test it on both as soon as I find the adapter. I have used it on Fuji and yesterday I was shooting some street with it on the EOS-R. It's a cool lens. Like always with 7artisans it's not clinically sharp, but I know you care as little as I do about that.

Fixed!

A couple more from the 7Artisans 28mm f1.4 that I got the other week.

My T5 1TB got it for EUR 139 from cyberport.de, no tax applies because we have no Boris in our land! : D

That is pretty damn good footage from something people might consider a Toy camera.