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I think your argument is based around the idea that lenses are an investment, but they're not, they're a consumable. I understand why you might think that, because it's a myth that seems to be on endless repeat in photography circles. To understand why I don't believe that lenses are an investment, have a look at the Camera-Wiki Lens Mounts page, or the Wikipedia Flange focal distance page, and see how many of the mounts are still in-use on a current model camera. There are things like PL, and EF (although its days are numbered), but the vast vast majority of them are essentially dead. Even if you take very good care of them (the best way by never using them!) they will still age and the rubber and lubricants will dry out, with plastics becoming brittle, and coatings changing over time (yellowing, for example). A second hand market does exist for some of the exotic lenses of yester-year, but unless you're talking about the pinnacle of the range, then they're worth very little. MFT is a dead mount in the same way that EF is a dead mount - it is supported by current flagship cameras with specs that remain desirable, but is likely to decline in the future. I would hesitate to call PL mount a dead mount, but anything else probably has the writing on the wall, it's just a matter of time. I invested in MFT glass considering it a purchase that I would use for a period of time, get value out of, and then at some point it would be worth nothing to me and likely to other people as well. Just like the shiny new camera bodies that everyone loves to salivate over. I have some of the most desirable MFT lenses around, but the total cost was still in the same league as buying a single camera body. In terms of the GH5 having been left behind, do a count of how many current model cameras can match the 4K60, or the 400Mbps All-I 4K 10-bit internal, or the 5K 10-bit open gate h.265. Odds are whatever it is you're using can't do that. There are some cameras that can, but odds are that I can't get them into a museum or historical monument without security asking me if I'm a professional, which wouldn't matter because my arm would probably fall off having to carry it around all day. All technology goes down in value over time. Relying on the resale value of any piece of equipment to justify its ROI is a recipe for losing your money. I don't understand why people think of equipment in terms of resale value - it's purpose is to be used, not traded.

This is a very strange one to me. I've seen online tests as well as examples from shoots I've been on of the Pocket 6k having really great dynamic range. Yet Blackmagic claims it has less dynamic range than the Ursa Mini and the same dynamic range as the Pocket 4k. Cinema 5d measured it at 11.9 stops while measuring the Ursa at 12.6. I tested the Pocket 6k against the URSA, both at 800 iso and the Pocket had more highlight and shadow information, by a good amount. If the Ursa has 12.6 stops of dynamic range the Pocket 6k has got to have over 13 maybe 13.5. I'll probably post the tests if anyone is interested.

So to follow up on that whooping 35 minute short film from Sigma, I just found that they'd released a Behind-the-Scenes video highlighting the crew's experience using the FP for the project and what their thoughts on it were! Gotta say, if Sigma continue to listen to the feedback they're getting on this camera and keep that in mind moving forward, I cannot wait to see what Sigma's followup camera to the FP will be like. They've got a monster of a camera on their hands, just iron out some quirks here and there and the next model will be insane.

Welcome to the "I discovered that something that 'everyone knows' is completely wrong by simply trying it out myself" club. If this was a real club then my rank would be 'Grand General Lord - Class 15 - Special' because the number of times I've spent 30 minutes doing a test and found out everyone online is talking out of their asses about something is beyond counting at this point. We should make t-shirts.

Huge update for the Sigma FP, allowing a total of three RAW flavors, and a lot of other thinhs. Here the list of enhancements : https://www.sigma-global.com/en/download/cameras/firmware/

The fact that this beautifully designed and engineered camera doesn’t overheat thanks to it’s clever use of a heatsink puts many other manufacturers to shame. They should thus take notice and pay their respects to this simple yet extremely elegant solution. It makes me even want to buy a Sigma fp just to support the company, even though I don’t really need the camera.

Went into the garden to test the new firmware I opened the CDNG's in photoshop, shot at full-frame with the Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar® T* 3.5-4.5/28-70, I'm happy with the results. all shot at 25 fps with firmware 2.0

The Rokkors. See https://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?92246-Minolta-Rokkor-Survival-Guide There's some good history and detail there. There are also reviews of individual lenses here: https://phillipreeve.net/blog/lenses/minolta-mcmd/ In terms of value for money, these are hard to beat. They have all the usual problems of old lenses designed for film when you use them on modern digital cameras, but if you want character and incredible colors, it's worth getting a few. I recently got the 55mm f1.7 Rokkor for about $40 on eBay and it's incredible.

Man, this new firmware update is MASSIVE. Definitely breaths a ton of new life into the FP and fixes a few of the issues that Caleb mentioned in his video! However, I feel it's worth noting that Sigma confirmed in a new interview with one of the sites that can't be linked here that they were ultimately unable to create a proper LOG/flat profile for the FP due to technical limitations... So apparently that's not coming any time soon for the camera. Not the end of the world, as I'd wager most filmmakers buying this camera are investing in it for the various RAW codecs it can provide internally and externally. Hopefully though the next model in the FP lineup fixes that issue and provides a LOG profile at launch. In cheerier news though, Sigma just released a whopping 35 minute long narrative short film shot entirely on the FP! Unsurprisingly, it looks pretty great.

Another one they need to make really is an EVF with in built recorder, something which is much more viable now with the tiny SSDs. Having it in an EVF format would add so much value to a lot of cameras, particularly fixed screen ones like the fp and Pocket4K/6K. In an ideal world, RED would license R3D directly to camera manufacturers to stop the hoop jumping and I'd presumed their link up with Canon over the KOMODO was going to do just that with the R5 but as far as I understand that isn't the case.

That shortfilm is second to none compared to every ”branding video” I’ve seen made with cameras in this price range. Really impressive.

They also fixed the flickering blacks with this firmware.

Maybe one day Atomos will take the hint about doing a 4K Ninja Star. Of course with the fp being able to record to an external SSD itself you would imagine it might be unecessary to use a full on external system anyway but I'm guessing this might be the only way to currently deal with RED's patent.

Nah! Medium Format is not far behind, they'll die out too. Large Format Digital photography is the only path forward now! And you're fools to buy into any other system which isn't large format.

Vintage

Canon should counter-troll Sony and push the announcement date after Sony, who moved theirs to after Canon. Imagine an infinite cycle.

The good news is that Camera Conspiracies will continue to be a thing.

Contrast this attitude with smaller Chinese companies like z-cam who have a ceo answering questions on Facebook and improving their cameras based on user suggestions. No usb-c just goes to show how slow and outdated some of these Japanese companies are.

In my opinion the camera industry could learn a lot from the open source community. Having so many exclusive patents and licenses really hurts the entire industry. Every single company would benefit from an open source compressed RAW codec. I think it is also what keeps us from better integration of the external solutions as well. We are never going to progress from a HDMI cables, because as soon as an external recorder connects more directly with a camera body, it probably counts as internal recording and thus violates the RED patent. It stops more modular designs. I would love to know what ideas and products RED's patent has killed off and whether this actually makes RED money in the long term. I don't think it does. Fair play to Mr Nattress. His work deserves long-term, rich reward. But come on. It's time to push forward together as one industry.

I would get a black magic monitor before getting a ninja simply because BRAW seem more flexible. And the BM has sharpening for display, that the Ninja does not. so focussing would be easier on the BM But since I have a smallHD Focus OLED I will stick with that and a 2TB Samsung t5 for now. ( and Slim-raw )

My kit is a GH5, a G85 and the GX85 as my c-cam. I bought the GX85 because I saw one used for $250US and figured if I found I didn't use it I could easily sell it for that, or even maybe a little more. After my first multicam shoot using it I was blown away. The IQ is in the same league as its big brothers, though the GH5 is superior for obvious reasons. The three though match pretty much seamlessly. Now when I go to grab a camera for something minor or for personal use, I pretty much always grab the GX85. Where it really blows my mind is when I pair it with the 35-100mm f2.8. What a combo! And you can pretty much bring it anywhere without anyone paying any mind. Throw a flip up/out screen and mic jack, and you'd have had a much more competitive "vlog" camera using 4 year old technology. Bonus if they'd included GH5/G9 AF updates.

This is unfortunately no longer true for fully electronic mirrorless lenses - which not only depend on system-specific protocols to function at all, but also heavily rely on in-camera digital geometry and vignetting correction. When a mirrorless system falters, you can pretty much throw away the lenses. (As it happened before with Nikon 1 and Samsung NX.)

I see the dilemma Panasonic had over costs, small size, and so on. What I don't understand is how they can justify such a stripped back G100 in 2020, but give us a superior-for-video GX85 in 2016 for < £500 with IBIS, it's small, cheap, minimal crop in 4K with an old sensor, I feel the parts donor for the G100 just isn't right. It should have been the GX85 with latest firmware features and fully articulating screen for vlogging. And if they wanted to go super-small, it should have been LX100 spec. Not LX100 II with the extra 4K crop. Instead they went for GX9 in even smaller body. Wrong choice. IBIS is a crucial unique selling point for YouTubers interested in Micro Four Thirds!

This is only for 8bit h264 mov and rather useless.

Sure, they're a consumable, but in general the maxim of "date your camera, marry your lenses" still applies. Lenses don't last forever but they almost always outlast cameras. I'm using some 50-year-old Minolta lenses on MFT and E-mount cameras, and could use them on L-mount and Nikon Z-mount among others. Those lenses offer a Leica look for a tiny fraction of the cost and with better lens-to-lens consistency than Leica. PL mount cinema lenses of any vintage can be used on any of these cameras as well with adapters. Camera technologies evolve faster than lens technologies, so you're likely to upgrade your camera much more frequently than your lenses, as long as adapters for your new cameras are available.

I watched the film on my 50inch plus tv and it looked beautiful! After a few minutes I totally forgot it was filmed with the fp.

dammit, i hate you guys, i just bought a ff lens made in 1971 and im looking at an even older lens..... Anyway i think you people have too much time on your hands 😛

Yeah, the only short film that I can think of that even begins to compete with it for me is A Different Beyond that Fujifilm used to promote the video capabilities of the X-T3. And that short had Matthew Libatique as the director! Sigma went all out with this short film. It's a genuinely compelling story being told by a talented filmmaker and cast and crew. The colors coming out of the FP look like something you'd see in a painting. Subtle, but rich. Sigma did seem to confirm that they're working on a new model in that same interview with the site that shall not be named and that they were aiming to continue to improve the autofocus on that model. Pretty vague overall, but it'd be nice if that were to turn out to mean that Sigma might switch over to Phase Detect autofocus at least. Like I said earlier; Sigma has a beast of a camera already with the FP. They could cause quite a storm in the industry if they implement the various key adjustments here and there that customers are suggesting for the successor model.

Just installed and tested the firmware, with the following results: - CinemaDNG recordings now have proper synchronized audio in Resolve, but Resolve still doesn't recognize them as CinemaDNG sequences, only as DNG stills sequences with attached audio. I.e. it does see them as clips, but only as folders containing DNGs, and you need to recursively import them ("Import folders and subfolders"). This also means that you cannot use Sigma fp's CinemaDNG in the Cut module. - In stills mode, the 0.1s shutter delay is unchanged. (Which also means the image you see frozen on the display after pressing the shutter is not the image that gets recorded/stored - you can test that by shooting a digital stopwatch.) So I guess this is a hardware issue and unfixable. 😞

Yes but it still looks amazing and is half the price of the 6K S1H, which is the only one to do the full 6K RAW output. To say it has line skipping artefacts is a big exaggeration in my opinion. The image is very nice. I am curious to see if the Super 35mm mode works in ProRes RAW / BRAW. Something else Sigma could look at in the future is a 1.3x crop mode for native DCI 4K RAW without the downsampling.

Yeh theres a fuck ton of vloggers and even more people aspiring to be. Even when you just search for a product review a lot of the time it'll be in a vlog format. And a large percentage of teenagers aspire not to be filmmakers, doctors, bricklayers, but vloggers. Panny really missed the boat on this one though. The camera they need to put out is an LX100 with flippy screen, mic jack and new sensor with no 4K crop and better dynamic range.

The main problem with the camera's RAW video still persists, even with external ProRes RAW/BRAW: It doesn't record a pixel-to-pixel 6K sensor image, but scales down the RAW from 6K to 4K - so that you get a pseudo-Bayer pattern with all kinds of visual/line skipping artefacts. :-((

External recording though. For me buying a tiny camera and then adding a lot of bulk around it(charging even more batteries), isnt for me. Then I rather have a bigger camera that I dont need to rig up. Allthough good news that braw is starting to move around to more cameras. Maybe on the next iteration they can do it internal.

The camera sensor and the phone's screen will be the same size!

I love how people seem to always say: "my phone can do this or that". Sure it CAN, but what about the experience and quality of the results? It just takes all the fun out of it. I feel more comfortable shooting on my Canon Point-and-shoot from 2004. -"But remember that shot they took in that Hollywood film? It was shot on an iPhone and you didn't even notice!" I don't really care. There will be new MFT cameras on the market for at least 5 more years, used working cameras for 20-30 years or more. I'll be about 77 years old (if I live that long). But shouldn't I invest in a system that I can keep for life and future generations? That's only true with vintage manual lenses. And anyway, I doubt anyone's grandchildren are going to care or want to use it. Great, now I'm depressed.

I got the same impression watching some comparisons. I wonder how much of this is simply Blackmagic worrying that they slightly overdid BMPCC6K, which could hurt their Ursa sales. Though, I doubt many people bought brand new Ursas during past two years.

I'm lucky that there are quite a few camera stores in Perth, but they're not my first port-of-call. I did buy my GH5 from one of them though, paying the associated markup, because I needed it urgently before a trip and wasn't willing to bet on shipping times, especially considering that it's common practice for ebay auctions to be listed as coming from Australia then they send you a message saying it's out of stock in AU but they'll ship from HK for free, and then it takes international shipping times. I've seen a few of the stores, and I think there is only really one or two that are focused on anything more than making sales. The ones that used to stock film, high-end bodies and lenses, and do servicing were more of a community feel, but have long since moved out of the main city area and may not exist any more.

The IBIS may be common or similar for most Japanese companies, including the one in Fuji (which had similar tech, but smaller sized components, since it sports larger sensors). I am guessing Olympus may have bene licensing it to some of them. True. Though Olympus has Full Frame lens patents, which they could have used for the L-Mount Alliance. Except, perhaps, they would have to figure which lenses would be covered by Sigma and which by Olympus (?).

Cheaper/easier/faster to just license the tech now from JIP?

Interesting take on the Olympus news here: http://www.sansmirror.com/newsviews/2020-mirrorless-camera/good-m43-news-bad-m43-news.html Particularly about some of the statements Olympus made in the run up to this decision.

After reading Thom Hogans take on this I am thinking there is a bit more hope on Oly surviving as a camera brand than before. It may well disappear from most parts of the world and may make fewer products in longer cycles but still might be something there. There is no certainty it will happen but if it doesn't I think their future will be bleaker than if it goes ahead. Many employees will be the losers either way I fear.

It seems Panasonic did not get their research right on this one 10 min limit in 4K for YouTubers... So that rules it out for monologues, interviews, live events, shows, a lot of YouTube content basically. 4K crop... On a camera for YouTubers who need wide angles for self shooting. No phase-detect AF like the Sony rival. YouTubers need reliable AF. No 5 axis IBIS. YouTuber's need IBIS. May as well use a G95.

Personally, I'm going to be on the lookout for cheap MFT gear. I don't need or want much more. I did the FF thing and went back as fast as I could.

Would be great if Panasonic got their AF and IBIS tech. Really the two things holding pana back right now. There is nothing like Pana/Olympus IBIS for vlogging

Driving home yesterday I saw a woman out walking with a bright orange coat and I realised that the scene before me was pretty much how the camera rendered the wedding shot in Italy - everything very low in saturation except a few spots of radical colour that basically don't look real. I guess that's how the real world actually looks. It's not how the world looks in most videos, and it's definitely not how we experience the world. I've had issues before with trying to get my blacks to sit at the right level. It seems like the difference between crushed and instagram-retro is less than the thickness of a human hair. Maybe I need to apply a node that boosts the signal by 10x then go through my whole timeline to equalise everything out and then remove the 10X node again. I sometimes do that with saturation, having a node that radically saturates the whole timeline and then I can look at all the thumbnails and see any clips that have an obviously different WB, which I can then fix and remove the node again. I'm committing every sin in the violinist shot. Underexposing a mixed-lighting scene with an 8-bit camera in log using a codec with a low bitrate..... in slow-motion. This specific shot taught me the value of higher bitrates and 10-bit colour. Unfortunately, this is what real-life actually looks like, but the problem is that it's not how we perceive the real-world, and due to the technical limitations involved I can't get this shot to even remotely how it looked to me at the time. Yes, that looks more neutral. The issue is that this isn't remotely how the scene looked in real life. My frustration is that I can completely remove all colour issues by simply reducing the saturation to zero, but the target aesthetic of this piece was that it was a happy occasion and Italy is a colourful place. The grade above simply doesn't match that aesthetic, being closer to a bleach bypass look for a desolate film rather than a colourful look for a happy rom-com. For context, this trip to Italy was part of my honeymoon! Thanks for outlining your process, I'll have to replicate it and have a play. You think that the S1 shot would have been harder to grade? That surprises me, considering that my GH5 was a breath of fresh air after trying to grade the XC10 footage for a couple of years. My experience of watching colour grading videos online with footage from five-figure cine cameras was that you can raise the levels up and up and up and they just scale up but otherwise look completely fine, rather than pulling things up a bit and being presented with awful hues and terrible artefacts. The GH5 feels exactly the same way in post as that - it just scales up without any drama. I can understand the a6500 not doing so well though. I guess I don't want to force a shot that doesn't exist, but it did exist, the camera just failed to capture it even remotely the way that it was, in reality. I've found the GH5 to be far more forgiving of difficult lighting. Mind you, had I used the XC10 4K mode then it might have been a different story due to the higher resolution and bitrate of three times more bits per pixel, or 12 times more bits per frame. Yeah, very Canon. I really do make life difficult for myself by shooting in the worst possible conditions! lol, I immediately thought of vodka, but perhaps you should be adding tequila? Not too sure what the YT upload was at, but the frames I posted above were 720 to be a bit easier to view in the thread. Here's the CLog still at the original resolution: The 1080p is pretty soft, and the 1080p50 even more-so. I exported the PNG above and a TIFF file and swapping back and forth between them shows very little difference. For reference, here's another CLog shot from the video, PNG at 4K:

MFT will continue to produce fantastic images and videos for many years to come (indefinitely?). With such a rich ecosystem, it's hard to believe that it'll ever be "dead". I suppose Olympus selling its imaging business is way better than them just closing it. Maybe, there's hope. I currently have a lot of Olympus gear and I'm quite happy with it. I got away from full-frame stuff due to it being too big, heavy, and expensive for the results it got me. Not much better than MFT (for the money).

If you want to know about Toneh and other useful insight in the relativity of it all, don’t forget this channel: I especially like the insider/management meetings he does 🙂 There are a few great ones about Sony and Canon...

Is it coronavirus?

I've done some tests today. The camera was set to UHD, 25p, Gamma DR, -5 contrast, -7 sharpness, 16-235, sRGB. I compared different ISOs with and without RGB set to max (1.99). So what I found out: All RGB channels at 1.99 increase exposure by 1 stop (or very, very close to it); Therefore ISO 1600 with RGB at 1.99, is the same exposure as ISO 3200 with RGB at 1; It positively affects the inbuilt noise reduction. Seems like the NR really is triggered by ISO value and not the actual sensor gain; It doesn't have any visible gains in highlights. Here's the test. The password is - rgb . Here you can download the edited test file, if you would like to take a closer look - https://failiem.lv/u/xvgh44ks