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$200 Australian is about $150 US at the current exchange rate. If it gets put down to $100 or even $150 for its condition that will be a bargain. Since it is a charity, I wish they would put it on Ebay but they are not allowed to do it locally for some reason. I think even $300 is a great price for it (not that I would buy it for that). Will look at the serial number today hopefully for an 8## serial number! (must read up on it again, it has been a while).

Is it an MMJ or an AEG? You can tell by looking at the last number on the aperture ring. If it's green, then it's an MMJ. Also the later serial numbers are supposed to be sharper versions, but I believe they're the ones in the 8xx... range. The AEG versions will have the sawtooth bokeh. I've owned 2 or 3 over the years. The first one I owned was unbelievably good. I don't remember which version I had. I never paid more than $125 for one, but I haven't owned one in a few years. If you pair it with a 25mm 2.8 or 28mm 2.8, I think it's a great little Zeiss set. And then eventually, if needed, you can get the 35-70mm 3.4 to fill in the gaps... if you don't mind a push/pull zoom.

I forgot to mention that the easy workaround for this is to just plug your camera into your computer via USB, which resets the camera's clock. In my case, both of my Micros have baseplates for attaching rails so getting at the USB input is actually quite an undertaking and it's faster to use the menu. But if you don't have a baseplate and the USB input is accessible, this is the fastest way to reset date and time.

ProRes HQ is very flexible in terms of white balance, especially if you shoot right where you have it, 5600k. On the Blackmagic Design cinematography forum Dmitry Shijan has a post somewhere describing his experiments with this, saying that ~5600 appears to be the "native" white balance for this camera. It works up to a point; I don't think it would hold together as well if you had WB set at 5600 but were shooting indoors under tungsten at 3200. The main issue with ProRes is the greenish color cast that shows up sometimes; I've never experienced this with raw (I'm shooting compressed raw, 3:1, as it provides pretty much all the benefits of raw with file sizes only a bit larger than ProRes HQ). I've seen claims that the colors are better overall in raw. That said, I've shot most of the documentary I've been working on for the past 3 years in ProRes HQ, and I've been very happy with the results and have been pleased at the level of flexibility in post. However, since 3:1 raw takes up only a little more space and working with CDNG raw in Resolve 17 using RCM is straightforward, I'm mostly using that now. I do have to access the menus before every shoot because, like every Blackmagic camera, the date and time need to be reset every day. This isn't a bug, it's by design: the internal clock is powered by a supercapacitor that can be charged very quickly and doesn't need to be replaced every few years as a battery would. But the downside of supercapacitors is that they don't hold their charge very long.

Theoretically, if anyone does 12-bit RAW, with a colour correction, or something else baked into the codec, it should not quality as RAW, when compression ratios are con concerned. Even if most manufacturers have their own version of RAW, with varying colours. Or If, there is an element of partial de-bayering within the camera itself, no matter how minor. I feel Panasonic can CIRCUMVENT this shady Red Patent (reminds me of the stories regarding how how hundreds of Tesla's patents were stolen and registered as someone else's, back in the day), by having uncompressed RAW out, and then compressing it in a tiny module attached to the camera (like the original yagh module, but Much Smaller). The sole purpose of the module, apart from extra battery and memory like mini SSDs, could be for having a compassion SoC (they could throw in a 5G chip for direct broadcast or cloud storage). Compression post recording should not attract any kind of the shady Patent application issues.