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Absolutely. We glossed on this same subject a couple of months ago on another thread. These "technical" reviewers on YT are very capable individuals with a keen sense of money. They are wicked good with the telepromter and have loads of charisma. Any mistakes are swiflty dealt with 100 cuts during editing. Yet, it all feeds the same huge business model: newer is better. Time to spend yet again. "GH5? Bleh. Yesterday's news. Buy your S5 NOW and receive 10% off with my promo code!. Who cares if you need to spend $2,000-$3,000 on a new body and new lenses. You NEED that full frame look to be taken seriously". This is the Gilded Age of YouTube. But that fine golden leaf is starting to show some cracks...

You can ignore them and they won’t earn a cent off your time. Life is to short to spend it churning the proverbial shit bucket again and again.

I actually have to agree with Andrew 90% of the way (I'll explain my other 10% in a bit, below). To start with, what I love about EOSHD is Andrew's honesty. He writes his reviews from a real-world perspective, and if he hurts anyone's feelings by telling the truth so be it (and btw, if camera manufacturers were smarter, they would pay attention to Andrew and actually provide interviews and honest respondes which would gain the favoritism of people like me). I run my blog and social media accounts in a similar way and it's clear that being honest is not a good attention-grabber for advertisers who want you to only talk about the great things their products offer and sweep under the carpet the bad things. I also greatly appreciate that at EOSHD I get the opinion from someone who actually uses gear to do real-world stuff. More often than once you buy stuff which sounds great on paper but when you try it it simply sucks for whatever reason (usability, quality, durability, expandability, simplicity, etc). And the problem (for advertisers and manufacturers) is that the truth is that most of the time you don't need all the bells and whistles and attention-grabbing features they advertise, they are designed to make you upgrade your gear and spend more cash. Having said all that however (here comes the 10%) I think we need those guys who buy gear every year (and thus, also the paid bloggers and youtubers) as they provide the necessary financial incentives for these companies to continue adding features and competing in the market on a continuous basis. If that had not been the case we'd still be using cameras with technologies from 10 years ago with FullHD sensors and no image stabilization. So bottom line, I think there's space for both sides. We need the B.S. celebrities in order to buy stuff, so that every few years the artistic community can upgrade to truly better equipment that could make a difference in their work.

I don't click on it in sheer point of principal. Unless it's a very nice looking lady with limited clothing in which case I overrule myself. But if it's one of the camera reviewer crowd or anything else I might be interested in, making a mock shocked face with a caption, "you won't believe this shit!", I don't even bother to click on it and thumb you down. You just don't exist to me other than as another clickbait cretin on the internet. And even if you don't have a clickbait thumbnail, but every single frigging time it starts with you riding around on a one wheel or walking aimlessly about staring off into the distance... well look forward to getting past puberty. I'm off to make a video now about me making coffee.

I'm quite a fan of Potato Jet - he's clearly a nice guy and also a working commercial videographer (although he readily admits that his YT activities take up more and more of his time). His really strong kit recommendations tend to be for items he finds useful for his commercial work (and the Arri Alexa thing was fairly jokey - although he still has the beast standing on a tripod in his studio). Similar to him are the guys at Epic Light Media, who intersperse gear videos with lighting tutorials and flights of preposterous fancy. A YouTuber who is much more focused on actual film making is, of course, Rob Ellis, whose videos about lighting, composition and colour are excellent. Personally I find Gerald dry as dust and twice as boring.

I don't watch most of those Canadians anymore. On Youtube, you really need to look for authenticity because you won't find it in almost any of the bigger channels. I've been watching for a long time now to see it go from authentic (and often normal) to shameless self/product promotion. 99% are simply infomercials, nothing more. You can still learn and laugh from them, but that is still the core of what they do. "Still Life - Art and the photographic image" by Justin Jones. He's a British guy who's into all forms of art and has 2.72K followers. He will never be known most likely, but his content is great. He's the type of YouTube I like. Here's a video:

I'm generally pretty hard on YouTubers but Gerald is harmless and doesn't claim to be anything more than someone that enjoys gear, enjoys talking about gear, and enjoys making videos about gear. He's pretty transparent in my view. It's definitely not for everyone but I also don't think people go to him to learn about the actually art of filmmaking.

Everybody loves Mr Undone. The YouTube bros line up around the block to circle jerk with handsome Gerald, but I for the life of me cannot find any of the great guru's shoots!

WARNING: Contains some strong language. Does David Lynch think a yappy assistant is trouble? Try getting clawed in the neck on both sides from Canon fanboys and Philip Bloom sheeples.

Gerald is a charming reviewer. I would love, if less people would get baited into the discourse of camera testers circus. Gerald does not represent that until now. He has been doing good work in his field of work, until now. It would awesome if we all would focus on contributing to great threads again, as we have been doing all these years. I would love a structure of the forum to bait us more into the filming section where people post their stuff but hardly get noticed for their work in that subforum of the main forum. Then click baiting would be a great thing. I would love more oldschool classic and classy articles like about the Canon dream lens. We never had a chance to see the trees in the beautiful photographs move their leaves in the winds, moving images. I think this forum could become THE major place for creative and TRUE nerd content again. Right now it is a bit calm on that side. The Gerald Undone piece is witty and right about the main points regarding the consumerism and camera hype machine but it is not on point about him, when he is presented like he was identifying himself as a "guru", which he never claimed he was. I too find it disgusting, when youtubers steal content from this forum and dont give back nor even cite the oritinal source such as was the case with the overheating problem of the R5. I think it is a major threat to original blog journalist and artists. We can go back to the roots of this forum, cool and involving stuff and not worry about the click baiters and content appropriators.

Nice find with the FAQ. Maybe it's my misconception about Gerald. I can agree with him about corporate work not being all that interesting enough to share (and often there's no permission for that anyway) and I can see why he wouldn't want to do any more of that when he's got a successful business with the YouTube channel. It's not a personal thing, only an observation, a suggestion that I'd enjoy his channel more if it had visuals, images, photography, short sequences to set the mood and cinematic moments. We are too eager to see the binary Me vs Them, when the point I am making is more about the consumerism and the dubious creative need to switch cameras so often. I watch a YouTube channel about headphones. I ended up with an addiction and 20 pairs of expensive ones. I am also a nerd that also likes playing with cameras as much as I like shooting with them. When EOSHD started the snobby pros were constantly asking searching questions of me - where was my pro work, paid work, client work? All mine was my own creative projects, self funded, I travelled the world under my own steam to make my own stuff and practice the art of cinematography and photography. I was pretty much attacked by the Cinema5D crowd about this all the time - if I wasn't a professional making money from commercial clients - I was nothing. An amateur, a fool, a "tester". I still think there is a Canadian manager though 🙂

1. Do we expect from engineers creating cameras, sellers selling cameras, technicians repairing cameras to be artists? Does it mean they know nothing about cameras in their respective roles ? Obviously not. Some do. 2. Cameras are not used only for artistic work. TV, sports, reportage, corporate, personal and family even some commercials and weddings videos are not art. Would say that people using cameras for artistic work are minority. So what? People using cameras in all those mentioned areas are not qualified or entitled to have their opinion? Or don’t have knowledge and experience with cameras ? 3. The art part cannot be completely disregarded in youtube channels related to technical reviews. But in a different role. My observations are that success of a youtube channel is greatly affected by the presenter. How it speaks and act in front of the camera. What's so great about Casey Neistat reviews and similar to him who have millions of followers on youtube. Or Patoto Jet. They are all great presenters and somehow good actors. It's fun to watch. It's entertainment also. That's why they are popular and with lots of followers. Why was top gear so popular ? Because it's about cars and technical reviews or because it's a great entertainment led by great presenters, screenplay writers etc. ? People and I mean 99% men like technical stuff. We like to talk, play and occasionally use cameras. Just kidding. 🙂 That's why Gerald Undone channel is much more popular than Mark Bone's channel. Mark is a pro DP and also Canadian. I like Gerald Undone channel, lot's of useful information. Does it mean that will rush and buy Sony A1 ? Not likely. Use those reviews only as guideline. At the end it's my budget and personal experience that decide what to buy and use. Don't blame the reviewers, there is interest, they satisfy this interest and make a living of it. There is some advertisement but it's easy to skip. Lived in a world where only reviews were in Popular Photography and magazines like that. It's much better now. Lots of reviews from different people. More or less independent. If you don't like it, don't watch it. So simple.

All the people you mention seem to be after one thing: our time, which on YouTube means money. Here's my experience: I see a clickbait thumbnail. I click it. I sit through 5 seconds of Adobe slowware, thinking "not that sh*t again" I start watching the video (now they're getting paid by my view), admittedly some nice footage sometimes I watch some BS ad right in the middle of what they're trying to get to in their BS thumbnail. They're selling some BS service that no one needs (yes, they get a cut if you're dumb enough to sign up). I watch to the end. Now, they ask me to like and make a comment (more of my time) about their self-promoting BS video to enrich themselves. "Don't forget to click subscribe and click on the alert bell" so can also get spammed by YouTube. Let's not forget the Amazon affiliate links they so generously added in the description section. Finally, they pinned the the first comment (oh, what a surprise, it's they saying some more BS). Is anyone else tired of this over-produced, time-sucking, self-promoting crap? Is this what google meant when they said "Don't be evil"? At this point, I'm asking myself if I have anything better to do with my limited time on this planet.

Found the video. He answers the question at 9:50.

I love this one. Thanks for sharing it.

Ah but Andrew, this is why YOU buy camera gear and I buy camera gear and many others buy camera gear, but I suspect we are actually a minority in this market. There are far more who are “gonna” but never actually do other than with their intentions. Nothing wrong with that and they are just harmless and if anything, help keep the camera industry alive for us pros and serious amateurs who do actually use our kit. I have no idea what the actual numbers would be but the percentage of kit sold to folks who actually really make use of it, for financial return or not, has to be single figures surely? Personally I find Gerald pretty harmless and a seeming straight up guy. I don’t think he is pretending to be anything but what he is which is a YouTube reviewer of gear who focuses on the technical side of things. He didn’t love the FP-L but then I didn’t either when Sigma sent me one for test. I wanted to. In fact I had hoped that having one hands on might allow me to find some reason to justify purchasing one, but the reality was it did just the opposite and confirmed it has multiple insurmountable flaws for my needs. But I did buy the 65mm f2 (that they also sent me) off the back of that test and it arrived yesterday! I shall now not make a YouTube video about it but it becomes my primary video workhorse welded to my S1H for the foreseeable future 😬

Well, are there instruments for measuring the accuracy of an instruments sound? Thereby taking all of the human factor out of it? Gerald uses charts math and science to review most of the gear on there which requires zero artistic skill whatsoever. Or do you think the engineers at Sony that design the sensors and put together the cameras should have a cinematic portfolio as well?

It is funny to watch channels reviewing gear, when their main use case is making the review videos. I think Linus Tech Tips is the best example, where they have entire videos about building workstations to edit their videos about building workstations. Credit where it's due, it's not a bad business model, and in Linus' case they're open and honest about it. Actually I'd say the same about Gerald, who has said in a few videos that his primary use for his gear is sit-down corporate interviews. He's said in a couple places that he's not a "cinematographer" or a "vlogger." I think the guy does a good job presenting information. If I want basic information about a camera or mic he's reviewed, I usually watch his video. I wouldn't try to get any artistic ideas from his videos. I think that's where you should position yourself with your channel, Andrew. I've always liked/agreed with your opinions on color. I think you're at your best when talking about artistic use cases and reviewing gear from that perspective. We don't need you to compete with tech gear reviewers, just talk about what you're good at.

Viltrox constantly releases firmware updates, with big improvements. Be sure to check in their site.

I remember vividly this epic Canon marketing moment. It must have been so hard for those canon fanboys to accept their beloved camera specs didn't match reality. The potential of a timer and not a real heat sensor making decisions on whether a camera turns off or continues to operate was so unacceptable, even for fanboys. Canon wasn't even acknowledging the problem. The pent-up frustration had to be released. On top of that, Philip Bloom said: "hey look, this guy said something bad about Canon and my cats" - let's go after him! This is probably what it felt like for the king's messenger in the middle ages. Personally, I'm an animal lover and that includes humans too. It would appear some animal "lovers" exclude humans from their love. Instead, they run them over on purpose to make an example of them- Don't f*ck with cat lovers. Anyway, that's how I see it.

Updated. v2.2 working like a charm. No, Canon annoying has 29m59s recording limits...👎🏻

I wondered about that, lol. Great work on that super 8 look!

So I finally got my 6mm Pentax Cosmicar 1.2 C-Mount Lens in and decided to take it for a spin today. It was a game changer!!! While I was waiting for that lens to come in I was using a Canon 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 on an EF-M converter and it was always too bright to use during the day even at f/16 and the 5x crop was horrendous, but as I hoped, everything changed and became clear and made sense once I got the Pentax 6mm. I used the same settings as @Matt James Smith ? (thanks for the specs by the way Matt!): 6mm f/1.2 Pentax TV lens (have not yet added a shim for infinity focus) EOSM with latest ML build 18fps override (exact) 5x zoom 4:3 aspect 1440 x 1072 I LOVE THE LOOK SOOOOO MUCH!! THE ONLY ISSUE ON THIS FIRST RUN WAS THOSE DAMNED PINK DOTS!!! I know they have been discussed on other threads, so it's time to dive deep into that issue, but for now I couldn't be happier! Only effects are some slight dust and movement via FCPX's "Aged Film". Other than that, it's straight out of camera. Also per Matt's deduction, I have slowed all clips down to 72% duration on a 24FPS timeline in FCPX. Here is a little vid I put together quickly from the shots I took in the Santa Barbara Harbor this morning. So far I'm only in for $160-$170 on the build, including the body, c-mount adapter, pistol grip and Pentax Lens (which I won for a steal on eBay for $40)! THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE HERE FOR HELPING ME GET TO THIS POINT!!! ? And if I can be of any service with my still limited knowledge...I'm happy to help anyone!!