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Maybe the forum has been taken over by AI and it's become sentient and agreed with your comments so much it wanted everyone to read them several times!!

The situation with review content being affected by commercial interests is nothing new in the slightest... Many years ago I was asked if I was interested in doing a product review for a now long-gone print magazine. I tried to be as fair as possible when I wrote it, but thought the product had some usability/compatibility issues that needing fixing. The version of the review printed in the magazine had some of my criticism watered-down, I assume partly because advertising revenue related to the product was important to the finances of the magazine. I only did a couple of reviews for the magazine in the end, mostly because the amount they paid for them wasn't much in relation the work involved in testing a product properly (and I wasn't interested in doing quicker, more superficial reviews).

Sorry. UK idiom. 'Old' in that context doesn't mean old. My bad.

I used the new high e-stab on my s5iix on a shoot last week to test it out, pretty dang smooth! Although the crop is quite significant, I was running around getting very gimbal-like footage on the venerable sigma 18-35, but at 18mm, plus the crop in 60p, still quite tight, so I may use this more with the Sigma 14-24. Great new tool in the toolbox of this already amazing camera though.

A 'walking about in a forest' comparison from Robert May of the S5iix stabilisation modes at 14mm (very wide angle) using the 14-28mm f4-5.6 lens(which doesn't have OIS): Pretty impressive stabilisation performance with minimal warping artefacts.

Luc Forsyth Jacques Crafford Cam Mackey Mark Bone

LOL, yeah, or self-importance or narcissistic or megalomanianism etc 😂😂😂 I guess in that case they don't have a clear idea of the industry they're in, likely because they're thinking about themselves rather than their audience. Entertainment is very broad and is sort-of a catch-all for the other categories, but I think it's still useful as it firmly defines that the purpose is to engage and entertain. I think that because YT was new and people didn't really understand what it was or how it fit into the world people weren't clear that it still fit the definitions that had been previously established, but (as usual) the pros had figured it out already and there (almost never) isn't anything new under the sun.

Self-indulgence? 😉 Entertainment is probably an overly-broad category, but that's splitting hairs.

Lok just posted a video talking about the S5ii and talks about the new e-stabilisation feature, and it looks like it has completely eliminated the IBIS wobble on wide lenses? He includes examples with him walking with a wide lens, so it looks like a legit test:

Bigger, heavier duty fixtures are probably outside the budget you're willing to spend, but I'll just offer the devil's advocate view to the other posters here, that you can never, ever have too bright of a light. I generally use a Nanlux evoke 1200 as my keylight, usually shooting through a 4x4 frame of magic cloth, and I am frequently at 100% power and needing more output, sometimes ganging it with an additional 1200B, 600D, Prolycht 675, whatever I have available. Granted, I am usually trying to hold some exposure through windows and the like, and I prefer to light with big, soft, beautiful keys, but still. You'll never regret having more power at your disposal. That will just allow you to bounce more, diffuse more, shoot through more material... always an advantage! Also worth mentioning, but bigger fixtures are more portable than you might think; until I recently upgraded to a full-size production van, for the past several years I've been able to easily carry a 1200d, Prolycht 675, 4' pavo tubes, in addition to a Nanlite forza 500, aputure 300d, spotlight attachment, 4 or 5 turtle-base c-stands, 4x4 frames and diffusion, various softboxes, not to mention all the accompanying bits and bobs of grip, power, dolly and of course, cameras, lenses, etc.... all within the confines of my beloved '09 Honda Civic. Now that I am finally in a bigger vehicle, I've got the Nanlux 2400b on my soon-to-purchase list as well. And I'm sure I'll very frequently still want more power.

If you just want footage with no commentary, markr041 who is a user here has a YouTube channel and he tends to try a pretty decent number of the cameras that come out. They're usually decently shot and I don't think I've ever even seen one where he talked about the camera (or even showed his face). 😃

The majority of YT that I watch has nothing to do with cameras, and in general the people that have the most followers have the least fancy camera equipment. I mean, there are probably more channels that have over 500K subscribers and are just shot with a smartphone than all the active camera YT channels combined.

One of the things I find hilarious about YouTube is that a lot of the big camera influencers talk about leveling up channels and increasing production value, etc. A lot of the bigger names have between 50-200k subscribers and a lot of them had the advantage of being early to starting camera channels. Newer, theoretically popular people like Cam Mackey have like 65k. Meanwhile, a friend of mine decided to do something with his YouTube channel a couple of years ago after the news did a story about his having purchased the monorail for $1/car from our local zoo when they stopped running it and turning it into a private campsite on some land in Wisconsin. He mostly repurposes junk that he finds at garage sales and thrift stores into things like push-pull carts on railroad tracks and satellite dishes coated in aluminum foil. The cameras he uses are mostly potatoes - like 25-year old camcorders and Hero 3-type stuff. He has a pretty decent natural grasp of editing and story, though, and he's a funny guy. He also would freely admit that he neither knows a lot about cameras nor cares to know any more. Last I checked, he was at about 187k subscribers (including me - I like watching his stuff). So if the goal is just to grow a YouTube channel, the quality of the camera is probably the least important bit. Making half of your video be slow motion slideshow garbage so that you can put "cinematic" in the title doesn't really get views if the rest of the content is garbage. I buy too much gear for my own mediocre talent, but that's partly just because I want it and after a lot of years, I can almost always find something to trade in to make stuff more affordable. I have no illusions that buying a Komodo-X will substantially improve anything I do, but I might do it anyway. If I get it, I'll probably like it a lot for a while and then after a couple of years, I'll probably trade it in toward something else. Anyway, another thing to remember with these YouTubers that are in the business of making day 1 review commercials for various channels - when they're showing "what this camera can do," go watch their older stuff with a camera from last year. Most of the time, it looks almost exactly like whatever they're doing with the new camera because they're really not that different. One of the most laughable things that people say on various camera forums or YT comments is "I can't wait for (creator name here) to get it so we can see what that camera can really do." Wanna know what that camera will look at when your favorite creator gets it? Go watch the review they did of the camera before it. It'll look pretty much like that.

Of course this is true; but the main business in photography, as far as the consumer market (and businesses that target it) is concerned, is selling gear and not the art or teaching techniques for making that art. The attitude in online forum discussions is that everything should be easy and automatic, and people are willing to pay significant money towards that end, but many people are not willing to accept that there is a skill component to photography. If skill is required to get results, the camera is considered flawed. People spend more time online complaining about (perceived) camera flaws and performance comparisons than learning the skills that they would need to do meaningful work. And the youtubers who talk about gear target this population who has been mislead to believe that if they shop for the next great thing, then they will become great artists. They get paid to promote gear, and have been misnamed "influencers" or so some such strange term when in reality it is what used to be called advertising. Somehow the social media "influencers" are supposedly more genuine and authentic than professional actors and models in advertising but this is really just an act.