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Agreed--if I had the production budget to make the backgrounds beautiful, I would never have anything out of focus! (Small exaggeration) Some of my favorite scenes and shots, for example Once Upon a Time in the West https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcb910b2-4302-4b6b-b8e1-c52220adeaa4_1200x500.jpeg Barry Lyndon https://sbiff.org/wp-content/uploads/barry-lyndon-1080x675.jpg It's very genre dependent, too. I love sci fi and fantasy, both of which have spectacle and world building that is often best accomplished with very wide establishing shots. Lord of the Rings - The wide shots of Helm's Deep not only serve as beautiful spectacle in their own right, but also display the layout of the fortress in a way that makes the ensuring battle comprehensible. There's this one I linked, but if I recall there's also a few beautiful crane shots right over the keep leading into conversations about the defenses. https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/lotr/images/d/d3/Helm's_Deep_-_TtT.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20190705232343 Star Wars - Our first glimpse of Coruscant (not sure if this screenshot is the first time we see it) communicates so much about the planet. https://lumiere-a.akamaihd.net/v1/images/Coruscant-Gallery-1_d654d3d0.jpeg?region=100%2C91%2C1000%2C563 On the other hand, personal dramas sometimes don't need as much pure visual setting, or are obvious enough that it's not needed. If our hero lives in an apartment, do we need to see the outside first, or is it very well understood what type of space it is without it?

To paraphrase Tony Wilson of Factory Records, Sigma protected themselves from ever having to have the dilemma of trading the camera's low light capability for image quality by having no low light capability whatsoever. On the upside, there's absolutely no need to carry ND filters around 😉

I was also interested in those Sigma DP cameras except for one thing, shockingly bad low light capability! I like ‘left field’ gear. Partly because I am somewhat willful and partly because I don’t like following the herd. But at the same time, not if it’s to my detriment. Which it was a bit too much when I only used that OG X100. Or rather to my clients detriment. I’d go Hassie X2D with a pair of primes if I could. Something around 28mm for indoor and something around 50mm for outdoor and just use cropping. Maybe in a few years when pricing comes down as my final stills camera for the last few years of what will be a 30 year industry career…

Maybe when they’ve got their act together sufficiently to produce enough of the current focal length version to meet demand they will think about it! Having said that, their approach with producing dedicated wide and tele adapters for them is an OK halfway house. I had the wide for my original X100 and it performed well, although the 0.79x and 1.4x respectively of the adapters is a bit conservative but I guess those were the optimum to not degrade performance too much. At the time that I bought my DP2m, I had a Nikon D800 and a Hasselblad H3DII-39 and couldn’t imagine that it would live with them but it actually did. I bought it on impulse really as I was at a dealer picking up a lens for my actual job and they had just started a price slash offer on them to clear stock and I thought I’d take a chance as I’d looked at it before but at £900 it seemed way overpriced. Turns out it wasn’t even at that price and I even ended up using it for work as well for certain roles. I then kept my eye out for the DP1m and DP3m at used prices (which plummeted because the new price had been cut) and picked them both up as well. It’s interesting that they completely write the JPEG’s off in that video as for work because of the live editorial fast turnaround time of it I used JPEG quite a lot! The ultimate quality is only to be found when using the Sigma software though and, as I said, that really does bring you back to the slower paced days of developing images. Funny thing about prices is that because I paid smaller prices for mine, looking at the current used markets, they are the only cameras that I have ever owned where I could make a profit ! Which I suppose takes us back to the “value” in cameras as even if I had paid full retail for them then they would still be about 65-70% of the original cost. My D800 and H3DII-39 on the other hand…. Yeah, let’s not go there. By the by, it’s interesting to see the iteration of Chris Nichols in that video compared to the current one.

"I don't shoot coverage, I know what I am doing" 🤣🤣🤣

Cannot wait to read about your findings. If the Aquos sports the 20 MPix sensor from the RX, FZ and LX cameras, we should be in for a treat. Would love to see it running 10bit HLG on Mcpro24fps. What a bad name for a cool app btw.:)

You’ll have to take my word for it. Zero agenda, but I don’t have the time to dig out old hard drives but 100% if I shot any of these side by side, I can see a difference. Other than my website and social media, nowhere, - it’s a typical 1000-2000 deliverable images for every client. What they do with them I could not say, but any image could be printed any size. Not sure about that! Extremely high? Rough calculation, gross, about 60x cost? Ha, too personal, but enough to suit our family needs. Not as much as a dentist who can afford that 10k camera 😉

There is. But you can also have the flexibility of going out one day with just a single prime and then on other days, say for work purposes and have a zoom or multiple lenses. Which is why I probably would struggle to go back to a fixed lens these days, ie, because we can have the same principle, but with that interchangeable lens body.

Really? I had the same sensor X100V in the XT3 and the S5ii/Z6ii beats it. I have the same sensor as the Q3 in my A7RV and that beats both of those. Nah. Those APSC sensor cameras put out good quality for sure, but few would say comparable even with 24mp full frame when it comes to outright image quality. 60mp A7RV is on another level. I’ve been through the sensor/image quality improvement process over the last few years and it’s definitely a real thing. There’s a noticeable difference moving up, but the difference is even more apparent if you go back after any time. Just my experience anyway…

Well, I'll tell you what, there ain't no way I'm laying the blame at the feet of labor in regards to the state of the biz here in SoCal. Any objective analysis of the industry over this past decade will reveal a much more complex narrative than the recent labor dispute. There's a bunch of chapters of that particular story that should focus on the board rooms foremost. Funny how that narrative has a hard time sticking in the popular media landscape, yeah?

I wouldn’t go that far… If it was €£$3500, it would be as cool as f*ck. A modern tilt screen, IBIS, large sensor, relatively compact camera, is highly desirable to a lot of folks, me included! From the OG X100 (my favourite camera of all time relative to it’s time) to it’s latest iteration, plus the Sony RX1R, the Q2/Q3 and even the little Ricoh’s, it suits a lot of folks! My only issue has been the lack of longer lenses with these things and Fuji got around it with a wide angle and tele adapters and the 60mp jobs with cropping and multiple models a la Ricoh are an option, but probably a bit pricey for most having 2x Q3’s! It has got me thinking though that a pair of the latest X100’s, one with the wide and the other with the tele, would make a really great combo, especially now that they have; IBIS, tilt and a decent amount of megapixels for some further cropping…

Who needs shallow DOF?