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Some worrying thoughts are occupying my mind at the moment so it might do me some good to let them out for a run... Here goes. In the 1990s I grew up with the early internet, it wasn't very media rich due to the bandwidth constraints and it only worked well on a big screen with a keyboard at a desk, so it suited web pages and forums. Written stuff, basically. Come the y2k and we began to see the early social media sites like Myspace and then Facebook but you still had to use these at a desk. Which lends itself to being able to type long sentences and create art. Come smartphones, they couldn't offer the full world wide web experience, on a pokey slow browser, but this changed with apps. So fast forward a bit to the 2010s... There has been a proliferation of apps into our lives, but it wasn't really until Youtube and Facebook Groups got some serious traction that things started to change. I used to be pretty confident in the EOSHD blogging days that if I sat down to write a review, or opinion, or do some proper journalism or get a scoop and break the camera news first it would get some attention and traction, now I am not so sure it will as it is a separate indie .com website outside of social media, and this is very bad news for the internet because we cannot let Meta and Google and a handful of other corporations OWN the entire web. So to the making a living bit... For creatives like photographers and filmmakers the internet was a real blessing, it allows you to setup stall with a website and get your work out there. You get noticed and then you get hired, that's how it used to work. There has to be a strong demand from industry for those positions as well, no matter how good you are it doesn't matter if the cinema industry is in a downward spiral. Cinema and photography have to compete with other forms of content too. Again it comes back to smartphones. Neither cinema and photography are well suited to a small screen and even smaller attention spans, they are supposed to be viewed on a large canvas and in a socially interactive way like in a gallery or theatre. Now with stuff like streaming, this works fine when everyone has a subscription to one or two of the same platforms like Netflix and are stuck at home with nothing better to do like during covid, but after a while there is a total oversupply of stuff to watch, and a total ADHD mess of an audience who is getting constantly distracted by social media content in direct competition to the long form stuff. So we have a meltdown at the moment in the filmmaking industry, and even in the commercial videography industry where it is now so easy to shoot something, companies may as well hire an intern to do it or have some staff do it themselves, because the bar is set by social media and that as I said works best with very short authentic bursts of home made content, where production quality or even the camera doesn't really matter. With photography, if you're an artist trying to compete for attention with all of that stuff you are going to be in trouble if you don't do double-duties as a social media influencer, which of course means making YOURSELF the story and front and centre. Not a lot of artists are all that comfortable with that. I'm not. So the business model now is that your content has to be free, and you merchandise it or earn from advertising and sponsorship due to your social media reach as an artist. And I REALLY hate that because it cheapens what it means to be a photographer or filmmaker. At the end of the day, the photos and films should be what matter and they should be paid for. PS Have you noticed by the way - that the AI bubble has completely lost people's interest, the content is all so un-compelling? Why do you think this is... It's because there is so much of it... And it is disassociated with the artist's own hand... And that is exactly what all this tech has done to use filmmakers and photographers... The accessibility of tech means that there's now too much content, and not enough demand for the next piece. A big economic correction is on the way.

It might help if a) Every piece wasn't introduced with the breathless "hey look what I made with AI". It should stand up whether you did or didn't and it just comes across as being inauthentic. Which, of course, it is. b) It wasn't being pushed by the same NFT/Crypto/Whatever this week's fad is shills. c) It evolves beyond more or less just remixing existing content. People aren't moved by it because they get the feeling they've seen it before. Which, of course, they have. I remember in my 30s going back to a hip club that I frequented when I was in my teens and very early 20s and feeling completely out of place and absolutely not getting it. Its a bit like that for the internet with the internet now.

That is about the sum of it unless we are talking movies, series and advertising. Most businesses seem prepared to have any old shit as long as it’s cheap. Or free. And plenty are happy to work for free because it’s a foot in the door innit? And I think it’s happening increasingly in wedding video land… Social media is full of folks gushing about any old shit and actually they seem to genuinely love rubbish over anything crafted. So I’m just counting down the next 6 years and I’m done because I can’t change the situation and am not prepared to dumb down in order to conform. And I think I can squeeze out another 6 seasons… And when I say ‘counting down’ and ‘squeeze out’, I don’t mean coast, or not care, but rather keep putting out the highest quality content for the duration of my career both for myself and my clients. But yes, it’s ‘everything’…quality, prices, attention spans…dumbing down in general.

Social media is destroying the internet as a medium and turning it into cable tv. I don't think people will realise what this means until a lot later, but now that print media is going away along with a lot else, including proper journalism, we're about to enter the find out stage. The internet as it was originally intended with net neutrality was the greatest invention of the century and we are really harming it by making independent .com websites bankrupt and the written word obsolete. It's going to become more and more of a problem. Maybe one day, blogging will make a come back like vinyl? I remember when a certain cat owner, who went by the name of Philip, switched predominantly to social media tweets and youtube, rather than blogging... his own site is now dead basically, and his content is now at the whim of an algorithm he doesn't own or have any control over... Anyway, he switched, and HE became the story - front and centre, private life out there for all to see, and it clouded out his actual work and images... and the other point I'm making is that he had no choice anyway because smartphones work better with YouTube and social media, the large in depth pages of the web just don't work well with modern attention spans or small screens with no physical keyboard, especially since most of the WWW these days is such a mess - so much poor content and horrific web design... you know, ads everywhere, popups, autoplay, cookie prompts, constantly scrolling by itself as new elements load. It's unworkable. I want us to come back to the founding ideas of what made the internet so special, before it's too late.

When they say you don’t need this or that and can use cheap gear, and then proceed to use and advertise expensive gear. These guys annoy me greatly.

I think shoulder work with the C80 or C70 will be tough, without an EVF and with the DSLR type form factor as well as the attached screen it's really not ideal nor is it built with ENG uses in mind. Even if you rig it in a way where you can view an external monitor while it is on your shoulder, getting to the controls for even simple things or using the touch screen will be difficult. With ENG cameras you don't need a frankenrig to make it work on your shoulder. At the end of the day IMO the C70, C80, and other "cinema cameras" really are meant to live on a tripod or gimbal with occasional handheld work if any at all, and little if any shoulder work. I learned early on that my C70 will probably never leave my tripod again and I will stick to other cameras with IBIS for anything handheld or any gimbal work. As far as color grading, it shoots in 6K raw in CLOG2 and has 13+ usable stops of DR.....with that as a starting point you can color grade it to look like anything including the C500. The battery life for my C70 is great, with my V Mount battery and the onboard battery I can shoot continuously for around 8hrs, the C80 is probably similar. Sturdiness is questionable in the C70, I would assume it's better in the C80.

Some 10bit codec are worse than the best 8bit stuff, you're right. MJPEG on the 1D C is still a thick chonky image... In 8bit. The compression quality, macro blocking, noise reduction and DSP all are more important than whether it is 10bit or not, in my view!

In the 90s I loved magazines... Nearly all the good ones are fucking gone. You can't sit with a phone and digest an entire magazines worth of content, it has to be in broadsheet-style print. Otherwise it just isn't satisfying or healthy to stare at a pokey little phone screen for that amount of time.

There's another devious slight of hand with Facebook and the socials, in that if they encouraged or even facilitated longer posts and content like a blog article with multiple photos and videos, their business model would suffer as the ads would get less time and attention, if everyone was to read long articles. So the reason they are making everyone ADHD dopamine addicts, killing livelihoods and long form content is purely for the ad $$$$ Cynical bastards or what?

I remember similar stuff in 1996, here's me a teenager at college... They had very early cable internet, which was a huge step up from the home modem. The crap is held aloft and in high regard by people. You only have to look at some of the videos in this thread 🙂 I find Facebook a mixed bag... There's some very good group content, user generated stuff like Reddit has. But it never has room to breathe. A photo, with a caption... max... Then you scroll past. It never goes anywhere... it's orphaned content, without a home or any parents. And Facebook has a certain demographic too... Not many younger voices on there. It's practically a boomer platform! If you for example are a 1990s PC game enthusiast on Facebook you can get a dopamine hit with a rush of likes by posting a photo of your setup and how nostalgic it is... fine... Erm, do that on a blog and you have a livelihood. You're a publisher, writer and journalist whereas on Facebook you're NOTHING but an end-user to be monetised for sake of Mr Zuckenberg. Bloom is an interesting example as he started off 80% professional cameraman, 20% blogger and ended up 10% professional, 90% social media influencer. The influencer role is bad for your mental health and has a very short career-span of perhaps 10 years maximum before the companies get bored of you. And it leaves you a hollow shell of a person, who has shilled his reputation away... and his credibility. This is because they are trying to get off the endless treadmill and save their mental health. Thanks for that observation it has cheered me up. Nearly outlived DPReview as well which never expected to do 🙂 Haha.

Andrew, excuse me for going a bit off topic. But I regard EOSHD and your work. I came to photography and videography as a hobby and now it has become part of my full time job. I remember my first steps on the internet, like paying 1€ at the internet-cafe to watch the trailer for star wars because my internet at home was so slow 😄 But I learned a lot from early video tutorials (ryan wieber for lightsabers and videocopilot, even though his tutorials became kinda stale), online forums and blogs were a great source of knowledge and information, with some strange guys of course, but thats the nature of it. Nevertheless, a community and as long as there´s no gatekeeper, great exchange was possible. the evolution of youtube into "cable tv" is in fact really bad. sure, you don´t have to like every aspect and genre a platform offers, but the amount of crap content and nonsens is enormous. Facebook is a similar thing. I began using it very early and it was great to stay in contact with my friends after leaving school and starting university. the first versions of the app and the messenger, all nice additions and well integrated. but what is it now? my feed is basically 90% braindead, idiotic, AI-created shit that I am supposed to look at. I only log in because I manage some accounts for work and I to use some groups for knowledge in resolve and audio recording. but facebook as it was intended is long gone. I still think that youtube, besides all the shit, still is a source of great information and knowledge. but you have to dig through a lot of mudd to reach the gold. The thing is, a lot of the accounts and characters i dislike, gain a lot of attraction for some reason. I just want to support overacting, narcicistic media prostitutes, that praise each and every product as long as there´s some reward for them. To some part that is the case for the mentioned cat owner. It became a 50% work 50% my life show, where the ration before was maybe 80:20. Me personally, I don´t watch this kind of television, I despise all forms of "reality TV" and scripted BS productions. If I look at the accounts I subscribed on YouTube, a lot of them haven´t posted for quite a while. Some of them do, but either with a lot of partnerships, product placements etc. If some of them can talk about this and make things transparent, I may be willing to watch it, but as soon as there´s clear bias I´m out. So many clips have become 70% this is the best product ever, it can make your dreams come true, just buy it and you will see, 30% real information and something you can take away and learn. I´d like blogging to make a return. Maybe in a typewriter font and with 800px only image sizes. back to basics, information and knowledge first. I´d like that. And on a side note: EOSHD not only kept the name, it even survived forums like BMDuser and others, that just died a slow death or ended instantly.

I went there in my 20’s and even then felt out of place and out of time. The 1920’s was probably my era…

Exactly, but those 3 are facing extreme competition too now... Advertising work faces competition from the influencer garbage, and the ability to fly out influencers to a launch rather than film a professional ad for the web, etc. Series, there's just too many. Movies, too many and too many of them just no good. Yep, fully agree. It's got sooooo bad. When the meritocracy breaks down, this is what you get. A race to the bottom! Yeah it's because they're digesting it on phones... it's fast food content. Anything too crafted or demanding, and they just switch off. Or perhaps just too ADHD distracted to focus on it, even if it grabs them in the first 30 seconds? I hope we can turn the ship around. The industry is going to be in deep trouble if it doesn't. The internet has to be nursed back to health. We can't afford to have any further slide into the pockets of Meta and the like... The founding principals have to be better defended!

Completely off-topic, but that's my fault. I read the comments about fixed lens cameras and forgot it was a Panasonic thread. The dangers of reading a forum first thing in the morning! The extended DR mode 4k mode does have noticeably more DR. Unless something's moving pretty fast, I'll use it every time over the faster readout modes. Otherwise, I really like the 5.8k mode - I tend to like a wider aspect ratio. My favorite thing about the 8k mode, ironically, is that it's cropped (and I can still crop in more from there). It means that the 32-64/~26-52ish in FF terms now goes up to around 72mm in FF terms and for 4k output, around 140mm. I've been meaning to play with the Nanomorphs in 8K mode since at least some of them will probably cover it. For me, the biggest step up vs the OG is that it's a lot smaller. I left the OG behind on a number of trips because I would have needed a bigger bag. Even though I like it, unless there were a really specific reason to bring it, if going on set, I'd pick up the K-X (and soon the OG Komodo too unless that ebay seller sends me a box of bricks) or the C70 any day. The GFX still feels pretty clunky in comparison. But for travel/personal stuff, I'll grab it just about every time. It's by far the best hybrid camera I've ever touched. For my upcoming trip to Peru, I'm bringing it with the 32-64 and 23. If I weren't trying to travel really light, I'd bring the 110. The trip make my usual travel kit (sometimes with the 63/2.8 or a Minolta 58/1.4 to use at night). I find myself more apt to leave telephotos home, at least partly because I can crop a lot and still have something that would easily print to 8x10. I'm also bringing an Osmo Pocket 3 since I'll feel a lot less paranoid about leaving it propped up on something to film myself and my travel companion than I would the Fuji.

I find it very odd that there's still no rumours about Panasonic's next flagship stuff. There's absolutely no way I believe an S5R is on the way! Why would Panasonic give away 8K FF 16:9 30fps 25ms super-sampled in a mid-range / entry level mode?

My GFX 100 II already records 8K. It's with a heavy crop and with unimpressive RS, but it's 8K at least.

Fo me, Youtube has become a minefield of people to avoid. I do watch a lot of different genres, movie reviews and analyses, album reviews, stuff related to cameras and gear and back then, clips about 9/11 or similar topics. Like some of you already said, it has changed a lot and besides the average production value rarely to the better. While movie reviewers were mostly nerds that found a way to escape the forums and message boards and connect in another, more accessible way, a lot of them and newer characters now often aren´t genuine anymore. you can see this with a lot of channels that once were kinda independent and now have connections to major studios, get invited to premieres etc. The same goes with cameras. where once enthusiasts tried to show their equipment, taught and talked about new features, there is this whole industry of clips from those characters, released on the same day, mostly praising stuff while often disregarding flaws or playing them down. And while with movies and music this might be more subjective, it isn´t that much with technology. I still like the platform and use it a lot, I know the accounts I avoid like the plague. Most of them help you with the moronic thumbnails but with the others, I avoid the names. Rarely, there is a new channel, with great content, and less to no connection to any major brand, studio, corporation etc. It is totally fine for them if they want to sell presets/corses/ebooks etc. and remind you once during the video, as long as the clip itself can stand on its own. No problem with that. skipable sponsoring can be done in an annoying way, or it can blend into the video. As for shills vs. journalists it is a difficult situation. a shill, and nothing more, is basically a modern day prostitute without having an OF-Account, jounalists often lack the objective perspective and sometimes mix too much (of their) opinion into it. so yeah, on one hand they lack the "personality" of the YouTuber/Shill, but they sometimes fail to use their platforms strength, that being the pilars of good journalism and the values that they bring. So I do value YouTubers, that stick to certain guidelines and don´t bend over as soon as Disney/Warner or Sony/Canon comes waving at them. When it comes to Twitter/X, I really don´t like the blocking-culture, since it hinders a discussion even if you have different opinions. So much of our debate culture, even in universities, has been lost and replaced with "I won´t even talk to you, you..." That being said, I would like to have a Blacklist on youtube, that filters accounts in your search results. hypocritical? yes. but it would make the youtube experience a bit better. P.S. And wtf with the "reaction" Accounts. first time watching/listening my pale a**. Most of it seems to be a mixture of fetish, overacting and dishonesty. Look I´m shocked, I´m crying, I´m happy, I´m crying againg. No I didn´t new the cues... Look, real tears.

Which is why I am also considering 100mp sensor cameras as then 3 primes could become 2… But that would be a serious investment and if I did it, have to see out my career.

They're so low volume in sales that using unique sensor is out of question. So expect to see a familiar sensor used by others. I would choose A1. They can't afford to not have 8k camera in 2024.

I should add that this is not some pointless pontificating but something I am seriously considering doing which is going back to a ‘fixed lens point & shoot’ for my stills work. Except I am looking at it as having a single prime for indoor work and a single prime for outdoor with a specialist lens for ceremonies & speeches. Would this be a ‘better’ option than my current 3 zoom set up? No, not ‘better’ as in it would not be as flexible, but would actually tick boxes in a more purist direction without really sacrificing anything. I’ve never been a fan aesthetically of anything wider than 28mm so 28 would be my indoor lens as it pretty much is already. Outdoors, I already was a big fan of the 40mm look but for certain things, prefer anything from 65 to 90mm. I have shot outdoors with just 65mm and it worked pretty well actually so it’s currently a hypothetical toss up between 40 or 65. If I went 65, that means the ultra compact super slick Sigma 65mm f2 which is one of my all time favourite lenses. That could then be paired with it’s 90mm f2.8 sibling, another sublime compact lens. The only thing with Sigma is they do not have a 28mm in the Contemporary line and I like things to be in a system. But otherwise it would simply be a case of having as I do now, crop mode on a custom button with stills of almost identical file size. So: 28/42 + 40/60 or 65/100 + 90/135 Arguably, this is NOT a purist single focal length approach and technically it isn’t but at the same time, it is not constantly swapping lenses, but rather moving through phases after many hours from one focal length to another and then having 2x working focal lengths at any one time. I’m thinking of it as a ‘Purist Plus’ approach 😉 It’s an option with HUGE appeal for 2025 because I use zooms for more practical reasons, but I lose something in the process by doing so.