Andrew Reid

Your whole premise is based on a slice of the market that isn't representative. Ask any of the distributors, retailers and rental shops and they will tell you that the majority are using the C200 as their main rig. That RED, C700, F55, Alexa users will consider it a B-camera does not make it "Not an A-cam" in the eyes of the rest of the pro video market. I know Cinema5D think $8000 is little money... all those ads are clearly paying well. For the rest of us it's an A-camera.

Will you sell your Canon gear or keep hold of the lenses?

I'm in love with how natural this looks. What grade of Warm Black Mist Pro filter did you use? Grades 1,2,3 are a bit to much like a 1970's porno according to what I've read. 1/2 is supposed to be most popular, still a strong haze but not overbearing. 1/4 is more subtle and natural. 1/8 is the least noticable. I love the softening of the harsh highlights in this scene, but preservation of detail on the pavement and shutters... amazing. Really takes the digital edge of it and actually looks like haze in the atmosphere rather than a filter.

All 24-70mm F2.8 lenses are bricks even G Master. With Sigma 35mm F1.4 ART on the market, Sony probably would be wasting their time. I like the existing 35mm F1.4 G, it's tiny and renders beautifully. Could do with SSM. Between SSM 1 and 2 hardly any difference. I don't think a 12MP sensor would make sense in A99 II instead of 42MP. Remember it's a photography flagship not a low light / video specialist cam. I like that stills are still 18MP even in APS-C mode, gives you huge crop ability to reframe a shot. 28mm F2.0 is old MD not AF? I have the 70-210mm F4 beercan. It's great for stills, for £70! Bbut AF is very noisy.

Yeah it's fun. Cinema5D just said $8000 is Little Money for the C200, haha. I like your idea of cheapest premium camera you can find. $28? THAT is "Little Money"!! The Sigma DP1 is a really unique tool for colour, for pleasure and for art... slow, but so much going for it. I wish more people would cover the cheap cameras and hidden gems. Samsung NX1 was one as well. Most of those who bought it didn't feel need to go all out and blow $3000 on a Sony afterwards. My current tip for a bargain for 4K, art and sheer enjoyment is the GX85 with cinelikeD hack And for stills a $500 Sony A900 with $80 Minolta 24-105mm F3.5-4.5... Can't go wrong with that. Full frame and the lens has character... whilst being 1/7th of the price of the Sigma ART 24-105mm F4, almost as sharp and 1/4th of the size.

Get a replacement on Monday so let's see about all that. The Super 35mm 4K mode is competent up to ISO 12,800! The full frame mode 4K is good to about 1600 but I think the 1080p might go higher and still look good. a7s still has advantage in low light for full frame 4K. Yes the Sigma is a bit sharper but the Sony has a lovely rendering and character. The new price for the Sony is insane but I got mine used for £599, which is similar price to the Sigma ART. Same with the Zeiss 50mm f1.4 vs the Sigma, the Zeiss has a nicer character and rendering.

It depends on the shot. Sometimes you will notice a huge difference between cameras and sometimes not. For instance there's a big depth of field difference between full frame at F1.2 and micro four thirds at F2.8, which you don't notice quite as much at closer subject distances, but at longer ones the M43 image would be completely flat, and the full frame one would be nicely layered. In low light situations obviously another big difference. Can you take great images on anything? Absolutely! But let's highlight the differences as much as the similarities.

You don't need to quote the post if your reply is directly under it.

This camera is better in almost every way than the A7R II and A7S II. Lenses... I'll get onto those in a minute but A mount is nothing to be afraid of. Will be selling a lot of Canon glass after this and will end up actually saving money at the same time as increasing quality and decreasing weight. The AF is definitely better than the A7R II and kicks the A7S II into the dust. At F3.5 it tracks like a hawk. I can now see why Sony did this because at F1.4 on a softer lens it doesn't work nearly as well as Dual Pixel AF on the 1D X Mark II. But to have this bonus feature on the 24-70mm F2.8, losing just half a stop, but gaining amazing run & gun AF for video. The 1080/24p and 1080/120p are the SAME QUALITY. This makes the 1080/120p the best on the full frame camera market. The nicest ever. There's no crop, it's full frame. A7R II was 720p only and A7S II was a big 2x crop! What's more it is not just an S&Q mode but a fully continuous normal video mode with 5 axis IBIS and AF tracking, at 100Mbit. The S&Q mode is only 16Mbit. The 4K full frame quality is also very good but Super 35 does still have advantage in low light and to eliminate moire. Nice to have a top LCD for shooting info. A7 series lacks this of course. Buttons are better arranged than A7R II and A7S II. It is not laid out like a RX10 III. It is its own beast in terms of ergonomics. You can now assign Super 35mm mode to a button, which you can't on the mirrorless cams. The new menus are in there and do group stuff together better but they're not a big enough overhaul to make me really appreciate them. I try to go into the menus as little as possible. Unfortunately you can't assign 4K/1080p to a func. button or the func. menu, you have to dig into the menus when switching between 4K 24p and 1080/120fps. You can assign video recording to the exp. comp button next to shutter release, really handy. Default video button is better placed than A7 series but on the rear not the top. Exposure compensation can be assigned instead to rear or front dial when in A-priority mode, then it automatically reverts to shutter speed / aperture control in manual mode.... again super handy. The LCD can face forward for VLOGs and stuff, cannot do that with the A7 series or A9. It can also sit on top of the hotshoe almost (reminds me of Sony R1), or flips away to the base. More articulation options than the A7S II. AF for photos.... hmmm lovely. Super quick and reliable. The A lenses...TOP stuff. Particularly Zeiss 135mm F1.8, 50mm F1.4 and 24mm F2.0. The 85mm F1.4 is a bit noisy and slow for AF but great in MF. Super optically. The Zeiss 24-70mm F2.8 is like the G-Master lens, and just as big unfortunately. I prefer wherever possible the SSM lenses (24,50,24-70 but not 135 and 85) if using AF for video - much quieter internal focussing. I love the green indicator boxes in manual focus mode for video. Way less intrusive than peaking. It stops you from diving into the punch-in zoom mode or racking the focus ring back and forth a little bit to be sure. As soon as you get that green dot you can just stop and relax knowing that area is in focus. LOVE IT Have dialed EOSHD Pro Color into PP1. Looks WAY better than the default. Not tried S-LOG 3 to see if the banding is improved since A7S II yet. S-LOG 2 and S.Gamut Cine 3 with view assist all present like A7S II and an improvement over A7R II. 42MP stills and 18MP Super 35 mode. This for photography is significantly more in resolutions terms than the 1D X Mark II and allows you to effectively get two high quality prime lens focal lengths in one. The camera is more responsive than A7R II / A7S II. Starting / stopping video has zero lag. Start-up time very good. Writing the 42MP RAW+JPEG files - MUCH smoother. Max write speed is 60MB/s to UHS 1 cards. Dual card slots. Not Compact Flash speeds (80MB/s plus) on the card controller but much better than A7R II 30-40MB/s. This isn't a DSLR. EVF quality is very good, translucent mirror doesn't flip. It's instant-on like mirrorless camera. Body size and weight is similar to the GH5. So far far less than 1D X Mark II. Has a DC-IN port, but doesn't seem to take charge from USB. Battery is probably too big for 5v 2-amp charging. There's a very smooth and nice front dial near the lens release which is assignable to things like ISO... It can be clickless or clicking. Now the bad stuff... The LCD dims in movie mode when you're shooting 4K or 120fps 1080p. It's either a power management thing or a heat thing. Makes exposure look totally different and 2 stops darker than same settings in stills mode. Very silly Sony!!! It seems all unnecessary on this camera because of the bigger battery than A7 series. Although the screen does get very slightly warm at full brightness outdoors, to think this would contribute to overheating problems is unlikely and it can be flipped completely away from the back of the camera where the hot main board and chipsets back directly onto the rear casing with no proper heat sink (I've seen the tear-down photos). Sadly my camera came with a small faulty part... a sticky joystick in the 'right' direction. Apparently it 'wears-in' over time but I don't think mine is proper...why would it only need wearing-in to click right responsively and not also up/down/left? We'll see if my next unit does the same weirdness. On this point, I think Sony still have work to do to convince us they can make buttons. Can you imagine this on a pro body like a Canon 1D X Mark II? Journalists would be rabid, foaming at the mouth. That's it for now, can't actually use it much more as it has to go back to DigitalRev but plan to do the review soon. I think this is a real rival to the GH5... No 10bit but you gain full frame, better slow-mo, 42MP stills and maintain pretty much all the other features. That's it with the Zeiss 50mm F1.4 The Sony 35mm F1.4 G is also a nice one... forgot to mention that. It's much smaller and lighter than the Sigma ART 35mm. Size comparison with the GH5 Although lens mount makes the A99 II look much larger, the tops of the bodies are practically level (look at hot shoe and mode dials) The grip is a bit deeper on the A99 II and card door a lot wider... dual card slots on both.

Great stuff!! Well done!

I'm all for trying this on the GH5. Is it worth a try? Can someone get me started?

My needs are evolving and the A99 II makes sense for a lot of reasons. If you think it's just GAS then that's up to you... Your call. I do like gear and have a lot of it, it's my passion and EOSHD would not exist without my interest in the gear. You know what is a passion killer... Snipers like you.

If you guys want EOSHD to be all about just 1 camera, I am just glad you're not running the show.

Does it support H.265 hardware acceleration via the GPU or is it a software based implementation?

They are going back to the Mac Pro with modular, upgradable components, plus a Pro cinema display. Good blog to follow on RSS if you want the first updates about this https://daringfireball.net

Dude, there are crews with an Alexa that shoot ProRes instead of raw. Pros are terrified of a slow turnaround on an edit, large file sizes and un-editable codecs. Why do you think internal raw is missing from the C300, FS7, FS5 and a bunch of other popular pro workhorses? At $8000, by mainstream you don't really mean mainstream, rather 'popular within a niche'. This is pure speculation! Just do the maths... 1 hour of footage = 512GB of CFast 2.0 media It will be a top quality card as pros don't risk an entire day's shoot for the sake of saving a few quid. And performance of the card will be a factor. So you are talking £4900 of media to get you through just 7 hours of shooting, assuming you have one camera at the wedding / commercial / live event / interview. If it is two cameras double your costs to £10k. The guy who said you would spend more on media than on the camera wasn't joking!! Now tell me the pro shoots that involve 15 minutes of shooting before it's all over.... Not many of those sir. Yes, you can offload 128GB every 15 minutes, stop the shoot every 15 minutes as a result, or employ a data wrangler armed with a very large hard drive... It's a big expense and hassle either way you look at it and it won't catch on, thus raw will not be mainstream with pros via the C200.

Canon raw lite is not Cinema DNG though. At the moment you have no choice but to turn it into some form of LOG before grading the compressed files instead of the RAW. So it is not really RAW, just a fiddly way of getting 10bit ProRes out of the camera.

Still think it is generous of that business considering amount of use you had out of the camera until it died. How long was the warranty on the NX1 since it is a 2015 camera? 2 or 3 years?

Nobody complains when we compare the FS5 to an A7R II. People need to know what extra they are getting for their money. Sure the market is a bit different and form factor different but there's overlap... You can't tell me not a single pro is using an A7R II or GH5, can you? By that same token, not every pro videography or wedding guy is using the SDI on their C200, whose biggest selling point to many people is the lack of need to rig extras onto it like external recorders and monitors via SDI. Not every pro is using timecode to sync footage between 5 other cameras on a shoot and not every C200 user will even be using the XLRs, some will strip it down to the bare bones and put it on a gimbal, with sound done like it has always been done in the film days - a separate job for another man. So shut up.

GH5 workflow as follows - ALL-I 400Mbit (forthcoming), edit natively like FS7 10bit IPB 150Mbit (current 10bit 4K codec), transcode to ProRes in EditReady C200 workflow - Convert the RAW using the supplied Canon software. You cannot edit the RAW files yet, not even in Resolve 14.

I found a Sony 16-50mm F2.8 for £280 used in mint condition. They regularly go for a similar amount as nobody is using them! Weather sealed, silent AF, constant aperture, perfect for Super 35mm 4K and the autofocus tracking mode.

How are you going to store a year's worth of the original footage? I am genuinely intrigued. It's debatable... Neither are full frame!

So glad to hear this. There are so few cameras that do great looking 120fps, let alone full frame. Leica SL is the only one I know. That Sony have achieved this 120fps from a 42MP sensor is quite a story. The new LSI in the A99 II seems much faster than the one in the mirrorless cameras and shouldn't overheat as much in a larger body. Also great to hear. In terms of autofocus, some A mount lenses do have silent motors, so in terms of the smooth aperture and silent AF these lenses are up there with any e-mount stuff. Does it dim when recording 4K like on the A7S II? Also good to know!! The mushy focus assist on the A7S II was one of the most annoying things about it. Can you still do a focus zoom whilst recording? The advantages of SLT! So you CAN lock the exposure when in AF tracking mode at F3.5? Does the exposure compensation dial work? It can work at F1.4, you just modify the lens. I'm thinking of buying the Sony 16-50mm F2.8, taking the aperture control lever out and using it only at F2.8... Although the change to F3.5 won't hurt the look that much to be honest. Does Nikon require back of lens mount change or is it an adapter ring? Don't forget ZS. There are M42 mount Zeiss lenses from the modern era M42 goes straight on the A99 II and there's no flappy mirror to hit the back of the lens like on Canon full frame DSLRs. I would go Sigma but I fear the AF might not be as good (esp. in video mode) as with Sony's SSM lenses like the 24-70mm F2.8 II. STF is a bokeh improvement right? Does the focus ring turn when focussing like the ZA85? I may sell the 85mm as on full frame, prefer 135mm. 85mm F1.4 is lovely on a crop sensor, like GH5. There's also the Minolta 28-70mm F2.8 for $350 They store 720p thumbnails for clips in the XAVC-S folder structure and yet still show the pixilated thumbnail for 4K in playback mode, to speed up flicking through it... It's stupid though. You can however set it to display very high quality video preview thumbnails in playback mode by going to change the playback mode view in the menus to video... but then you lose sight of your stills!! There has been no firmware update yet, which means one is certainly due. Remove the P-auto limit in AF tracking for video and get the thumbnails sorted in playback mode... anything else? Will suggest these to Sony. 1080/120p is continuous like RX100 V and not just a S&Q mode, right?

Technically, both shoot 10bit but the C200 is really going to be an 8bit camera for 95% of the people who use it. Read the full article

When I sell some of my EF lenses and the 1D X Mark II, I am actually saving money by going A99 II.