Andrew Reid

I sold my a1 the other week, to raise some money which I immediately spent on sweeties and trawling Berlin for vintage PC parts. A fine investment if ever I made one. The problem is I now have absolutely no Sony cameras, at least no full frame ones. For some reason I refuse to part with my old a6500 as it has a nice wooden grip and feels funky. The choice now is between 1200-1800 euros on a full frame a7-something. I don't want to spend another 5 grand. So I've been eying up an a7 IV and an a9. The a9 for me is the better stills camera - it's way faster - however on the video side it only has the old Sony colour profiles and the lightweight 8bit codec. Actually 8bit I am sort-of-ok with, it is the lack of Picture Profiles that lets it down more. The a9 can be had for around 1500 euros / $ on eBay or £1300 in the UK in good condition. The a7 IV has a lot of rolling shutter, a rather clunky sounding mechanical shutter and quite a slow sensor in general so 4K/60p has to be a crop. It does however have a lot else going for it... And the new ergonomics are a big step forward for Sony. The a7r III is another I'm considering... Ergonomics are sort of half way between the older a7s II and new a7 IV - that is it to say, not bad but buttons feel worse and the grip is smaller. It has S-LOG 3 and HLG / REC 2020, fine for 4K/24p, the moire isn't that bad, it's great in low light considering the megapixel count, 12,800 very usable, S35 crop mode very sharp... Can't remember if it has clear image zoom in 4K for 2x crop Super 16mm c-mount lenses... Does a7 IV? Thing is a7r III is a bargain at 1200... So I am very tempted. Spend extra 500-600 for a7 IV or maybe get neither and go with something else?

I don't know... You tell me ChatGPT?

Does anybody know who is making their sensors these days?

The only drawbacks I can see are the lack of auto-ND (aka FS5 since forever) and the reliance on quite obsolete lenses (EF). https://www.newsshooter.com/2024/09/13/metabones-canon-ef-to-sony-e-cine-end-smart-adapter-first-look/ Metabones are good at getting cinema people involved though... First Caldwell Optics and now LC-Tec

That is 250 euros per K. Not bad.

Lovely, very lovely. Liking that it has the clear setting.

Personally, I am holding out for the 20K URSA

Only the lowest prices from me 🙂

Due to having too much stuff and serious addiction issues (to camera and lens drugs), I am reluctantly and bitterly parting with quite a bit of gear for cash in Berlin. If you are in the area and fancy a coffee and a new lens or camera, I am here. The complete current gear sale from me (updated daily!): https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-bestandsliste.html?userId=6113630 Some highlights: Fujifilm X-H2 Panasonic GH6 Leica Noctilux Some FD lenses Voigtlander Leica M lenses RED EPIC Sony RX1 Iscorama 36 anamorphic. Fuji X100T And a bunch more stuff. A small price reduction is on offer for EOSHD readers 🙂 I can also ship within Germany and throughout Europe!

It's very odd what Panasonic have prioritised over releasing the S1 Mark II, S1R Mark II and S1H Mark II. They have updated the G9, because that's an insane best seller of a camera isn't it? And it really was crying out to be updated in an S5 Mark II body, hence G9 II and it is now languishing at something like 58th in the sales chart for 2024. They have updated the GH6, as the GH7 being part of a dead system is obviously more important than an S1H isn't it! And now we have the new box cameras, aimed at the cinema market which is currently in a huge downturn, maybe Panasonic want to capitalise on the raving success of the first box cameras, which sold a mammoth 5 units. At this rate we are going to see a Panasonic CM1 Mark II, a GM1 successor (S9 anyone?) and a sequel to the long line of sales chart toppers known by their initials G... as in G100, the vlogging camera. The S9 really nobody wanted it, I don't know why it exists. The GH7 I can just about understand, I'm glad the GH series will die AFTER getting autofocus and not before. The G9 II doesn't need to exist, just use a GH7. The S5 Mark II probably should not have come out BEFORE the S1 Mark II. The box cameras, I really couldn't give a hoot about. Somebody wake me up when Panasonic rejoins the camera market and stops messing about.

Seen as though my retro tech hobby is now completely out of control I decided to get a 2007 MacBook Pro for FireWire duties today, cost 80 euro. Came with some nice music and the SSD upgrade (500GB) which was popular back in the day, and seller chucked a 4S in with the deal. there’s a number of aspects to it that suggest modern Apple have not necessarily gone in a forward direction!!

Yeah the design has gone really far downhill in general, when it comes to websites. Far too much shit and clutter. The worst examples in the UK are local newspaper websites... they are like viruses. The EU did not think through the cookie rules. It should be a browser level setting and not popping up on every site all the time. Also the ad industry and Google ads have not helped... Google abandoned the open web a long time ago and now makes all of its money wreaking it with ads, whilst squandering that on failed products. Google's products across the board are getting worse, including search - now run by the failed-upwards ex boss of Yahoo search! Even Google Maps has become a flawed and frustrating piece of shit too. When the internet was in the hands of individuals and Europeans / British companies it was in a much better place. Corporate US has a lot to answer for.

Some good options there... On PC side it is probably a case of just adding the expansion card to a spare PCIe slot? Or even a PCIe capture card with S-video input. There's also some £80 car boot sale/FB market place Windows XP PCs with a front panel that includes a firewire jack plugged directly into the mainboard. Some external firewire interface boxes are also an option for PCIe sound cards like the Creative Audigy 2 ZS.

High-end production and film industry is in real trouble at the moment. Stuff is not selling. From ARRI, RED, all the way down to vintage lenses on eBay there has been a real slump in demand. It was good timing for RED to sell up to Nikon. Not so great for Nikon though. The question is how long this slump is going to last... Streaming giants are cutting back on new production. Cinemas closing left right and centre across the world. TV is struggling for ad money and social media is taking over casual viewing in the home with GenZ. So it remains to be seen how long RED can last and whether the market correction for high-end gear is going to be significant and permanent, especially with AI on the horizon.

Ah I see yes, I agree with that. Sometimes the customer doesn't need to go on a deep dive and upgrades become less frequent anyway. But it doesn't change the fact that written journalism in the tech industry should not simply vanish, there is still a huge demand for it. It is just that the way we digest content now on small screens just isn't suited to magazine style in-depth articles so it discourages us from spending time that way. When I do try to spend time with many of these websites I am bombarded by cookie permissions, ads, bad design and clickbait anyway, whereas scrolling through apps on a phone is a much cleaner, faster experience. Yeah the ad dollars have by and large been hoovered up by influencer gobshites. Witness the last Pana launch where they outnumbered journalists by a huge margin. And anyone who does more probing coverage isn't as useful for marketing now anyway. They are not there to sell. They're there to tell the truth in an in-depth way. Guess which the marketing bosses prefer, them or the influencers? And therefore they spend accordingly... Indeed the ad industry has seen a large shift in spend to influence the influencer.... rather than to themselves directly influence the customer. Yes good point. But wasn't it always a minority in class rooms that nerded out on stuff like this? But yeah, times change... Today's kids are more likely to be into Telegram, Ai, social media, YouTube, console gaming and streaming. A toxic bunch of platforms if ever I saw one.

The 2k, 3k, 4k canon stuff is still cost cut but not as bad as the construction of the entry and mid-range stuff. Local store here in Berlin had a tiny, light 18-45mm kit zoom gently fall off a table onto soft flooring and it was irredeemably fucked forever. The stuff I have taken apart such as an R10 was so delicate inside that I have no idea how they even service the things. Just the act of partial disassembly is enough to make it dissolve. It is like the materials are brittle and made of a very low grade plastic, and the ribbon cables seem to be made of paper. The internal layout is also very busy and you can tell that it is not really meant to be serviced at all by hand. They seem to have automated a lot of the build.

Plus dongles?

I recently took apart some RF lenses and an RF body, and they are shockingly cheap and poorly designed inside. Canon have automated a lot of manufacturing and the mechanical side all looks like it was put together in CAD by a trainee. This is a particular shame as Japan was known for having the best mechanical engineers in the world. I guess this is what happens when you promote accountants to run the company over the heads of engineers. So many problems on the EOS R5 II for such an expensive piece of kit. They are like the boeing of Cameras. I would never spend 4K on something with incomplete firmware. It's supposed to be a mature product, it's not like it's first gen.

Here is the sum total of what I have pulled out the trash in the last few months Nice to see Panasonic can do a 3.8 inch screen after all on the NV-DS5 in the background which takes same battery as the DX1 and DX100, but is only a one-chip. The GS400 is / was a very capable beast, on par with the pinnacle of prosumer Mini DV cameras... Sony TRV950e The DX100 was 40 euros, the rest of them 5 euros or in case of GS400 40 again. Still have my earliest filmmaking from university in 2005 on tape. Should get round to digitising it soon via firewire.

Funnily enough this EXACT one was sitting staring at me from a Berlin flea market table today for 40 euros. So of course I couldn't resist and have yet another 90s Mini Dv camera to play with. Must have been one of the smaller 3 chip cameras of the era? It's nice and compact. The later one in 2005 I used to have is the Panasonic GS400. That was the peak of the Panasonic prosumer MiniDV cams for me. Very nice screen and lens on that, and it's 3CCD.

Well said.

Sorry but this doesn't explain why the longer form written journalism is going away. The tech market that Andandtech covers might be mature but it's still absolutely huge in terms of interest and enthusiasts, and there's a wealth of discovery to be done, debate and bait online devoted to GPUs, gaming, and such like. LinusTechTips on YouTube is huge, one of the highest subscriber counts anywhere. This is all the fault of phones, you can't READ a phone like you can a magazine due to the small screen, it's just not very nice to read long stuff on a phone and you're much better off sitting at a desk instead with a laptop. You'll be surprised how many people use their phone as a laptop or desktop replacement now. Also it is far too easy for social media and clickbait aggregators / rumors sites to hoover up other site's content and act as a link farm or highlights reel without attribution. And that is how people now digest the content. In the days when the camera rumors sites were interested in EOSHD blog posts, their link-through to the source was of no real benefit to me - they got all the views, and I had virtually nothing out of it. Andandtech could go on publishing deep dives on Apple's architecture and such like but 90% of the delivery of this would be done by aggregators, reddit, Facebook, etc. So the internet is truly broken with social media and it will soon die, or become too financially unrewarding to bother working with.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell Very sad to see the news of Anandtech stopping. Canary in the coal mine or what? If this can happen to a PC / tech website which is part of a thriving market compared to DPReview, then it can happen to ALL quality journalism on the world wide web. Anandtech is owned by Future PLC, they are the British company behind some of the earliest mainstream tech journalism in the UK such as the PC and Atari magazines on shelves in the 80s and 90s. In a nut shell smartphones are killing long form written content completely and the internet is going away as we know it. It is turning into cable TV or sensationalised clickbait tabloid news. Just look at the camera rumors sites and YouTube. A big shame if you ask me and it would be great to know what to do to preserve the written word, written journalism and written knowledge outside of just books, if the internet is no longer the right medium for it. Time for an internet 1.0... That can only be accessed via a desktop or laptop? The problem with phones is that you just don't have the large enough screen space to do anything useful, content wise. It lends itself only to scrolling and short captions, or photos and video.

S1R II and S1H II are in doubt as originals didn't sell. S1 II is also problematic as the S5 II has taken over as the mid-range / entry level FF model... Not the S9 so much as that is a different form factor type and has no EVF. Various Pana cameras of late have been impacted by severe cost cutting. The S9 feels hollow and cheap, because it is. And it has a very old sensor in it. The G9 II malarky with the same case as S5 II was a pity. The GH7 in EXACT same casing as the previous GH camera... Although the GH3 and GH4 were very similar, it does show Panasonic cutting back. Leica SL3 coming out before the new Panasonic cameras is also a sign that things aren't well. I hope they prove me wrong.

Lovely subject and rustic colours, all cuts together well and is nice and abstract. Yeah it doesn't have a true 24p or progressive scan sensor mode... But it will always have a use. Another paint brush on the canvas. And the form factor is very interesting... Why the mirrorless hybrid cameras have not got out of their stuck-in-a-mini-DSLR-all-the-same-shape rut yet I have no idea.