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What is your business model? Ergonomic nightmares (I mean horrible) and 90 seconds to boot. Shoot battery life. Bug prone. Lots of crashes... but toward the end of their life-cycle, these evolved into really solid workhorse cameras. Unusable before the MX chip without some serious work, but respectable with the upgrade and new firmware/software and an ok image even by today standard's with the new color matrices Red's released. Red's dynamic range measurements are BS. 11-12 stops at best, same as C300, just a bit better than MK3 and BM4K, worse than 2.5k BMCC. Noisy under tungsten light with some iffy color rendering, but if you can light appropriately or use an 80A filter, the results are quite nice. Really only the Alexa gets tungsten quite right. Not my favorite camera, but for the price... it will last a while. Skew is same as F3/C300... internal audio is useless, but so it is with any decent camera. Of course you're using dual system sound at this price range (or at least feeding from a mixer). For doc, corporate, wedding, tv, etc. cut your losses and get a C300. Still the best thing going and a better image than the Red MX under less-than-ideal light. But a lot of good stuff was shot on this cam and at $6500 you're looking at a workhorse. Just not recommended for projects requiring a lot of data or low light. The transcode is brutal and the low light is bad. For the David Finchers out there who want to get every little bit out of their image... it's a fun ride. If you're shooting ads it is cool. For the documentarians... run... far... away... just to much data and bad under low light. If you can rent it out for $500/day YES GET IT. And then rent it for ten days. Easy! The company seems to offer great support and push the other guys along toward innovation. Dragon is an achievement. For the money, if you can support the workflow and don't need great low light or tungsten performance, you could do worse. A lot worse. But horses for courses...

Thanks for the detailed reply. The 0.5 filter was like $20 used and the 1 $25 new, so I'm not going to spring for the Tokina at 10 times the price. The image is good enough for me. I do wish someone would reverse engineer the Iscorama 36 and re-release it. The SLR Magic seems like the closest thing yet, but dual focus is just.... sloppy. Not that I haven't worked with a dual focus adapter before and had good results. Just amazing how clever the Iscorama is.

Decent advice above... Here's something better than a dumb blur... a little Neat Video profile that might give some good results used judiciously and masked appropriately. Use it well. If the subject moves, use temporal aliasing. If it doesn't don't... or treat removing moire like a matte painting. t2ialiasing.dnp

​If you have an Iscorama 36 (for which a 72mm filter is ideal), why worry about double focusing? With the Iscorama, both a +0.5 and +1 filter are useful. The +0.5 filter will give you a good focusing range for normal use, but for anything closer than like 3 feet, you'll want a +1 or stronger. Really a 0.5 is necessary unless you don't need to focus closer than 6 feet. I am not sure how much an achromat matters rather than a single element filter. My 0.5 B&W filter seems fine, and it is single-coated, single-element and dirt cheap.

I'm yet to be convinced that the difference between an achromat and a good single-element close up filter is terribly substantial (I would be happy to be proved otherwise, if anyone wants to pit a Tokina 0.4 against a Tokina 0.5 I'd love to see the results!), but the 0.4/0.5 strength gives you a really useful focusing range with an Iscorama, whereas no filter gives you infinity to 6 feet (too far to too far) and a +1 gives you too close to too close. I don't get it, though. Most lenses aren't apochromatic and a 0.5 filter won't ruin your optics much. I don't think a decent 0.5 single-element filter will ruin the party tremendously, though I guess if you're spending $4k on an Iscorama, why not drop a few hundred extra on the best CU filter you can find.

Iinteresting.... looks like it's worth a try if the threads aren't borked to be lens-specific as the listing implies, but is rarely the case. Is it two-element or one-element? There are lots of 0.5 single-element diopters on eBay. How big is the difference? I'm using a B&W NL0.5 72mm diopter and the image seems fine with it. Not noticing any visible degradation or added CA with such a weak diopter strength. Is the Tokina 0.4 really worth that much extra money? Going to add a B&W NL1 to the mix because even the NL0.5 doesn't focus that close. Good build quality and strong threads, no idea if the optics are actually good except that it works well for what it is and 0.5 is a useful strength.

​With both film and digital I spot meter and incident meter pretty religiously. Rarely trust internal meters. You're really ill-equipped to expose without the right equipment and a miscalibrated internal meter on an old Russian camera isn't up to snuff. But for casual projects, absolutely I just use the waveform monitor or something and leave it as is. Digital is much easier and my preference for sure, I mean, it's everyone's. I liked having to storyboard every shot and only shooting the portions I knew I needed from each angle to conserve shooting ratio (under extreme circumstances). Fun but kind of a needless obstacle.

They're dirt cheap. Though film isn't, but you can buy short ends. SR3s are selling for peanuts now and the images look as good as ever. I just do this for fun (and the occasional paycheck), so it's still a little too expensive for me. If you've never tried a Bolex, even that is a lot of fun. Just the lab fees and scans are brutal.

Fair enough. There are circumstances in which you'll see it (chain link fences back to back, because one is working as a a system sampling the frequency of the other), but when looking at one chain fence, or straight at fabric... or one part of a system... you're never going to see it. So while it's not completely alien to nature, it's still nice to reduce it. No matter how much you stare at that brick wall it won't moire without something else in front of it.

​Good question lol. I actually posted this technique about four years ago and everyone forgot about it until someone made a plug in that automatic a similar process (but just for chroma noise... the chroma blur I mentioned above). It works great. If the aliasing is so bad it's obvious on the screen it's hard to get rid of, but every time i've seen a bit in a suit or something I've been able to fix it. I just find the frame that has the worst and most and drag the sampling window around it. It's very low-frequency, so I crank up the low frequency nr setting in the advanced settings in neat video. Works awesome, although obviously it can get so bad nothing can fix it.

It's not an electronic phenomenon (what does that even mean in this case?), it's a mathematical one. Read up on the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. When one system samples another system there's potential for aliasing at frequencies above half the resolution of the system that's doing the sampling. This could mean music recorded at 44.1khz might cause aliasing in frequencies above 22.05khz (which is just above the cut off for human hearing). It means any sensor that's resolving more than 25% (50% in either dimension) of its megapixel count is also aliasing except when something optically reduces the resolution of the information going into the system below that threshold. Usually no one notices just a little, though, and most dSLRs alias when shooting stills under the worst circumstances... but just a little... and resolve roughly 70% resolution in either dimension at best. That said,​ when have you seen aliasing induced by your eyes? I would argue no one ever has. When have you seen aliasing with your eyes? Only when there is a system offering a signal and another filtering it. You see it when you see it in images recorded with sensor that is prone to aliasing because it is sampling information beyond the Shannon-Nyqvist limit. You see it when you see one screen door through another at the right frequency (one screen door is the signal... the other is the system filtering it...). But the system that induces aliasing is never your eyes, because your eyes as sensors are so high-detail that it's effectively irrelevant and beyond diffraction-limited and, more importantly, the rod-and-cone pattern is too random to have any statistically significant chance of aligning with another system. (Whereas sensors are grids... and there are plenty of grids and lines out there.) So no, the eyes do not cause aliasing at any frequency, no matter how high. They can see aliasing when it occurs as a result of another system sampling something about the Shannon-Nyqvist limit, however. So... stacks of screen doors, fences, etc. can cause a moire pattern. But what you're suggesting (that the eyes can induce aliasing) is mathematically and objectively wrong, but maybe psychologically right, sure, in that it's not a foreign phenomenon experientially. We've seen aliasing before in real life when screen doors or wire meshes overlap and seen it in plenty of pictures. So when we see it on camera, it's not too foregone. But when we perceive it in life it's always a product of two systems interacting, and neither of those systems is ever your eye (whereas it could be a sensor.. or meshes... or whatever). You will never see moire induced by your eyes alone. Always one system interfering with another before getting to your eye. Whereas a dSLR sensor (CCD or CMOS) can induce aliasing whenever it captures detail above the Shannon-Nyquist limit; thankfully most OLPF knock out the majority of detail that causes really bad aliasing... except that line skipping decreases the Shannon-Nyqvist limit by a factor of three (if you're skipping every other line) and the OLPF obviously isn't blurring things that much! Same goes for film, actually. Random dot pattern doesn't induce aliasing. Can't. Won't. The same idea that explains why line skipping causes aliasing explain why the Alexa has bad aliasing with red fabrics (the C300 even worse!). The OLPF is designed to knock down resolution for green/white light, but the pixel count for red pixels is pretty small on any Bayer sensor. So when your signal is mostly red, it's getting through the OLPF with more than 50% of the frequency of the red pixel array. Thus... aliasing. Can't imagine red fabrics through the 7D.

​1) Certainly good advice, but not always possible. I agree, though, that's the best approach. I've even seen the Alexa alias pretty severely in the right circumstances (fine-pattererned red fabrics at certain distances), and beta cam did terribly. Being smart when addressing set design is always a good choice. 2) Uhh... sure. 3) No. CCDs alias just as much as CMOS sensors... it's what's in front of the sensor and how it's processed that matters. 4) Worth a try, so is pushing the image just slightly out of focus if you really need to. If it's a brick wall in the distance, you won't lose that much resolution throwing it just a little out of focus to lessen aliasing. But kind of iffy. 5) The human eye does not see any more moire than you put in front of it. If you put an image of something that has moire in front of it, it will see it, same as with film, which also doesn't otherwise alias. I've had really, really good luck with some post techniques, assuming the aliasing isn't horrible. I sample the aliasing in Neat Video and use a 0-radius temporal filter and extremely strong low frequency noise reduction settings. Then I mask this in After Effects where needed, maybe add a little blur, then regain. For less severe (color only) aliasing you can copy the footage onto a layer above the original shot, add a 12-pixel radius blur (or thereabouts) and superimpose that blurred footage using the color transfer mode. I also mask this layer as it fuzzes out the richness of the color. These techniques are a pain, but very effective at at least reducing aliasing. That said, the fabric thing is your best bet. Although I'd had decent luck tackling fabric in post, only if it's pretty minor in the first place though. So shoot smart... choose appropriate fabrics for your camera (as I said above, Alexa aliases with some red fabrics, and the Canon C series even more so, despite both being pretty alias-free normally), throw your worst aliasing out of focus or avoid shooting brick walls in establishing shots (or shoot a still and blur it and composite it in later: seriously). Suddenly I don't miss my t2i as much.

​The Epic MX doesn't even surpass the C300, which isn't that much better than the GH4/A7s/and apparently the Samsung... The Alexa is pretty hard to screw up, though. Dragon is another story... jury is out but the capabilities are amazing. The strength of Canon's CX00 series is that they have "good enough" image quality for cinema (whereas dSLRs don't quite, but maybe in a pinch) and good low light, REALLY easy to use, no need for kludgy connectors, etc. Just a workhorse for the owner/op. But for anyone trying to get images that look "as good" as a C300 (which you can make to look "as good" as the Alexa or Epic, fwiw), just get something like this. You're paying more for easy of use and something that's efficient for what's it's designed for (C100 weddings; C300/C500 doc and low end cinema... a low light Alexa b cam) than image quality. Lighting and art design are not cheap and skill is priceless, but getting a good enough image really is pretty affordable.

Seems to be a really inexpensive Isco 54 and Isco 42 up on eBay.

​Make sense. You could get closer to the rear element, too.

[removed by moderator] the Nikon cameras are available if you need them. The extra DR certainly isn't a bad thing, I just don't find it useful (for stills). [removed by moderator]

It's rare that print photographers need more than 10 stops of DR. For the longest, they were shooting Velvia, with 4-5. (And it looks awesome.) Or Provia, which is just slightly better. For tone mapping and sloppy online stuff I can see the desire for great spec. The Sony sensors do have a nice "smooth" feel, but DR is overrated for stills (and this is a stills camera). DR is still pretty crucial for video. The 1DC and CX00 aren't half bad for DR, though. Solid 12 stops and nice roll-off and noise floor. (Vs F5's sketchy 14 stops and ugly noise and shitty roll-off.... but still a legitimate 1.5 stops better DR.) The "fine detail" scene mode is encouraging. Canon's mushy debayer algorithm is responsible for the difference in sharpness between 5D III video and 5D III raw video. Whatever future models include this scene file setting will be a lot sharper. Adequately so. The dampened mirror is also an awesome innovation. And their new lenses are great. But they clearly are lagging on sensor and processor tech. If I had the money and the new 45mm TSE and 90mm TSE were out already, I'd consider ditching my 4x5 kit for them.

Thanks... I'm using the pre-36 (wish I could find a cinegon to combine the single coating flares with the larger rear element). It's funny how a tiny "prosumer" lens from the 1960s solves the flare issues and mumps/breathing issues that high end anamorphic lenses had at that time... if anything, even this single coated lens could benefit from flaring more. My Nikon 35mm f1.4 (which is infamously garbage wide open, but in a very pretty way) seems sharp at f2, but there's a lot of flare from internal reflections... I think with a slower, more modern lens the internal reflections would be fewer and less pronounced, but I can't really justify it. I'm sure the contax looks brilliant. Beautiful glass. 28mm has vignetting, but it's not as bad as I'd expected. I have half a mind to stay a 0.8X wide angle adapter on the Iscorama itself. Assuming it didn't vignette, that would get me a 28mm 1.5X lens, with a horizontal FOV similar to 18mm... aka... wide enough.

Alexa.

I've been using the new Dreamcolor, which is ok except that it has bad off-axis performance (really more an issue with a weird anti-reflective coating), poor uniformity for a reference monitor, and it's only an 8 bit panel. I feed it with a black magic interface (via HDMI) and can grade off my rMBP with no problem. It's a pretty nice set up. Calibrated to rec709 out of the box, but need recalibration after a while. For a little more (or a lot more, really), the FSI BM210 is sick. Also an 8 bit panel, but amazing. There are some inexpensive (older) plasma and LCD tvs that you can get really close with simple blue gel and pluge bars. If you're grading for broadcast and aren't a perfectionist and know how to follow your scopes. Fwiw, 709 and sRGB have about the same chromaticities (or trivially far apart), but different gamma. Are you grading for web or for broadcast? If for web any decent calibrated display will do fine. I like the dell ultrasharp line and you can get a nice $200 dell and $150 probe and be all good. For broadcast, the Dreamcolor isn't really "good enough," but it kind of actually is. There are good LCD and Plasma tvs out there, too, but the blacks often take on tints that aren't trustworthy and I find the skin tones sometimes skew a bit magenta or yellow and the greens a bit teal or chartreuse. Unfortunately, those are very important colors. But you can still get 98% great. It's difficult to tell anything from the video you posted. What are your IRE values on the noise floor? If you want to know if it's crushed or not that is where you will find out definitively.

On an Iscorama pre-36 (on APS-C) would I be better off with a 35mm f2.8 than a 35mm f1.4 stopped down to f2.8? I figure I could bring the rear anamorphic element closer to the optical center.... Assuming 28mm is a no-go. What about a 77mm threaded wide angle adapter on the Iscorama itself?

​Thanks, I'm flattered! And I mostly agree with everything you've written. While the Hawks still look good (a friend shot a short on the Alexa Plus with them and it looks great; another friend shot them on 35mm and it looks very good, too), the look of the Panavision lenses and even the Kowas is more Classical and textured and would be my preference. The beautiful flares and character of the Panavisions are replaced with these sterile rainbow flares on the Hawks... I don't like the new coatings, but I do like how well they handle "anamorphic mumps" and DPs I know who use them love them. My reference points are very "Hollywood." It is how I grew up and what I learned in school so I mean no offense in quoting Hollywood directors exclusively. Kurosawa also used long anamorphic lenses at times, but I am less familiar with that work. I also like wide anamorphic, I just think long lens anamorphic can look great.

​Ridley and Tony Scott shot primarily on long anamorphic lenses earlier in their career, and their work is quite great. You're right, though, nothing replaces Panavison anamorphic lenses on a 4:3 sensor or on film. And that's why that look is so coveted... it's expensive just to get it. Which Iscos have bluer flares and which are warmer? I'm not a fan of warm flares either, but even the new Hawk anamorphics have more neutral/rainbow flares and people dig it.

It's more an aesthetic choice than anything. While you can fake the look (poorly) using string and an oval aperture cut-out, the flares, distortion, and character of the image don't really look the same. Then again, eBay adapters don't really look like Panavision anamorphic lenses, either. But it's always been an aesthetic choice (at last in recent history). Look at how much was shot in 2.35:1 two perf as an alternative to anamorphic in the 90s and oughts. Michael Bay is an interesting example... shot Bad Boys II in 2.35:1 spherical then moved to anamorphic exclusively until he switched to shooting on both digital and film. Some DPs don't like the unnatural look of anamorphic lenses (Roger Deakins never uses them, while he does shoot 2.35:1 at times); some directors just like the nostalgia (JJ Abrams). There's a bit more resolution, sure, and a finer grain structure on film, but it's primarily an esthetic choice, rather than a technical one, and has been for decades. When digital became popular, it was difficult to shoot anamorphic because of the 16:9 sensor size resulting in a 3.5:1 image, so shooting anamorphic became rarer on digital formats and perceived as more "high end." Every element of anamorphic has a totally different look, from the bokeh, to the distortion, to the flares, and some directors (Anthony Mandler) even embraced the 3.5:1 look. Meanwhile only the Alexa Plus has a 4:3 sensor so between renting that and anamorphic lenses you're spending a lot of money. So it's a way to make your production look high end... check out the new Total Recall (Epic) and Ninja Turtles movies to see digital anamorphic photography on high end CGI-filled features. Check out the Lego Movie (or, Wall•E) to see an anamorphic look on pure CGI... total aesthetic choice here, but it makes it look more "real" and more high end. The weird lens artifacts take off a bit of digital sterility. On the ultra low end hobbyist side, the Iscorama (still hoping to buy one) seems particularly nice because it gives you 2.6:1 and lets you focus and use a variety of lenses, but we'd all rather be using an Alexa Plus and Panavision lenses in theory. But anamorphic could give you the right look for the right project. If I'm doing a Spielberg 80s homage like Super 8 or something I'd much rather be shooting anamorphic. If a director wants it you should be able to provide it. If you're the director and you don't care, yeah, pass. I think the 1.33:1 adapters seem odd. Treat it as an aesthetic choice, not a technical one. Ultimately, every choice is. Fwiw, a lot of anamorphics are decently sharp at t2.8. And sharp isn't always the goal. 1080p is enough resolution to let you focus on texture and grain, not just crispness. If you watch the Dark Knight blu ray (not my favorite movie, but whatever) you can see that the IMAX portions are way sharper than the anamorphic portions even at 1080p! But the anamorphic photography has a good look. Very organic. Those are some nice looking movies. Kaminski doesn't shoot anamorphic (at least not much that I know of) but he softens and distorts the image in a really organic way through other means while still getting a sharp enough image for projection and blu ray.

​ ​ The market changes quickly. Opinions must react accordingly. If anything, the market is bipolar. For $6k the 1DC is a simply fantastic camera. Canon kills it for ease of use, reliability, and "look." On tech specs they die. For $15k the 1DC is crippled (intentionally) because Canon was afraid it was a bit too good if priced lower... they were right... But now it's priced lower! No joke I would really love one. Wondering why I bought a C100 and 5D Mark III instead. :X