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Might be my poor reading comprehension, but I couldn't find much on APS-C coverage with Bell&Howell... is it the same as the 16H? Is it easy to swap lenses if you have a lens support and series vii to 52mm step up ring? Want to switch ideally between 35mm to 135mm on APS-C, but wondering if I'm asking too much.

Shooting Super35 what lenses work with this? What are the rear threads? How do they attach? Seems it should be compatible roughly with 52mm-threads w/ step up rings clamps but not sure where to get them. Of my Nikon manual focus kit with 52mm threads (24mm to 135mm), which will cover Super35 (C100) without vignetting? Which will cover FF? I'm guessing cut off on APS-C will be around 50mm and 85mm on FF?

Same pixel density as Alexa (also a sony sensor). Let the inaccurate rumors begin. (C300 has same pixel density as 5D Mark II....) It would surprise me... Canon Log (not Log C) is 12 stops, no more. But it is still disruptively better than dSLR video (10 stops or less with poor tonality). CX00 has great DR, but still no more than Epic, slightly less than F3, significantly less than F5/5 and Alexa. If SLOG 2 matches F5 or even F3 dynamic range this will surpass CX00 and Epic... Dragon/F5/Alexa league (though Alexa distributes the curve better than anything else). Sony has better color than Red, worse than Alexa and Canon. This could easily have the best IQ short of the Alexa for any price. Haven't used the Dragon yet, to be fair.

Looks amazing if it lives up to the hype and comes in at that price. Low ISO looks on par with CX00, but should be even better in theory.... FF compatible with EF-mount lenses... wow. SLOG 2 is a big deal if it is on par with the F5. Sony F3 began with very poor footage, low DR, SLOG pushed it up to 12+ stops... F5 reaches an easy 13+ stops of DR in SLOG 2. Given that the Epic manages 12 and just barely... that's a big deal if this can deliver. (Most Canon dSLRs in cinestyle come in around 9-10 stops with poor tonality, imo.) SLOG 2 underexposes then pushes... means muddy shadows and lower end mids (it's not Log C by any means) but if it is on par with what the F5 does then that that separates this from every other dSLR-type camera other than the 1DC and puts it in production camera territory, which the codec seems built for, too. Promise of gobs of highlight detail missing from everything else and a codec/gamma curve that's built to intercut with whatever. I'm sure the images in stills and video far outstrip my C100 and 5d Mark III but Canon's shoddy products always lure me in over Sony/Black Magic/Red/Panasonic/everyone else's glorious tech demos. This looks amazing for the price, though, and highly useable.

Looks pretty horrible here. Maybe (extra) line skipping at 50p? No better than average dSLR footage here I agree... but the samples all seem to be 50p, no 24/25/30p... Sample video from here looks very good however. Cheapest "good enough" option maybe for hobbyists? APS-C chip... good image full 1080p looks like... no moire not bad skew... ok codec. How is footage outdoors focused at infinity? This is where Canon dSLRS fall apart. Cheapest good enough option for professionals of course is whatever clients will tolerate? Refurb t2i? (Loved that camera fwiw.)

I don't believe this is entirely unintentional. That said, the Alexa is the real deal.

Adam, Canon's sales, marketshare, and any given recent issue of American Cinematographer speak to Canon's success. Arri and Canon are cleaning up, but tbh (as a fellow C100 owner who also wishes he'd bought the C300, full disclosure), I do feel the Alexa has a much better "look" than Canon and would LOVE an Amira. But Canon has a better "look" than Red and Sony, and I say this as a kind-of fan of the F3 (which may have a modified Alexa sensor) and F5, and as someone who has learned to like the Epic/Scarlet just fine when I have to use one. Also kind of dig the GH3, but I'm trying to leave Canon dSLRs behind me... might have to give my 5D III (with raw) another go though on my next shoot on some pick ups. Granted, there's a wow factor to 4k footage shot in beautiful natural light without compromise, and a lot of amateur stuff looks better than a lot of "pro" stuff. The GH4 looks amazing under the right circumstances, and the BMCC has its fans (an MK-V op I know who flew the Alexa on a shoot I was DPing)

To be fair, it looks like tv because it's used heavily in tv (as a B camera for the Alexa and an A cam on reality). The Alexa looks like tv, too, for that matter. Correlation isn't causation. Victims of success.

TV crap pays the bills.

The main difference between a C300 and a GH4 (not that I've used one, but I have used the GH3 a bit) isn't the image quality but the workflow and ergonomics. For a working professional, efficiency on the job and in post is crucial; for a hobbyist image quality is more important if you're a camera nut. Canon caters toward mid-range pros (B cameras for tv; A cameras for indie and mid-range corporate) by making something that's very easy to use and easy to work with in post with good enough image quality. The image is great but not a lot better than much less expensive options (and not a lot worse than anything other than the Alexa, even then it's a fine B camera). The C300 is also an affordable rental. And "future proof" is for your clients to decide. When they demand 4k only then do you need it. :)

It's different if it's an investment. I know gaffers with $500k trucks and DPs with $200k camera packages. That said, I couldn't pay off a C300 in a month! But if you're getting booked consistently at a $1000 day rate wet hire, then sure.

For tv no one wants raw... DNXHD and prores (often 422 to save space) dominate. C300s are showing up all over the place alongside Alexas as b-cams for tv as well as replacements for ENG rigs for reality. Even at 50mbps you see C300s as B cams for big budget movies and tv... go pro 3s, too. C100 is not renting so hot but seems popular among owner/ops. Canon has done very very well with these cameras... Red is suffering atm for being unwilling to introduce a prores module. And C500 seems like the odd duck, and its raw format is bizarrely implemented. Form factor is at odds with shooting style on larger productions for A cameras... I don't see Canon introducing raw in its lower end models. Prores maybe (hopefully), 4k certainly... But there are plenty of products that differentiate themselves by including raw on the low end already. Canon will differentiate itself through price (for a fully outfitted kit) and ease of use. Wish they'd find a way to coax out a couple stops extra highlight detail and maybe slow motion (less important), but I don't see them focusing on raw video except toward the high end, where their niche is already just weird. Not sure what the appeal of raw is over very good quality intermediate codecs or if it's worth it for small gains in image quality. I'd take 2k prores from an Alexa over anything else in terms of acquisition.

Thanks!

Then: Explain to him how he's wrong about the ugly noise texture in all MX footage, especially tungsten-balanced, making the image look cheap and chunky and digital. Explain to him why the shadows get so chunky and blue in any tungsten-balanced Red scene, whereas Alexas can be shot under any lighting condition. And then go on and add why the Alexa's superior low light ability is irrelevant. Explain to him why it's irrelevant that the Alexa has a smoother noise texture, much more like film. Explain to him why, despite the Red's 13.5 stops of DR being is a total lie (in fact the camera has no more DR than the C300, less than the F5, and a magenta-tinted highlight rolloff), it's still better than the 14.5+ stops smoothly handled in the Alexa. Explain why the Alexa's superior midrange tonality isn't significant. Explain why red code botching details in skin and foliage (again, some of the most emotionally resonant subject matter...) is irrelevant, whereas ArriRAW is fine and even prores handles these details well. Explain to him why the color science of the Alexa matches 5219 almost exactly and offers smooth creamy flesh tones and beautiful green foliage, whereas the red totally botches memory colors, but that's ok. Explain to him how he's wrong that the OLPF of the Red offers ugly internal reflections and color cast over highlights, whereas the Alexa rolls off smoothly like film. I'm curious. Explain how an ugly image with good specs looks better than a beautiful one with somewhat lesser specs. Personally I would shoot a C300 or F5 over an Epic; the Epic has a stranglehold on summer blockbusters for the resolution advantage, but the look is just so... ugly and the workflow so damn shitty. Yes there is beautiful content shot on red. But Prometheus, for instance, required a lot of CGI lipstick to dress up that pig. I do find the character of the Monochrome sensor to be superior.

I have. And he's right.

They have a similar "look" and both cameras are easy to use. The CX00 is very good in low light, has a similar texture and good skin tones, and is a good run-and-gun B camera and very small and reliable. The image is surprisingly very easy to intercut with the Alexa.

I only A/Bed the Optimo and the 17-55mm Canon, then the 17-55mm and the 18-35mm. So I don't have a direct comparison (or clearance to post the footage), but I know all three lenses pretty well and have shot with all three of course. In my opinion, the Optimo is just about the best thing going. It has a look halfway between Cooke and Zeiss, but closer to Cooke, it's very small with great mechanics, and it has no breathing or visible distortion, even at wide angle. Wide open overexposed scenes exhibit a lot of CA in lesser lenses (the Sigma has it toward the corners, not the center the Canon all over), but the Optimo is entirely well-controlled. It has very unpolluted colors and nice bokeh... really similar to the S4. Edge to edge sharpness and coverage are excellent with minimal fall off. Probably covers APS-H. Of course the build quality is worlds away That said, if you don't mind the distortion, the Sigma is a great performer. Maybe I just used the Optimo under different circumstances from you when you used it.

My experiences differ. While the 18-35mm is optically excellent, I consider the 15-40mm Optimo to be dramatically better. Better edge performance, less CA, a much nicer look with better bokeh (somewhat similar to the S4s) and MUCH less distortion. And it's parfocal. Just my experience, though. If you don't care about a lens being parfocal or distortion toward wide angle, the Sigma is nice.

    Absolutely, what videographer shooting hours of footage a day will process all that non-standard aspect ratio raw footage just for a bit of sharpness the client won't care about anyway for content that's probably web-only? And this is assuming the hack actually works...   I don't think most casual hobbyists would go through this trouble, either, which is why I don't think Canon is crippling anything video-wise (intentionally). Their debayering algorithm for stills (and video) is softer at 100% than Adobe's or DXOmark's and the in-camera processing throws away a lot of highlight detail. That soft algorith, alone might account for some of the difference in image quality between these raw video grabs and what the camera offers up as h264. Likewise I think peaking is useful, but it's very slow as ML implements it... None of the hacks are really production/casual hobbyist ready 100%. The C100/C300/C500 line is more a matter of crippling in increments, but dSLRs are still cameras first and foremost and the video is good enough for most.   I'm unsurprised that the 550d has the highest resolution of the previous line of dSLRs. Loved that camera!   Lastly, nearest neighbor downsampling has little to do with pixel binning as regards image quality. Nearest neighbor downsampling is after debayering is done. So you're downsampling all the interpolated data for each given channel. With pixel binning, every third pixel of a sub-1080p stream is red or blue with to weak an anti-aliasing filter to do anything. So the frequencies that alias are much lower than those that would alias in a downsampled still.   Because we lack the tools necessary to make really beautiful images on the cheap consistently (art design, lights, lenses, a big crew, talent) it's easy to get focused on image quality on the cheap and it is a valid pursuit. But it's kind of its own pursuit. I mean you can always rent an Alexa package for a week for about the price of a dSLR package.

Where's the C300/C100 comparison? You quoted similar levels of detail to that camera so you must have shot a comparison, but it's not in the image.

Which "indie" films are these that can't afford to rent a $6-10k camera but can afford a full cast, crew, grip truck, lenses and the remainder of the camera package, locations, art design, sound, and to finish in 4k raw? And what distribution outlets are they seeing that justify the need for that kind of image quality? Network HDTV and 4k DCP? I get that Canon's dSLRs have been disappointing for videographers (in the case of the Mark III, more so for being disappointingly close), but both Canon and Red -- who started this whole game -- have done pretty well putting "professional" quality cameras in the under $10,000 price bracket. Both companies are open about their cinema line targeting "professionals" for whom such an expenditure shouldn't be that devastating -- they know their prices are higher than dSLRs because they aren't selling dSLRs. A grip truck equipped for an indie movie usually has half a million to a million dollars in gear. SAG day rates range from $250-$900 for indie (theatrical) film. What's overpriced again?   I can't understand how a $6,500 C100 or $8,000 Scarlet, even when both come closer to $10k fully equipped, will really break the bank. They are the cheapest part of producing an indie feature... I get the complaint "my toy is too expensive" but these cameras weren't designed as toys, as honestly most Canon dSLRs excepting the 1 series (which is also $6500) are. I'm buying a cinema camera as a toy and I really do empathize with this argument because I have the same complaint. I wish the Mark III had the same image quality as the Alexa. Absolutely I do. But it's like complaining that a sports car is too expensive or a Toyota isn't as fast as a Porsche. Why the entitlement? What options did we have before Red and Canon? The Panavision Genesis and hvx200? You can buy a great toy for cheap if you pick your poison (low res, small sensor, etc.) or you can buy a toy designed for "professional" use (not even better image quality -- the BMCC likely runs circles around the C100) for a lot more money. But still ridiculously less than ever before. Who should be complaining are videographers with digibeta and HDCAM systems and F35s and all that nonsense who are seeing their business go to kids like me with dSLRs and 1/10th the rate.   Either way, this complaint boils down to "my toy is too expensive." Your film didn't get rejected from Sundance because it didn't have "true 1080p" resolution or because it wasn't shot in RAW. 

[quote name='themoviegeek' timestamp='1348586099' post='19031'] Jeez! I don't get why [i]anyone's [/i]raving about this. It still looks so... video. Panasonic evidently haven't heard any of our complaints about the last generation. It looks like something you shoot reality TV for Channel 4 with. It is absolutely not what I was hoping for. Was looking for an alternative Alexa b-cam. But hey - Panasonic, maybe the GH4'll be worth writing home about, eh?[i] [/i] [/quote] The Alexa draws somewhere around 90 watts and the sensor (coincidentally, both are probably from sony) alone costs $20,000 and needs to be cooled with a fan. The camera is pretty huge and full of crazy proprietary technology, like the color that simulates Kodak Vision film stocks and the dual gain paths and all that. Even then it's a miracle that the Alexa is as good as it is. And even with the Alexa footage shot under this light would look bad. The next best thing seems to be a C100 with an external recorder. You won't get Alexa highlights with anything but at least there you're getting the resolution, more flexibility with lenses (granted it's not PL mount) and likely somewhat better color. And of course the GH3 would probably be a fine crash cam to intercut with Alexa footage...the Canon dSLRs are good enough and they're much softer.

[quote name='ScreensPro' timestamp='1348256853' post='18838'] Let me guess, someone who hasn't actually edited C300 footage? The codec is really, really good. It holds up really well. Stop looking at paper specs and download some footage. Yes, 4K might have more problems with that codec, but equally likely, it will be the same, or it might be better. [/quote] I don't get it either. The C300's footage grades great, so does Alexa footage, which squeezes 13+ stops of DR into a 10 bit 1080p image. Granted dSLR footage (certainly even ALL-I from the 5DIII) has these problems, but I just can't get them to show up with higher end cameras.

[quote name='EOSHD' timestamp='1348004300' post='18521'] It is definitely not soft. But the aliasing is a bit D800-like and a worry. [/quote] Do you think the implication, then, is that the GH3 is line skipping and the GH2 is not? Not only does line skipping produce some ugly artifacts, it reduces sensitivity dramatically; although its ugly noise pattern (picked up due to bad read noise and pixel binning) is frustrating, the 5D Mark III has incredible low light efficiency and its footage cleans up well. With half the sensor size the GH3 should be two stops slower/noisier (but you get deeper DoF, which goes very far to compensate), but if it's also skipping pixels that's another stop or more right there and potentially a real problem. I haven't used the GH2 at extreme ISOs; does its low light performance evince full sensor readout or not? Debayer a full 1080p image from a 16MP sensor is way more work than this camera should be capable of doing, and it's almost inconceivable that the GH2 was doing the same. But every bit of design here--a new sensor of the same resolution, a bigger body designed around cooling, lots more video options, seems to exist specifically to allow for better video performance. So if this is line skipping and the GH2 isn't, that's mystifying. The claims that the readout is much cleaner seem to support the possibility of pixel binning, since the noisy readout is such an issue in the Mark III, which does have pixel binning... But Panasonic denied that the AF100, and by implication the GH2, did pixel binning, though they never revealed what they did exactly. (To me they never seemed as sharp as the C300, but they didn't show much aliasing, either--the GH2 is very impressive.)

Based on that sample video (the quarter resolution one on Canon's site--not the upscaled youtube one) this looks sharper than the Mark III and closer to the 1DX, but it's impossible to tell at such low res. I wonder if it's doing something closer to what the 1DX is doing, skipping every third line, so you get a little more aliasing but better sharpness and resolution, too. It's kind of funny (less so for me since I own a 5D III) but I think Canon was really trying to make the ultimate mid-range hybrid camera, but the pixel binning trick around which the entire sensor was conceived (combined with Canon's soft debayering and super primitive sharpening algorithms) just made the camera soft. The GH3 not only seems sharper, it appears as though a lot of work was done to get rid of read noise, a major problem on the new Canon cameras. For those who have lenses to support it, it sure looks like a winner. The 6D might be interesting if it is sharper and this much cheaper than the 5D, though. FF cameras are way easier to outfit; everyone rents EOS lenses, not everyone rents SLR Magic primes!