IronFilm

Changing to a slightly different topic.... Saw a Sound Devices 664 for only US2K for sale recently! :-o With secondhand prices dropping so low it is enough to make you second guess yourself and question your decision if you're considering buying a Zoom F8n or MixPre10 as your main primary recorder. Although, I personally wouldn't buy a 664. Plus the MixPre3 won't be my only recorder, or main recorder, or even secondary recorder? It's for those small shoots I'd know I'd be wearing the bag all the time.

Yeah but no widespread consumer market acceptance is what I meant.

Indeed! Sub $1K Wish there was an "Atomos Samurai V", would be the perfect partnership. Currently, an original Shogun is the cheapest pairing. It's true that "appearances matter", unfortunate, but true. Handy to have a "big pro camera", even if it is just for the sit down interview stuff. Then grab a secondhand a7Smk1 or a6x000 to run around and grab the B Roll / gimbal / specialist (such as crane / car rig) shots. Probably what I'd do if I got back into the camera dept side of things. Saw the Panasonic EVA1 for as low as US$3.5K-ish brand new greymarket on eBay a year ago, sadly prices seem to have gone up since then. For studio work? As on location shooting a Neumann KM185D + Neumann KMR81i would be far far more useful Neumann mics to have.

Wish there was an option to intentionally put it into low power mode. It is more the fragility of a USB connection I wonder about? How much time do you get out of a NP-F970 with it? (is this a MP3 or MP6?)

Did we skip over tricopter on the move down from quadcopters, going straight to trying to make bicopters popular in the consumer market? Wonder how long util they'll invent a "monocopter"? ;-)

Where do you think a theoretical number comes from? From the figures on a spec sheet / the design spec drawings. I see, but hopefully nobody thinks a theoretical number is "just made up!!" That would be a sad state of affairs. I guess for me, it is simply kinda obvious there is always some calculations behind a theoretical result.

"model aircraft company" hahaha I laugh, but it is true!

I think Canikon makes a profit from their flagship products, but yes, those profits are dwarfed by the number of APS-C cameras they sell because they are perceived as having the best. (even though the Canon Rebel is nowhere close to that! Not even the best in its market niche) The Canon 1Dmk3 and the Nikon D6 have a massive marketing impact. In terms of the headlines and eyeballs they attract, and discussion they generate. (the same is true for any other groundbreaking product they produce, am sure the "D800 medium-format-equivalent" sold a few more lower end bodies as well, and the "D300 the-mini-D3" sold a few extra lower end bodies as well)

On a related point of actual vs claimed values.... how about those lenses which say they're 35mm but are in reality a 32 or 37mm lens!

At least the IBIS is triple checked confirmed. Very happy to read that.

Wonder if that is gross or net? If gross my $50K example was a little on the generous side! But either way, I did not too bad for gut guesswork to whip up an example.

One of the main reasons I got the MixPre3 is for run & gun productions, so I want a robust setup. Skeptical if USB powering would do that for me. Also that battery you've got seems like overkill? (should last you for 2+ days I'm betting??) I'm wanting this as lightweight as possible! Don't worry, I learned long ago to always use high quality rechargables! ? Years ago when starting out I was using the production's gear (oops, first mistake! Never do this) which was a Sound Devices 702 + 302 + 5x G3 + 416 (if you recognize this gear you're already thinking what the fvxk!!! Yes, that was my first thought in the morning when I arrived on set as well. Couldn't a production shooting on an ARRI with anamorphics provide something better than a 702?? Top notch crew too, the DoP was the one Peter Jackson used to regularly use). But it got worse, the batteries were cheap single use alkalines. I immediately identified that they didn't have enough packs of AA batteries there to last use the whole day, and told the producer a runner would need to get us more ASAP. (we were shooting way out west too, a good solid drive away from civilisation) By the end of the day I'd used four dozen AA batteries. Felt like my whole day was nothing but swapping batteries in and out.

Let's ignore 32bits for now, as in my world this won't ever get used. Could be literally years until I get asked that I must do a 32bit recording. 24bit 48khz is 99% of what gets done when you're on set recording dialogue. 32bits is more for the videographer who is doing everything (sound post as well) in house, or similar scenarios. So now for dynamic range, that would be the signal to noise ratio from the pre amps. Both Zoom F series and Sound Devices pre amps are very clean, you will not be able to tell the difference between them in a blind A/B test (however the Zoom H series.... yes you could spot them, they're much worse). If you're finding either of them to be too noisy then I bet what is really happening is you're doing something wrong. (like recording with your boom from 4m away & expecting it to be clean, or the problem is earlier in the signal chain such as due to using Boya wireless)

Maybe we're just coming from different backgrounds of what words mean, but my background is studying optics at university. So I feel I'm using the right terminology here. Theoretical value means what you calculate using values you know from the specs (such as looking up what is the focal length and the diameter), while the T Stop of course is different because it is taking a specific lens and putting it on a test bench to measure the damn thing when you shine light in vs what you get out at the other end. Thus theoretical vs measured values. Fascinating when you see the Samyang lenses (which should be all identical, aside from the different lens mounts) return results varying from T1.4 to T1.8 That indicates quite a large sample variation from Samyang (assuming dxomark is doing their measurements with precision), but perhaps not so radically surprising when you consider that Samyang is a low budget lens making? Precision quality control isn't their #1 priority. But still, I'm surprised at the variance. I wonder what the variance would be if you took half a dozen identical (but each from different production runs, so the serial numbers can't be close together at all) Sigma or Canikon lenses. My guess is Samyang is making lenses which are say perhaps f1.36 but because they know their quality control is sloppy they realize it is smarter to advertise them as lenses rounded up to f1.4 than to exaggerate it rounded down to f1.3 Then dxomark perhaps measured a T1.44, which gets expressed in their limited space as a "T1.4", thus you then got a drop (in this example I'm making up, the reality could quite possibly be even less extreme) from F1.36 to F1.44 (a drop of 0.8) which seems quite reasonable in the stituation of them getting a really good quality sample.

Let's say you're a pro earning $50k/yr, you want to live on a modest $35K/yr. That leaves $15k/yr to put into your business, which needs to cover running your website / advertising / repairs / transport / software / training courses / insurance / legal / etc and all the other gear purchases you might want to make that year. Suddenly it starts to make you pause and think which to choose when you're considering a camera bodies which will cost you $700/yr vs $1200/yr. This is true across all businesses. (especially business which are in the same areas which people do for fun, often the serious but rich amatuers are using nicer gear than the hardworking pros!! Unless the pros are getting gear sponsorship, which for example in the case of sportspeople is often the only reason they can afford gear nicer than what your casual weekend warrior is using) For example in my own world of production sound mixing, there is a shockingly large number of people (working on big shows too!) still using Cantar X2 / Sound Devices 788T / Zaxcom Deva 5.8 as their main production recorder. Doesn't mean they're not still spending heaps on of repairs and new gear each year, just its not being focused on their recorder. (kinda like working pros who are not bothering to upgrade their main camera body every single cycle) Yeah, no mention of that. The Panasonic S1H will hold onto that crown of being a "Netflix Approved" DSLR/mirrorless for a long time before Canon joins them. What is the over/under on the bets that this is the hidden "gotcha" easter egg Canon has hidden away for us? There always is "something" that Canon screws up.

Transmission value is the actual measured value. While F Stop is only the theoretical value. (a theoretical value which doesn't account for complex details like light loss due to reflections or thickness of glass elements, etc) Thus why the T stop is always larger than the F stop.

I'm going to give a camera analogy to help you understand: Imagine if the only cameras which offered S35, 4K raw, 10bit 422, SDI outputs, TC, dual card slots, swappable mounts, LUTs, great AF, slow motion, NDs, waveforms, etc were cameras which cost $6K or even more. Then a camera came along which could do all of this for $2K, would you call that "a game changer"? YUP! Hmmmm... now I think about it, we don't have anything in the camera world like this!! Sadly. Perhaps a JVC LS300 mk2 would get more than half way there (if they managed to stick to the same price as the LS300 is currently). Or if BMD did a repeat of "the summer Pocket half price sale" but with the UMP G1 instead, that would kinda get most of the way to this dream scenario with a pricing only somewhat over $2K.

110% agreed If anything, running a business means you need to think even more seriously about ROI ("return on investment") than a hobbyist. As a hobbyist doesn't care at all in the slightest if his new camera will make him more money than his old camera.

Yes, obviously the D750 won't fall as far in price as if the new D780 had came out at say US$1.5K instead. But still, every time a new model comes out, it applies pressure on the older models to come down in price on the secondhand market. As the D750 is no longer "the latest".

What are people's preferences for powering the Sound Devices MixPre3? (am planning to run it with phantom power on one channel for a hardwired boom mic, plus a Lectro SR for channels 2/3) The way I see it is there are four main options: 1) Sound Devices MX-LMount (2x horizontal L Mount batteries. This seems like an awkward choice for a compact bag to have the batteries sticking out at an angle, works with 2x slim NP-F550 batteries perhaps? But the run time would be a little too lean. Yet 2x NP-F970 would stick out too much! I suspect a compromise would be a NP-F550 on my "belly side" so the MixPre3 sits flush against that side of the mixing bag, and a large NP-F970 on the opposite side which a receiver would then sit on top of) 2) Hawk-Woods SD-2 (this is a single NP-F battery in the horizontal orientation, solving the problems with the MX-LMount. But would a single NP-F battery be enough?? Not sure at all. I've read a MixPre draws up to 7.5W? So would a NP-F970 be enough to always get through to lunch break every day? Seems likely, but perhaps the MX-LMount with an extra NP-F550 with the NP-F970 would be the safer bet. There is a low power mode, which seems perfect for what I want! As I don't need HDMI/USB or more than two phantom power channels, however from reading the manual it seems there is no way to turn that mode on yourself?) 3) Hawk-Woods SD-1 (gives you a Hirose input, that I could use with my BDS. However I can ditch the BDS entirely, because I can use a Lectrosonics SRBATTSLED on my receiver, and power that via a NP-F550) 4) USB-C powering (a USB connection seems too fragile to me to handle the hurly burly knocking about during a fast paced run & gun production) 5) something else I'm not thinking about? (don't think the existing AA battery sled would be the best option, neither using the 8x AA option. That's too many extra unnecessary batteries to juggle at the end of each day!)

Let us know if it is works! I use SD cards in an SxS adapter myself for my Sony PWM-F3, but that is recording at a much lower bitrate, curious as to if it works in an ARRI

That is not at all what I meant. What I mean is if you shoot with Canon all the freaking time, as you're a Canon shooter who has owned Canon cameras for years, then you're naturally have grown to prefer "the Canon look". Because it is what you've grown accustomed to, and anything else can seem "weird and foreign" at some level. Personally seems madness to me when you can pick up a secondhand Sony FS7 kit for sub US$4K

That's a key point, the average press pool photographer who may have used this in the past is a dying breed compared to a decade or two ago. (and those who remain, would be happy to just carry on using their 1Dmk3. Or heck.... even a 5D) And the rates for other fields are all coming down as well, the average sports photographer isn't as highly paid as before.

Pictures of it out in the wild, increases the odds Komodo won't turnout to just have been a mythical beast. However Komodo also is from RED.... which increases the odds it will be a mythical beast! ha C500mk2

Would have been a smart move by Nikon if they did lock Atomos into a period of exclusivity in exchange for working with them in a partnership. Is a way to keep the edge by Nikon over Canon. Although I haven't read anywhere anything that hints at an exclusivity agreement.