tugela

They have a long history of being vague about when stuff will actually be available. The problem is that they do product announcements way too early, I would guess when they have a working prototype rather than after they have built up stock in preparation for release like most other companies do.

If the output is clean uncompressed, macroblocking should not be an issue other than whatever the shogun does.

Except that you can reuse your SD, whereas reusing a 50 foot roll works less well

You can lock focus in AF mode by pushing the button below it as well.

The NX1 has peaking, 4K video and those things. No lens adapters, but there is not much Samsung can do about that because of IP issues and the need to work around the mount they had. I disagree that the NX1 has targeted at Canon and Nikon users, it was clearly intended as a state of the art hybrid, and neither of those two companies have anything in that segment. The GH4 was likely its primary target. The success of the NX1 is that it achieved many of those goals as a hybrid, but that was not enough to make any headway at all against brand entrenchment in the pure stills and pure video markets. Now, I believe that the hybrid is the camera of the future, but the market isn't ready for the future yet. Too many people stuck in the old way of doing things, but that will change in time (eventually, all dinosaurs go extinct ). In that sense the NX1 was ahead of its time I think. Even if it is no longer developed it is still going to be a very competitive camera functionally for a long time to come as a result. As for the D5, no, I don't think it is aimed at the average person. The comment was more directed at the apparent attitude that things like 4K are unimportant. And that might well be true for people who make content, because those folk are looking at other parameters. But the point is, what is important for those folk is typically unimportant for the average joe. What will appeal to the average person are not nuances about color, "feel", or dynamic range, what will appeal to them is a sense of reality, what they can see. And ultimately that will come down to sheer resolution, particularly as TV sets become larger and larger. Do you think that HD is really going to cut it when the average panel is 60"+? At that size pixels become evident, along with jaggies and all the rest, not to mention blurriness due to a lack of resolution. People want to feel like they are there, not feel like they need to go to the optician the next day. The future with large displays is unquestionably going to be at least 4K.

It wasn't the margin that killed Samsung, it was the entrenched brand loyalty that did it. Blame the people who prized the logo on the name plate over performance for that, not the company. Pleasing to you. Not necessarily pleasing to the masses. Just because you are a film maker you should not make the mistake of thinking that your tastes are the tastes of the average person. They might watch what you make because that's all you make it, but that doesn't mean that what you make is what they want to watch.

It isn't an NX500. There is pretty clearly no Samsung DNA in this camera.

The crop refers specifically to HD though. Note that the 4K image is not cropped. My reading of the image is that the HD is essentially a portion of the 4K image and not a downsized image from the full sensor. Hence the crop. I would guess that the added overhead of downsizing is too much for the processor to handle. With that sort of limitation it implies that the image is not going to be competitive with cameras such as the NX1, GH4 and a7R/S mark IIs.

Cropped for HD only (in one mode, the other has an oversampled area). 4K is full sensor. The image in the pdf doesn't really make sense. I'm guessing it is actually the sensor image figure for the D5 and they have just recycled it for the D500 document.

Canon will have 4K in their upcoming cameras IMO.

The D5 thing must be a typo. The crop appears to be for HD only. At least that seems to be what the pdf is saying, but perhaps it is just poorly presented.

So, the Nikon D500 has been announced at CES, complete with 4K video. I imagine that this will be the enthusiast camera from Nikon. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the NX1 and GH4.

Since the encoding is probably done in hardware, there probably isn't much that can be done about it. I'm guessing that the FS7 has a more powerful processor.

The video mode is a slight crop on photo mode, so if you are framing in photo mode and going directly to video record, it always crops a bit. The vertical lines are not normal however. If they don't appear on the video itself then they are probably some sort of error associated with the LED display. It looks like part of the text on the display are being read down to pixels below them, which shouldn't be happening. It could be hardware or software related. It is possible that the software may be in a bugged state. You can try doing a full rest of the camera. The command path is /menu, then select the wheel on the bottom, scroll all the way down to "reset", and press that. That should completely reset the computers software. You could try that to see if it helps. You would have to redo all your settings though, because they will be reset to default as well. Do they appear in the EVF as well?

That is normal if you are using framing mode and viewing extremely low light scenes with the aperture preview button pressed. Dark elements will contain a lot of blue noise. It shouldn't be happening otherwise. Are you using a manual lens with the aperture closed all the way down?

The first one of the first set is the most obvious. It is comprised of regular blocks, I'm guessing 8x8 pixels. Mostly in the out of focus regions. The image of the succulent is composed almost entirely of obvious macroblocks.

Not sure if you noticed, but some of those images have a curious grid pattern overlaid on the image.

I think sharpness in digital cameras is basically a debeyering parameter, so it is always going to be there in some form if you have a sensor with a Beyer filter. The H.265 encoding is done in hardware, so the algorithms are set in stone. Not much that can be changed there short of a new processor.

Bit rate maximum is likely determined in hardware, so it can't really be increased over what the maximum currently is. And in any case, the maximum bit rate conforms to what Samsung's H.265 TV decoders can handle, which is a maximum of 80 mbps. Probably they use the same logic in both the camera and television sets. Macroblocking in areas of low contrast detail in highly detailed scenes is a function of the codec and bit rate in combination with the very high resolution of the NX1. Unless the bit rate is significantly increased there is probably not much that can be done about it. Peaking on during recording probably won't happen due to processor overhead demands, since it would effectively double the workload of the processor at a time the processor is being stressed anyway. Things like magnification for focusing while recording video probably wont happen for the same reason. That is not to say that things like that can't be done, but I would guess that we would need a 2016 processor to be able to handle the work load. Sensor readout is limited by the silicon in the camera. The sensor can do a full sensor read at 240 fps, but obviously the camera can't handle that work load, so the practical maximum is a lot less. Therefore rolling shutter can't really be improved much by a firmware adjustment. You would need updated hardware for that I think. "zero sharpness" would essentially be undebeyered RAW output. No camera is going to do this I think. That would without question require completely new hardware.

The force will not be with the naysayers.

Well, do any broadcast channels use 24 fps? If not, then you are not watching "cinematic" footage anyway, and are watching some higher frame rate instead. I think this argument about "cinematic" and "soap opera" effects is just an example of Pavlovian conditioning. People have been conditioned by being raised on low frame rates in the cimema to expect artificial blur and consequently think that it s the way that it should look like, but real life is more like a high frame rate clip. They conflate the high productions values in cinema with frame rates and think that the quality comes from the frame rate, when in fact it comes from the production value.

I doubt that Nikon would use the NX mount, but you never know.....it could be a solution for them for mirrorless crops if they chose to pick up the NX1. If there is a relationship between Nikon and Samsung it will more likely be a case of Nikon picking up the FF sensor Samsung have been developing and using it in the D5. It certainly seems to be an odd coincidence that Nikon would announce that they are developing the D5 at the exact same time that Samsung started to pull out of the camera business. Why would they feel the need to announce that now unless something specific happened to prompt it? The implication is that the deal for the sensor for the D5 was completed in November and they are now proceeding with the development.

Well, I'm not a professional photographer, but I am a professional, and as a professional I can say one thing: you do NOT skimp on the tools of the trade. That is how you make your living, using jerry rigged bits and pieces doesn't cut it. I mean, would you go to a dentist who uses a repurposed home power drill to do fillings??? Lol. Maybe you "professional" photographers are different from the rest of the world

The problem is that local PR will always say this because they are out of the loop when it comes to high level business maneuvers. They are saying what they believe to be correct, but who knows what is really going on at corporate. One thing you can be absolutely certain about is that regional divisions in Samsung and Nikon will not know if there is in fact (or not) a deal in the works. That kind of information is not widely circulated within a company outside of a very limited circle at corporate. When corporate PR says something in an official press release (in other words, available on the company's website in the IR section), then you take note. There may be people lower down in the company who have a pretty good idea about what is going on, or can guess, due to things they observe happening, and rumors can spring from that. It is always their interpretation of course, and they can be wrong.

Sure, I read your "white paper". You compare before and after with the same lens. Of course you are going to see an "improvement" on the same camera because you are essentially putting a glorified magnifying glass between the lens and sensor. You are taking a larger image and shrinking it down to a smaller size to fit the sensor. So, for example an image that read "..I..I..I.." would become ".I.I.I.I.", and that would appear to be more sharp, but it isn't really, it is just shrunk. Nothing comes for free, and in the course of that shrinking each additional lens element is going to compromise some IQ, which will be lost for good. A native lens will not do this, assuming both lenses are of equal quality (something that is impossible to control for if you are comparing different lenses from different manufacturers). The acid test would be comparing the performance of a full frame lens on a full frame sensor that has the same pixel count as your crop sensor with the same lens +SB added. If what you say is correct then the optical performance should be identical. But I suspect it is not.