BTM_Pix

Depending on the lens, there are usually between 250-300 individual points that Panasonic cameras can drive the lens to from closest focus to infinity when in manual mode so there is enough precision there but the ballistics of it are a bit quirky. From an external control point of view there are only two speeds - the slow one which moves it in the individual increments and the fast one which moves it by a multiple of ten of those (so 25-30 coarse points from end to end). Trying to move the focus point with a combination of only those two types of increments causes the weird acceleration behaviour because its trying to anticipate where you are going to end up. If you want to do A/B focus transitions then this is where an external controller can potentially make things much better as it knows the ultimate distance and can calculate a smoother ride using the two speeds. It will always have some lumps in it as only being able to move one or ten steps is never going to be ideal but at least the overall issue can be masked with a slower acceleration and deceleration. I've made some progress with this and it won't be long now before people will be able to try it themselves.

I have a wide variety of overpriced cases and bags that I haul stuff round in. Its the abuse the gear gets when its taken out of them that causes the problems for me.

Yes I have one and only one piece has fallen off it so far in its travels in my stupidly filled bag in the past three months. In that same period of work I have broken the memory card slot on a Fuji X-T20, chipped the rear optic on a Nikon 1.4TC, killed a Panasonic battery charger with rain and totally destroyed the rear screen of my beloved Nikon Df. And we still have another week of this current trip to go. So, in relative terms, its doing quite well !

Don't be ridiculous man. Everyone needs one of these. Without delay !

On a complete tangent..... Go motorised for under $50 (including some strips of lino which you'll need outdoors!). Fits in your pocket and honestly with a small camera it is far better than it has a right to be for the price.

I've been asked via PM regarding is it possible to use a pistol grip with the MOVO foldable rig so thought it better to share the answer here in case anyone else needs it. The answer is yes, you can use one such as this cheapie from Amazon and screw it into the mounting plate either fore or aft of the camera. As the MOVO also has mounting points on all of its arms you could side mount it with any number of adapters if you'd prefer it on either side of the camera. Once its on you can then do the usual shaping stuff with the MOVO to use it as a shoulder mount or top handle as shown in the inset pic. Handle I'm using is this one here https://www.amazon.co.uk/Neewer-Handheld-Stabilizer-Panasonic-Samsung/dp/B018LQEFL4/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1501604216&sr=1-1&keywords=Neewer+Camera+Handle+Pistol+Grip

Same as M43, you can get adapters to Fuji X from virtually any mount so from CY to Nikon to PL and all points in between. The Nikon lens turbos are cheap and give some great options with the X-T2 or X-T20 My love affair with the X-T20 hit the rocks on last night's job when the spring went in the memory card slot. Had to fish the card out like getting ketchup out of a bottle with a knife.

You could do with some sort of hardware controller that let's you adjust the exposure compensation on the fly using dedicated buttons....

Just for a bit of balance regarding service turnarounds, Nikon had a D4 of mine for so long I thought I was going to have to put a picture of it on milk cartons. They then had to have it back to remedy the botched fix for another period of time where their radio silence had me on the verge of demanding a picture of it with a daily newspaper as proof of life. And if you ever have a Hasselblad that shows a calibration error prepare to tearfully wave it off on its journey by rowing boat to Denmark. A slow rowing boat. With a paddle missing. Fortunately, this gives you enough time to save up for the bill. So whilst I'll still maintain the Leica EVF thing is ridiculous from a testing perspective, things are not always sweetness and light when it comes to premium products from other manufacturers either.

Yes it has both of those.

It was a throwaway about irrational gear lust so my purse was never in serious danger of leaving my handbag.

Been doing some extensive research myself overnight. Its called Terre d'Hermès apparently and according to the manufacturer its "a symbolic narrative revolving around a raw material and its metamorphosis. A novel that expresses the alchemical power of the elements. A water somewhere between the earth and the sky. A journey imbued with strength and poetry. Woody, vegetal, mineral." I'll be dousing myself in this and inviting Sofia over for what I believe the youngsters call "Netflix and chill". Or "Netflix from an approved list of 4K capable originating cameras and chill" as its known on here.

One of these if you've got an M postcode.

I decided that poring over the list of what cameras I could use for a Netflix film was distracting me from my other concerns such as what amp Paul McCartney would prefer me to use on his next album and the approved list of colognes to wear on a date with Sofia Vergara.

It was just an excuse to use the Vladimir Putin dog picture to be honest. RAW would be wasted on me anyway.

I can only speak to my own job of sports photography but I think they might struggle with a D6 or even a D5s. No one is really crying out for higher speed at this point and if they are the economics are so tough at the moment that there are still plenty of D4 and D4s being used that shows people aren't ready to spend on the D5. That's the problem with selling workhorse cameras, people will take you at your word when money is tight! If this D850 is to be the last hurrah for the D8** line in a mirrored format then maybe there is something in it being called 850 rather than 820. If they are looking to go out with a bang and also keep sports and photo journalists in the fold then a halfway house between the 820 and a D5 would be very popular. Something just a bit less resolution but that had proper performance at 12800 would be enough for me to do what I don't want to do which is buy another mirrored camera! There are plenty of D8** cameras used in sport (by me included) but they tend to disappear into the bag when the lights dim. In the wilderness years before the D500 came along, the D8** was effectively - due to how far you could crop in - the best pro APS-C DSLR that Nikon made and that's how we used it. If they can combine that with better low light performance then it won't be a difficult sell for people like me with battered cameras who are baulking at a D5 price ticket this late in the mirrored game. Who knows, maybe if they're committed to NOT doing another mirrored D5 successor then they might say "fuck it let's just make the last high end DSLR we make also be the best DSLR we ever made". If they're looking for legacy like they did with the F5 when digital was coming in then that's exactly what they should be doing. As it stands, their legacy from this era will be the D3. Which is no bad thing but it would be great if they bucked the trend and went for giving us everything they could in a product instead of holding back. Dream on though eh? It'll be a million mp, useless beyond ISO3200, 1080p with a 5x crop, and have a mirror slap that could be measured on the Richter scale. The only thing approaching IBIS it will have is the Irritable Bowel Syndrome it give you when you shit yourself at the £3.5K price tag.

I'm going to pimp this again! Really flexible (literally) thing that can adapt itself to numerous support functions and thanks to the mounting threads all over it can have other things like monitors and recorders attached to it as well. Folds down small as shown with the diminutive GX80

They're trailing it as 'the next frontier' but I wonder whether it might also be 'the final frontier' as far as DSLR's are concerned? At some point the mirror will have to yield and you wonder how many more times round the block they can go before that happens. The D8** series being Nikon's highest resolution cameras and having a 2-3 year cycle, could this be the last one before mirrorless takes over as its hard to imagine them hanging in there until 2020 isn't it? Its weird to think that an announcement like this, which doesn't exactly have the pulse racing, might turn out in the fullness of time to have been for a camera that would be the highest watermark DSLRs ever reached.

You're watching it and have the exciting revelation of "Right, they're all the same in the final analysis so all I'll ever need is something that shoots 2K RAW so fuck all you manufacturers trying to brain wash me to lust after higher specs than that, its clearly a waste and I'll never need it and I'll now never even think twice about anything with a higher resolution than that." Its truly liberating and you feel you've broken free of the shackles of this ludicrous pursuit of something you don't need and that you'll never be able to justify having financially, technically and especially creatively. Hurrah!! And then the Alexa 65 came on.

Ah, I see. I only have G7 and GX80 and you have to do the region change to enable the 30p and 60p on those but the G81 has them in already. As far as I know, the G81 is slightly different to the G80 in only one odd respect which is that it has 2X digital zoom instead of 4X. It seems really odd to have made a specific variant for Austria/Germany (and Switzerland I think) in the first place but then to have that as the differentiator. The only possible - and still far fetched - reason I could think of for that would be if a well known camera manufacturer from that region that Panasonic have a relationship would be at some point maybe be planning on producing a re-badged version of it. The NTSC region G85 only has the 24p/30p and 60p rates so it looks like thats the mode its in even though you've selected G80. The golden ticket version of the camera is the Australian (and some other regions like Hong Kong) of the G85 which has all the frame rates and unlimited record time. http://www.panasonic.com/au/consumer/lumix-cameras-video-cameras/lumix-g-cameras/dmc-g85k.specs.html Whether anyone has ever used the service mode save/load ROM function to save from an Australian region G80 and loaded it on to a European one to see if it possibly made a difference I don't know.

You were able to change to NTSC mode to get the 30p and 60p though?

It is basically some additional setup that can be done when the camera is sent in for repair. The primary useful function for end users is for PAL users to get the additional frame rates by changing the region code. As far as I understood, the Australian version of the GX80 did not have the record time limit but there doesn't seem to be a way to get to setting up a European GX80 for example to be Australian from the region change so the best you can achieve from using the service mode (and its not a bad trick) is to get the extra frame rates. There are also some additional diagnostic functions for errors which may be useful if you're suffering from card errors and want to determine yourself if its the cards or the camera before you send it in for repair. It also lets you save and load ROM stuff but that is for saving and restoring user settings prior to and post repair as far as I can tell. Here is the GX80 service manual if you want to explore it yourself. All the Lumix cameras have the same service mode so its applicable for everyone https://www.apotelyt.com/doc-pdf/panasonic-gx85-service-manual.pdf

I wasn't being entirely serious mate so I'll probably just hold firm at my current level of calm. With regard to the D750, I'd love Nikon to recall all of their camera body variants for free shutter replacements just to be on the safe side as it would save me a load of money! To paraphrase Alan Partridge about The Titanic enjoying 1000 miles of trouble free cruising before it hit the iceberg, at least the D750 owners have had a couple of years rather than a couple of days use out of it

Turns out the TL2 is much improved right up until the point you attach their Visoflex EVF at which point it, erm, breaks. Sales suspended until they fix it and seems as big a failure in testing as Leica have had since they decided on Victoria Beckham as a good candidate for a bit of celebrity product placement.

There are two ways to do this. The NASA spending millions on a pen to write in space approach or the Soviet using a pencil approach. (Yes,yes, I know thats turned out to be an apocryphal story but I like it anyway ) The NASA way would involve copying and renaming files (there is a catalogue file hidden away in a Panasonic folder on the SD card) and using a hex editor to append chunks from a genuine file and trick it into thinking it came from a Panasonic camera. I've just spent some time doing this and managed to change the error but not much else so you'd need to dig a lot further in. Another NASA approach would be to use a tracker in your NLE to graft the video onto the GH5 screen. The Soviet way would be to play the file you want on an iPad or some other screen and just film it with the GH5. No hacking, no plugins, no rendering. Its up to you but I know which route I'd choose, tovarich.