kye

Very cool!

Great to hear it's working for you. I've long suggested that the cheap Chinese lenses are a lot like the high-end vintage lenses from the SLR film camera days - both had simpler optical designs and simpler coatings. The only challenge is how good the lens is wide open, but if it's enough for your application then you're all good! Same for me. I have saved power grades for each camera that convert from camera colour space to Davincis log space, and a few Timeline power grades that apply a few variations of film emulations. I just pull all the footage into a timeline, apply the power grades, and then adjust exposure on any clips that need it (I use ETTR so this is normal for me) and mostly I'm good. The wider DR of the GH7 and iPhone 17 Pro means that the images are less crunched and therefore respond nicely to a film emulation contrast curve and so need a lot less fussing than the GH5 ones did. I standardised on 58mm filters as that's the largest size that fits most of my lenses. Actually about two thirds of my lenses have that size natively and for the ones I use a lot that don't have that I bought dedicated step-up rings and just have them permanently attached. I have a K&F Concept True Color Variable ND2-32 (1-5 Stops) as my main vND and recently bought a NiSi IR ND8 (3-Stop) fixed ND to stack on it if the 5 stops of the K&F aren't enough (5 stops is enough for full-sun at F5.6 but wider apertures than that will require more). I wanted to just buy a nice 5-9 stop one but I have a Tiffen? 4-stop filter and when I paired that with the 1-5 stop I got all kinds of IR pollution on the iPhone, so I knew that anything more than 5 stops needed IR filtration too, and I couldn't find anything that had it. I had to buy an 82mm one for the front of my Sirui anamorphic adapter, but got a cheaper Neewer 1-5 stop which seems to work ok, although that one I only shot at night and colour fidelity is less important for that stuff. I also bought a few lower-quality 1-9 stop vNDs in specific sizes for when I wanted to keep the lenses as small as possible, so I got a 46mm one for the 14mm F2.5 pancake lens which lives on my GX85, and a 40.5mm one for the 17mm F1.4, which I had thought might be a good low-light lens for the tiny GX85 Super-16 setup but I haven't shot anything with that combo yet. Funny how people end up with similar solutions!

Nice images. Once you get files beyond a certain quality then the film emulation can do the rest. How are you finding the 17mm F1.4? Sharp enough wide open for you? In terms of filter threads, you can get filter-thread-adapters in that size. I bought a tiny vND for mine, which was really cheap because of the small amount of glass required!

This makes sense to me. I figure there are two scenarios they design cameras for: 1) Recording outside in bursts, in aircon for longer takes, size and spec over thermal management, customers get big image in tiny size 2) Rock solid professional performance from integrated fan, customers pay for the reliability Unfortunately the third scenario is missing from the market: 3) Decent but not cutting-edge image (4K max) in very small size

I guess without it having electronics in the lens mount there's no using an AF lens even in manual mode, because focus and aperture both need power. I can't think of any way to get power to the lens either, without it coming from the camera. There used to be that trick of connecting a lens to a camera with lens controls and setting the aperture, then putting it on a camera without them and using the mechanical MF controls, but I guess that's not really possible either. With the right lenses I think you could get the shots you want, but it would mean buying new fully-manual glass, which obviously isn't ideal. It takes me back to the "what is a tiny camera with good image quality" question that has been asked over and over again because it doesn't have a good answer. Hmmmm.

There's a counter-culture online of (young) people shooting with early digicams etc, and the way they talk about it is that they're going for an alternative aesthetic to the clean modern digital look that's now in every smartphone and has become the 'default' look. Personally, I've been pushing how small a video camera can be, and it has brought me to the same place - deliberately choosing very poor video quality. I've been using the Kodak Charmera for travel, which is the size of a construction-workers thumb, because it's so small no-one really takes it seriously when shooting in public, and also because it doesn't attract thieves etc (unlike a large ILC or new smartphone). But I'm also resurrecting my old Lumix point-n-shoot for roughly the same reasons. I've started to think of the Charmera as a sort-of modern Super-8 camera - a much smaller and lower quality camera for amateurs. If you apply some film emulation then it can take away some(!) of the digital nasties but I'm guessing some people will prefer the unmodified low-quality digital look. In a sense it's a 'worst of both worlds' situation as it clips like digital but also has the low resolution of film while simultaneously looking sharp and harsh - applying the film emulation rectifies some of these issues to create a hybrid with some limitations of both looks. Here are some stills, both ungraded and also graded with a modified version of my Super16 film emulation, and some sample footage to get a sense of the motion (it's truly terrible). However, the more I use this camera and look at the footage the more it grows on me. I can't say I like it, but as I get used to the look it strikes me more as a look rather than deficiency. Here's a warts-n-all montage of some shots I took. I was mostly walking around while rolling, but at 45mm FOV with no stabilisation it's pretty jittery anyway considering it weighs about 30g / 1oz so has almost no weight to prevent micro-jitters. If this was a real edit I'd smooth over a lot of the rough edges like sound pops and clicks etc, but this is a realistic look at how it performs. The issues do lend it a certain charm (like in the name!) I think, and it's the imperfections that give something character, so logically this must have a lot of it! I'm still constantly thinking about how to get better results from it, but being so small it's hard to modify the setup at all without drastically diluting its biggest advantage - the size. Anyone else experimenting in the very shallow end of image quality?

I might film with my point-n-shoot instead of the charmera (which is probably the worst video camera anyone on this forum owns). Not really sure what else is a useful limitation that everyone can meet? Maybe start a new thread to get some visibility and see who else is interested?

Yes, and I think that the right situation for it is the combination of when you want a small camera and you want to shoot impromptu things. If you're shooting in controlled environments then a larger camera probably makes more sense, which was sort-of my point, and probably not explained that well. I agree about it being a new category, it sort of feels like that to me in a way too. Cameras are all about combinations of features, and this one has some feature combinations that haven't really come together before. I can recommend the Laowa 7.5mm F2, it's really sharp, but not cheap. It's probably not the right choice now as there have been wider lenses brought out in recent times, but as a reference the Laowa is a great performer. I suspect that we're probably better off without it having AF. I suspect that (in the parallel universe where they did give it AF) the AF they gave it would have been pretty rubbish and also because it got AF it probably wouldn't have gotten any/many good MF features, so neither pathway would have been particularly useful. Back in the days before PDAF subject detection was really a thing I remember spending quite a lot of time half-hitting the shutter and then asking the camera "why did you focus on the background?!?!?". The problem then, as well as the problem now, is that when there are multiple things to focus on, the robots are choosing which one and often falling on their faces. I shoot MFT at F5.6 and at F2.5 on PDAF and CDAF models and it's great and focuses incredibly fast all the time, but only because either the DOF is so large that everything is in focus or I'm simply focusing on on the middle of the image. I have the TTartisans 17/1.4 and it's small and light and cheap, but wide open it's more of a "character lens" rather than a sharp one. It's good for emulating the softness of film in-camera, if you know what I mean! I also have the 50mm 1.2 and it's a bit better than the 17mm IMHO, but neither of them are high-end glass. Share some images with us if you're able!

This highly-cherry-picked reel appeared in my feed. The image quality looks pretty impressive, so when the stars align the potential images from this thing are very nice. I guess the question for me is how many situations would the ILS be the right camera choice for? For example if you're going to pack a bunch of lenses, a tripod, and rig it up with filters, then go somewhere to shoot, setup your gear and potentially direct the scene in front of the camera, using a larger and more capable camera wouldn't make much difference to the logistics but could give advantages in DR and usability etc. For example, the ILS body is roughly 90mm x 60mm x 45mm, very similar to the Lumix GM1 which is 100mm x 55mm x 30mm. Small for sure, but by the time you add all the lenses and all the rigging, it's not like your camera bag is that much lighter. Does anyone know what the stabilisation is like with third-party lenses? Like, is it the same as the normal GoPros with their own wide lenses? or is it poor / hit-n-miss?

If you're going to get an ARRI phone, why wouldn't you get one with a built-in gimbal?

GoPro ILS vs BMPCC OG... not a completely scientific test, but lots of shots in different scenes, so a good real-world comparison.

Thinking of it as a Super-16 FILM camera represents an incredible opportunity when combined with the high-resolution sensor - zooming in post. My experiments with emulating S16 film showed that even a moderate amount of blur applied in post hides a huge amount of detail in the image. This means you can crop into the source image significantly and the blur will hide it. For example: If you were to put a 12mm lens on it, then you'd get a ~35mm FOV at 6K, which you then blur. If you were to put a 12mm lens on it, then crop 2x you'd get a ~70mm FOV at 3K, which you then blur and the blur hides the zoom in post. If you were to put a 12mm lens on it, then crop 3x you'd get a ~100mm FOV at 2K, which you then blur and the blur hides the zoom in post. Depending on how much blur you applied (if you were going for a vintage 16mm look or a more modern 16mm stock emulation) I suspect you could zoom up to 4-6x in post before the digital nasties started being visible through the emulation. I don't know what kind of digital zoom the camera offers, but if it allows it then you could frame in-camera and not be throwing away bitrate when you crop in post. This gives two advantages: 1) It turns any prime into a zoom, perhaps even a 4-5x zoom - much more than the 2-3x fast zooms like 18-35 etc 2) if you crop in post then you can apply additional stabilisation, making it feel a lot larger than the tiny camera it is I suspect that mostly this advice will fall on deaf ears, as people are drastically afraid of softening their images, like they'll be punished in the afterlife for it. When I saw Goodfellas in the cinema on 35mm film projection, it looked like somewhere between 720p and SD - and that was a 35mm feature film!! The amount of blur to accurately reproduce even a semi-ballpark 16mm film emulation is beyond most modern thinking, but if you can wrap your head around the concept then the ILS can become a drastically useful camera.

Makes sense. I'd imagine that perhaps the biggest difference (apart from the size!) is that the 4P has the controls on the handle, not on the part of the gimbal being stabilised, meaning it's easy/possible to change settings and operate it while rolling. Will you mount it on the hot shoe of your stills camera? Or maybe off to the side using a flash bracket or similar? I'm always intrigued by hybrid setups where multiple cameras are attached together.

Not film specific, but a great way to think about business things is the sales funnel. There's lots of versions of it, but the one I like is this: 1) Marketing - making people aware of your business / services / products 2) Sales - actually selling something to someone 3) Delivery - giving the customer what they paid for 4) Invoicing - getting them to pay you (assuming they don't have to fully pay up front) 5) Re-sales - selling something else to your previous customers (they bought from you once, so may well do-so again) The reason I bring this up is that there's a critical difference between marketing and sales. Marketing is generally done in bulk where whatever the customer is seeing isn't customised for them (think ads, fliers, etc), whereas Sales is often done person-to-person and so can be customised to what will help them specifically. In this sense, the job of Marketing is to make contact with potential customers as quickly as possible, because only then can you start addressing their specific needs. The purpose of social media in all this is Marketing, which is generic, and should do whatever is required to get them to contact you and not do anything else. For example if you say you provide corporate videos but don't outline the details then maybe they contact you to discuss, but if you provide tonnes of info about it then maybe it's not quite right for them and they think you can't / won't provide what they want specifically and they never contact you. In this sense, having an Instagram that says what you do, gives a few examples to show the quality, and encourages them to contact you, might be far superior to an endless stream of great looking images that aren't quite what they want.

The more I think about being able to shoot with 180 degree shutter on my iPhone 17 Pro, the more I feel drawn to shoot with it. I don't know what it is, but there's a certain X-factor in the idea for me. CineD posted their (incomplete / failed) lab tests recently and there are some interesting things to note. The first is that the rolling shutter is absolutely excellent. 3ms for the main 24mm camera, <6ms for the 100mm camera and 5.6-7.4ms for the 13mm camera. The 3ms is equal to the fastest of any camera in their database: Very impressive, especially considering that this is much more likely than most cameras to be shooting fast-moving things or being shakily hand-held, like when shooting inside moving vehicles etc. The other thing they tested is Dynamic Range, which (because of the internal processing) couldn't be fully tested. However, there are a couple of images of the waveform from the Xyla, including the below one, which shows the 12th stop peeking above the noise floor: They conclude that it's likely got "around 11-12 stops above the noise floor" which is a very good result for such a small sensor. To me these things are both very encouraging and just makes me want to shoot with it more.