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My experience is similar. Definitely have lower lifetime in years, with batteries dying (no longer charging) after a few years but the OEM ones keeping on going, so I'm down to the OEM ones for most of my cameras now, as I haven't bought a new camera for a while! I've been lucky with the camera / battery / usage of my cameras and mostly get by with a single battery on each day, and recharge overnight, so the non-OEM ones are mostly for backup, but that's not likely to be the case for everyone. Some battery types remain relevant across camera upgrades over time (NPF being probably the best example of this, with some Canon batteries like LP-E6 etc being others) so it's worthwhile buying well as the OEM ones will have a much longer lifespan over the years than the non-OEM ones. Like the sayings go: "buy well, buy once" or "the poor man buys twice".

It has no IBIS.

Maybe there's tests on the performance of the battery somewhere online, that would include these considerations? I would imagine there are ways to test a battery, just like any other piece of equipment, so maybe someone is out there running those tests?

I'm not familiar with the Olympus lineup at all really, but that E-M5iii seems quite interesting actually. What are the relative advantages & disadvantages compared to the GX85? I can see it's more expensive, has a slightly smaller screen, and of course it has PDAF. If I was to upgrade from the GX85 to it what would I gain and lose?

Original Gangster. As opposed to the Komodo-X.

He'd have to be a pretty pessimistic estimator, or seriously experienced at doing mods like this, for that number to be anything other than wildly optimistic. There might still be a RED tax, even on the OG Komodo, but you're buying into an ecosystem, rather than than a very niche mod. Depending on the footage you look at online, there was a mojo to the OG Komodo that I haven't seen on the modern BMPCC models. Good luck to the person making the product, but I'm not really that sure where the final product sits. I watched a video from a documentary shooter about what matters and doesn't in buying cameras, and his number one criteria was reliability / ruggedness, which I suspect won't be high on a mod like this. R&D for commercial products is a long and complicated process involving many iterations of destruction testing and the like, which likely aren't going to be done here. Let alone warranty support etc.

Nice video! Especially nice camera work in keeping up with those two 🙂 How long did the fight go on for?

I have had success with the Wasabi brand in the past across multiple cameras. If the design is good and the real capacity-per-dollar is competitive then I'd say go for it. I wouldn't worry about them putting extra weight in there - Sony used to do this in the early days of manufacturing electronics in Japan because although they were making decent products the consumers were still in the mindset that the heavier something was the better it was made. I think it's easy to look at this peek behind the curtain and conclude that cheap NPF batteries are a minefield / rip-off / etc and then get disheartened, but I think that most manufacturing is like this and we only think these isolated examples are bad because we have some deluded fantasy that the rest of the world is mostly above board. If you feel badly about this then just wait until you discover that in a lot of situations the "authentic" brands do this too, only they're doing it with their "genuine" products that cost 5x the third-party ones. Then when the consumers find out and start buying third-party products the manufacturers put in mechanisms to deliberately cripple the competing products. The printer ink cartridge example is well known, but this happens all over the place. Here in Australia we have pretty strong consumer protection laws, so lots of stuff gets pinged here that doesn't overseas, but even here the law only matters if you get caught....

I'm trying to get back into this and analyse more edits. Anyone else done this? Planning to?

Or the GX850/GX800/GF9 camera, which is discussed heavily in this thread... The rules in travel shooting are simple: Rule 1: Get the shot. To get the shot you must have your camera with you (so it must be small, must not have been taken by security, and must not attract too much attention from others around you). You must have it handy and ready with the right lenses (so a zoom is often more practical). You don't know what you will encounter, so you must be able to shoot quickly. You don't know what will happen and how you will edit so get a lot of varied coverage. Rule 2: Get a high quality capture of the shot. This rule is secondary to the first rule. If anything about the camera decreases your ability to get the shot (rule 1) then it is hurting your efforts, not helping them. Rule 3: The magic is in the edit. Once you've returned from shooting, get to work. Even a casual review of any travel TV series will make it obvious that the individual shots are not what make the show great, but the editing and storytelling and sound design. If you want a good travel film, shoot a lot then open up your NLE and get to work. Here is an award winning episode of a travel TV series - I encourage you to look through it and analyse the footage and the edit, as I have done with many examples. I think you'll find that almost no shots are beyond a modern point-and-shoot. (NSFW) I have done frame-by-frame analysis of this episode, and this is one of the finest examples of editing I have ever seen. It has a complex and nuanced storytelling and cultural narrative, has great music and sound design, uses more editing "tricks" than those nauseating YT travel videos that used every fancy transition they could find, and does it all in a way that is sensitive to the narrative. It makes even the best YT editors look like toddlers playing with crayons.

Resolve has an AI depth map plugin, but the edges aren't good enough to use yet, and neither is the above. It will get better, but it's got a way to go. Flyaways in the hair is the giveaway, and unfortunately it's both very difficult to do effectively, and it's also visually quite obvious. If you want to use this technique then you'd have to sacrifice the more cinematic lighting and compositions to hide the artefacts.

It plays in 4K for me, and looks pretty good! There is some optical distortions, but it looks like the normal ones from filming through glass, so not the cameras fault.

That's more like the performance I remember from previous models. Field curvature is a thing, which he doesn't test in the video, so that might be the cause of some edge softness. For example here is an article with graphs: https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2019/11/practical-use-of-field-curvature-graphs-the-50mm-primes/ It is odd that such a setup would have these issues more than the lens itself, considering that I thought the setup was just the lens projecting onto ground glass that the phone focused on. Or are there additional optics inside the mechanism? If so, that's probably the cause. The focus peaking not showing up is just because the setup is very soft, this is a common problem when using vintage lenses.

The relationship between a cameras image and the emotional experience of the viewer are connected, but a compelling story will completely overwhelm the image quality. I know there is no discussion on here about what happens to images once they're captured (and much discussion is relevant to only single images) but I think that the image quality is part of the last 10% of polish on top of a finished piece. Love is still love, even if it's in SD Heartbreak is still devastating even if shot on Alexa Betrayal is still ugly even if using Canon colour science Emotions are still colourful even if filmed in B&W If you want to make a feature then go ahead and make one. You are probably already familiar with Noam Kroll and the principles of writing the film you can make, starting with what you have access to and working backwards. I think that probably everyone is capable of making a feature film of significance if they were able to look within and tell a story inspired by their own struggles. Until recently all of TV was in worse quality than every FHD camera on the planet, and millions or billions of stories were told. Don't let colour subsampling and DR distract you from the fact that the human experience is universal, and that what separates a good film from a bad one is how much the audience can relate emotionally to what they see.

The first footage I saw was in a studio, but everything looks so good in a studio now that it's not a test that really stands for much. I've also seen a couple of videos of it on FPV drones, but those were coloured badly or weren't that useful. I wasn't sure that people would even use it outside a studio at all actually, but thankfully I was wrong 🙂

One aspect of this camera I'm particularly interested in is the AF. I use AF-S with back-button on the GX85, which is very good and very fast, but if this has anything like that level of performance then it will be a very interesting thing to add to my setup. One thing that makes it super interesting is that the Dual ISO means it will have much better low-light than the single ISO GX85, so would make me quite torn between the two.

I've been chatting with @mercer about it and we think it's the same sensor as the P4K. The sensor specs that we've looked at all line up between the two cameras. So if you think of it that way, it's the small box version of the P4K that everyone was asking for. It might be larger than the M2K but it sure is smaller than the P4K!

First outside footage... looks good to me!

Yossy has weighed in: https://ymcinema.com/2024/01/11/panasonic-strengthens-its-imaging-business-will-the-cinema-lineup-be-renovated/ Lots of discussion of the EVA1, Varicam, etc in there, as well as rumours of a refreshed cine line with S35 and FF/MF options.

I started just after The School of Computing had formed and separated from the School of Engineering. In first semester they taught us to program in Pascal via the "it's like a recipe" -> pseudocode -> Pascal path. In second semester they kept going with the theory in Pascal and also taught us C and assembler too, so by 9 months in we were coding double linked-list databases in assembler. Some kids hadn't used a computer before the course.... welcome to computer science! After that I have vague memories of Java, Javascript, Perl, Fortran, Visual Basic, etc but the main language was always C.

Definitely getting better. Considering it's on a gimbal and is an enthusiasts camera, I think they could spend a bit more on the next iteration (or release a Pro model) and make next model with a collection of cameras like smartphones now do. Even if it had a 15mm equivalent, a 24mm equivalent and an 85mm equivalent that would be great. Or make them the 8K like the Insta360 Ace Pro and you could have 4K recording with the 16mm (and 32mm with crop), then 50mm (and 100mm with crop).

In my Comp Sci degree, we reached a point where we realised that after learning 3 or 4 new programming languages in first year there were no more programming units after that. Unfortunately we got a shock when we arrived in second year at the start of a unit called something like Numerical and Computational Methods and they told us we'd spend the first 8 weeks learning Fortran, then we'd be using it to program all sorts of horrific mathematics-related things, like converging and diverging algorithms, L-U matrix decomposition, path-finding, etc. The lecturer had written a small book on Fortran that was very well written and absolutely essential because the lectures weren't enough to learn it and so we had to keep the book on hand to refer to while doing assignments etc. Apparently in subsequent years they worked out that the lectures weren't enough and that students were teaching themselves from the book, so they shortened the Fortran lectures from 8 weeks to 6, and eventually to 4 weeks. After that we arrived at the start of each unit thinking "what they hell are they going to sneak into this unit that wasn't included in the unit outline". Sadly, that wasn't misplaced paranoia as subsequent units involved more additional programming languages than I can remember, and even open-ended assignments where you had to accomplish some goal in a programming language of your choosing. After all that, if I had to pick a programming language to work in, Fortran wouldn't be it!

Yeah, familiar with that one. When I was into hifi I once paid almost $100 for a pair of resistors. They were custom made high-precision ones made from exotic materials, so were expensive at USD$10 each, but it was the USD$60 shipping fee (which at the time was the minimum cost for whatever courier they used exclusively for shipping their products). Combined with import duties, we call it the Australia Tax. It's also one of the reasons I don't tend to sell things I'm done with it.

The variable aperture zoom lenses aren't fixed DoF, but they're certainly close.. ...and I think you're talking about Mina Rhodes who did a bunch of Urban Symphony style videos like this one?

If you shoot a test shot of the X-Rite then you should be able to just pull it into Resolve and have a bunch of guesses on CST settings and just watch the vector scope and waveform to see which are closest. Just remember to shoot the chart with high CRI lights and expose it well. I don't know the exact theoretical way to shoot them, but I shoot my chart by just exposing normally and it comes out fine in the charts with the right CST. Even if you only find a combination that is close, it's like I said before "if it looks good, it is good" and unless you're doing scientific work or commercial shoots then the colours don't have to be exact, and if you're doing narrative work then the colours are best when being true to the emotion of the scene, rather than the specific objects that were filmed in the scene.