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+2 We'll see huge consolidation and what happens now will decide who will be the new Canon and who will be the new Pentax in 5 years. The reasons that I think the third category is small-screen and enthusiast content is that more and more people are producing video content for online and many of those will need multiple cameras for interviews, and even if you can use your phone for one of them you're probably not going to buy two other phones for the other two angles, although you might just use last year's and the year before that. Everyone wants a wedding video, an engagement video, there are now clandestine proposal videos being shot by photographers hiding in bushes nearby (I kid you not) and this trend will continue as the first world economies change from manufacturing to services economies. Social media and human vanity and sentimentality aren't going away. The other segment of this market is cashed-up enthusiasts. Every office building has a dozen or more people who own a 5D and 24-70 F4, not because it's got the FF look, not for the low light, but because they earn 100K a year, like photos and want "the best" or "what the pros use". It will take a long time for the answer to those criteria to be "use your phone". Don't forget that photography is an art that people think comes from the camera. "That's a lovely photo, you must have a great camera". This alone might be Canons entire profit margin - selling the same camera that took the lovely picture to the person that wants to buy the ability to take similar ones on holiday or at the park.

I see two major trends in this sector, convergence of stills and video, and computational photography. I don't see computational photography being ready for some time and there isn't really a market leader (Apple perhaps? Hardly a likely partner), leaving video as a potential direction. Olympus has deep stills experience so maybe they partner with a video only company, like Red or Arri. I have no idea how likely that is, probably almost zero, but it would make sense from a certain perspective. The cinema company would get a partner who does lenses, has deep stills history, and is in the consumer market. Olympus would get a partner who can give experience designing bodies built for huge data rates and image processing. The not-so-distant future of imaging belongs to the smartphone for mum and dad, the cinema camera for the big screen, and the hand-held run-and-gun setup for small-screen and cashed-up amateurs. Adding AI and computational photography to the mix would best be done by acquiring a third partner down the track once we've moved forward a bit.

What are you thinking of? IIRC it's a nice camera but had some significant flaws, RS comes to mind. A C100iii would be a fascinating thing to see. Of course the interesting part would be how crippled it was. Even if it was the same ILC / S35 form factor but matched the digital specs of the XC10 / XC15 that would be great. Including 4K60 and IBIS would make people pee themselves with excitement at the announcement event. The more that I think about it, the more I realise that a tiny cinema camera fits my needs better than a hybrid, but of course the lack of IBIS in "cinema" cameras is an ongoing issue. Maybe I should do another review of the ILC camcorder options again.

Cameras are a funny thing - it's one of the only things I know of where having more money wouldn't help me that much. If you want an ILC cinema camera with good 4K smaller than a C100 there are simply no options. That is, unless you're a billionaire, in which case you can probably ask one of the manufacturers to design you one! Edit: with great IS for handheld work. Otherwise the Pocket 2 is fine

Many people forget that other people are shooting in different conditions to them. I shoot home and travel videos for myself, but the conditions are generally the same: The event comes first, photography shouldn't get in the way, camera placement is often restricted No re-takes, either you shoot it when it happens or you missed it You may have some control over lighting, you may not, but anything you do can't get in the way of the events that are happening There are parts in low light = high ISO performance There are scenes with high contrast = good DR There are action scenes = ok RS, and slow motion You have to be mobile and move very quickly = monopod / gimbal / hand-held = good IS etc etc etc. I started my photography / videography journey with a <$100 Nikon point-and-shoot and every upgrade since then has been based upon the quality of the end result from me actually shooting what I shoot. I haven't gotten a setup that I really gel with but my current setup is close, however I have shot enough to know what my style is and so I am not trying to buy equipment to hit a moving target - I know how I work, where I work, and what I am trying to achieve. If someone has different feature desires it might be because they're shooting different films.

And we see absolute magic coming from people that wouldn't have been able to operate or afford to make anything on that old equipment. The old days aren't better, or worse, they are just different. Get over it. Anyone who has the privilege to be able to do something and is complaining that too many people also have that privilege is just showing fear of being inadequate. Master artists aren't campaigning for schools to stop giving students access to art supplies!

Excellent! Can you please share the technique for me to round $50k on my next family holiday down to zero? (Yes, I know....)

ML.. the app!!

I totally understand your point and mostly agree with you...... but if you're going to give an example of why we should stop nitpicking the video features of mirrorless cameras then don't use an example from a cinema camera that has many of the features we're talking about and costs double or triple or more!!!

Absolutely, my complaints about the XC10 are few and relatively trivial, and my situation is not the norm by any measure. If you're shooting with a bit of room then you can just get further from the background to get some defocusing and adjust lighting for more contrast. In a sense I am looking to create the polished and slightly dreamy impression that we have of memories. I make the footage a bit on the warm side, I use the nicest moments and angles I can, I add cheery music. It's just a slightly different aesthetic. There is lots of criticism of people wanting to buy more equipment or have more features, and sometimes that criticism is warranted, but when the desire for features comes from starting with the creative process and working backwards then it's mostly not warranted. I think it's like writing an essay in school, you can say anything you like as long as you can back it up. If you want new features and can back it up with real-life creative needs then go for it. No-one criticises Hollywood productions for shooting in 4k or RAW or on huge rigs, or people shooting hair commercials for wanting great slow motion because we understand that the equipment choices are relevant for the task at hand. That should be the only criteria.

What exactly does "super sampled" mean? 4K60 down sampled from 8K?? That would be absolutely stunning to see!

It's not dead if you're shooting for yourself. I'd say that you'd be pleased to know that my videos have no gimbal movement, no flashy transitions, and don't look anywhere as nice as the professional ones (which I'm working on) but it won't matter at all because they're not publicly available, like much of the work that I think people buy fancy cameras for I suspect that there's a huge market segment out there just shooting for themselves and we have no idea what they're doing or what they're making it with. When I work in a new office for my day job it only takes a few weeks for me to meet someone who has a 5D just to take pictures of their kids at the zoo.

@mercer yeah, the XC10 is a hard act to follow but when I watch the footage I just get disappointed with how flat it looks. It's totally possible to shoot a good film with a 1" sensor and get good 3D images if you control the locations and lighting, but that's just not how I shoot. I shot a few videos with the 700D and 18-35 1.8 and the separation was what I was wanting. The A7iii and 24-105mm F4 goes longer with APSC mode, and longer again with a bit of digital zoom. It's not the ideal form factor and I'd love a tiny cinema camera, but I'll see what there is once the dust has settled from the current frenzy of announcements. I'm in no rush, but a look with a bit more depth is calling.

If you're in the stills game then Canon are great and are pushing the price/performance in the upper echelons of pro-level cameras. Unfortunately for us we are playing video and the upper echelons are $100k+

By the time you account for crop factor, the f2.8 on a 1" sensor is more like f8.

I want shallower DoF than I can currently get with my XC10 fixed 24-240mm zoom but don't want to give up the flexibility of the large zoom range and IS. A 24-105mm F4 zoom on a camera that shoots 4K in full sensor and crop mode would do for me, and FF is the only system with a fast zoom. I'd happily use any sensor size, in fact the smaller the better, it's the lack of fast zooms in any other mount that is pushing me to FF.

I agree that some tests are far fetched and not useful. What is useful is seeing how many out of focus shots there are in real videos that aren't about the camera's AF. Kai Wong had regular occurrences of out of focus shots from his GH5 where he's obviously shot the video and only discovered the focus problem in editing when it's too late to re-shoot. I've seen him sitting in the middle of the frame talking to camera and it just focuses from him to the background and just stays there for 5 seconds or more completely happy with itself. I think it got better after the update but still wasn't perfect, and this is potentially the easiest composition in the world to focus on. It might be the technology of the future, but it's not the technology of the present unfortunately.

Thanks, that makes sense. The video I linked differentiated MF from FF more than still images seemed to and that explains why. That makes perfect sense considering that the lens essentially converts 3D to 2D and the sensor only captures the result. Combine that with flares and other effects that vary depending on the location of things in the frame, which is how our eyes work, and it's a really critical component of getting depth to an image. I haven't seen the Zacuto shoot-out, do you have a link? I agree. If you skip FF mirrorless for MF video then you'll be waiting a decent time period. Although, having said that, is it easier to make an 8K sensor FF or larger? If there are advantages to a larger sensor then maybe MF might be how some manufacturers do it? Although releasing yet another set of lens mounts for 8K would be beyond ridiculous, so chances are that they've factored in 8K into their FF mirrorless lens mounts already. Gear up people... Choose your 8K video manufacturer now when you buy FF mirrorless!!

I'd also like to know if Canon are working on a small ILC cine camera. Maybe a C100iii or an ILC XC model or something in between. I'm not optimistic though as AFAIK Canon have had their announcements and the C100 (2012) and C100ii (2014) schedule seems to have stopped completely.

Sony A7Siii anything, that seems to be the last missing component in the next batch of cameras. I'd also like to know if Sony are updating their 4K action camera, as I'm in the market.. Thanks Andrew!

I think we should discuss lenses and MF cameras separately. In the same way that a MFT 25mm f2.8 lens gives the same viewing angle and DoF as a 50mm f5.6 lens, there are equivalent lenses on MF also. My question is that given the two sensor sizes and two equivalent lenses (equivalent in both focal length and aperture) then are there any other differences? The video I included looks absolutely gorgeous to me, but is that simply a combination of the lens resolution and characteristics, the colour science, the codec (IIRC that video was raw?), the source resolution, and the nice lighting and subject? If so, then the engineering part of my brain understands that, and would also explain why lovely images can be also be taken with MFT, 1" cameras, or even smartphones and their borderline microscopic sensors. I want to have a camera that is as small as possible, but if there's something magical about MF (which the images certainly hint that there might be) then I want to understand what it is and start working out how to get it!

No-one. The problem is that sometimes it doesn't.

If what you're saying is true then that's a good thing, and I hope you're right. My experience has been awful with older budget cameras, and the issues I've seen with the GH5 (or those that made the cut anyway) are admittedly less than 2005 point-and-shoot cameras, but unfortunately we're still too far off for it to be acceptable performance for me. I've now filed it under the same category as 8K video - it will be good but it's not available yet and when it is available it will be costly and take time to trickle down into the camera body with the right feature set for my preferences.

What are the competitors likely to release and when? I was hoping Sony would update their flagship action camera this year When is the next Xiaomi Yi announcement likely to be?

I agree and have commented previously in other threads about this. I'm not sure why but when you go smaller than APSC there are no fast zooms available, and APSC only has the one option.