kye

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.

You might be right about CDAF being best for fine-tuning the focus, but PDAF not only knows something is out of focus but which way the focus is to be found. After watching dozens or hundreds of beautiful moments pass while the focus mechanism has charged off in the wrong direction and the moment concludes and the shot is lost while the camera is still wondering why the entire frame is a complete blur, I will always be deeply deeply skeptical of CDAF-only cameras.

Thanks everyone! This is kind of a microcosm of my previous impressions about MF, most talk about it being scaled up but the same, a few talk about desirable aesthetic differences and then get refuted. It's kind of why I asked the question. My brain says that the differences should be all engineering, but then I see images like the video in the first post and something within me stirs and says "I want that!!". I guess we'll have to wait for the camera to come out and judge the footage for ourselves.

Now we've heard the Fujifilm GFX 100MP 4K Medium Format camera announcement, it leads me to wonder what the medium format look really is? Obviously the sensor size means that shallow depth of field is easier to get, and larger sensors gather more light (although MF sensors don't seem to be low light beasts), but what else is part of the look? This sure looks nice though...

@noone I agree that there are too many systems to survive. It's an interesting time, as it is an industry in disruption and also, depending on how you look at it and over what time scales, in consolidation. In the long term I think we will have three form factors, large modular cinema cameras with mind boggling specs, smartphones with many lenses and AI driven computational image processing, and the middle offering that will be the successful synergy of video and stills. As smartphones eat the bottom end of the market it's the middle offering that we're moist concerned about here, and we've got a number of iterations before this space settles down.

How directional it is would be useful to know too

Yeah. Until the cameras get into the hands of reviewer's who can pick them apart, understand the various combinations of features that work well and those that are locked out, understand who there for, and then compare them, only then will I sink a solid four figures into a new system. The more that I thought about this announcement and what I wanted the more that the line between mirrorless, cinema and ILC camcorders blurred in my brain. If we're talking about the relationship between consumer and cinema cameras then why should the consumer ones not overlap on video features, and what is the best form factor anyway? At some point you need to understand what features you actually use and then when the camera that has those is released then that's what to buy. For some people that was 10 years ago and for others it's not yet. The problem is that some don't start with their requirements, and that's how you get lost in the confusion of camera tech.

@A_Urquhart good info, thanks. As this is a camera that is really likely to shine brightest with raw and careful grading, perhaps just sharing your impressions of it is easiest and quickest. Or alternatively just take a bunch of random shots and upload some DNGs or TIFFs for others to dl and play with?

No PDAF though