Surprise! New Sony RX10 sensor has 5K full pixel readout

[Flynn]

Oh yeah, it's also weather resistant.

Shoot in rugged outdoor environments without worry as the dust- and moisture-resistant design gives you that added level of confidence to follow your subject wherever they may roam.

 

For someone who doesn't want to shoot raw I think this could be a very good choice, especially if that price starts coming down, provided the footage is good. It looks to be an awesome camera for documentary/news work.

[markm]

An f2.8 fixed zoom  starting at 24mm on a 1" sensor will not give you much of a wide angle nor bokeh. High compression in camera may look great but so high it leaves concerns. Uncompressed HDMI which I assume is 8 bit will "Another assumption" be for 1080p.
For the price and lack of professional usability accept for gimics I fail see what use it is. Yes you will get a little bokeh using its built in ND filters but to little room with the lens for anything meaningful accept to shoot demo footage that shows what extremes it can do. At its price point If you don't want highly compressed 4k then other cameras have more to offer.

[Damphousse]

An f2.8 fixed zoom  starting at 24mm on a 1" sensor will not give you much of a wide angle nor bokeh.

 

 

8.8mm on a one inch sensor.  8.8mm.  Look at the picture in the first post.

 

 

I don't know why people keep posting 24mm.  It's equivalent to 24mm on a Full Frame sensor... which is wide.  My only concern is distortion and image quality.  It is a lot easier to build a 24mm undistorted lens than build an 8.8mm undistorted lens.

 

Frankly I don't like anything less than full frame because you start having to go to the extremes of lens designs and fight physics all the way.  But if the lens delivers it is a wider zoom range than the $800+ 17-55mm 2.8 IS I bought for my canon.  Yes you take a hit on bokeh  but this is a finished product.  Buy a memory card and start shooting in the store parking lot.  You can't do that with a BMPCC.  I could sell my 17-55mm 2.8 get this and keep my 600D and fast lenses.  So if I want to do low light work I can use my 600D.  If I wait for this to come down in price I will only have to chip in a few hundred dollars more than my 17-55mm 2.8 IS lens.

[markm]

The reason it is a 24mm to 200mm lens is because we have to standarise it so we understand it. It is not down to us to change standards or Sony.

When I read it as being a 24mm wide I know in my mind that a 16mm film frame size has a 25mm lens that would be equivalent to a 50mm 35mm film frame size In other words a C/U lens. Trying to make all sensor sizes adapt to the format size would be extremely confusing.

 

A fixed lens at f2.8 is not good compared to other fixed lens cameras As for the compression then we are talking about the low end. The camera may be perfect for you because you want extremely compressed 4k and don't need to worry about colour correction and happy to playback the footage on your 4k sony TV.

 

However I think most of us would for TV or documentary and wanted to run and gun would probably look for something like a Panasonic G6 or something with a smaller sensor. In any case I don't think the camera justifies its price tag and I think for the most part its a backwards step but in 4k just where Sony want to take us Back to consumer level at an inflated price and away from pro formats. The only good thing about this camera tomeis the ND filters proving it can be done. As soon as Sony come out with a 4K camera with 10 bit 4.2.2 out or onboard SSD drives for below £5000 like the BMCC then I will applaud them.

 

What they can do and what they are attempting to do is nothing short of treating the public like idiots.

[Axel]

The camera may be perfect for you because you want extremely compressed 4k and don't need to worry about colour correction and happy to playback the footage on your 4k sony TV.

(...)

 

 

What they can do and what they are attempting to do is nothing short of treating the public like idiots.

 

First paragraph: It's not a 4k camera, nor is it likely to output video beyond 1080p ever. HDMI outputs 10-bit indeed, but it's 8-bit color depth and 2-bit of control signals (or so). 

 

Second paragraph: There is planned obsolescence going on, and if Sony really tried hard to make better cameras, they probably could. On the other hand, I don't believe it's easy to build a perfect camera for a budget. It's either that the big companies are not in touch with the VDSLR users, that they don't understand what we are asking for (easiest thing in the world, I was told by an engineer, to shit raw signals, spares you a lot of work for the processor and the codec implementation). Or it is that we are too few. That for a majority of Sonys consumer customers this camera is just the right alternative to an NEX, because they even hate to be bothered with lenses. 

[Damphousse]

The reason it is a 24mm to 200mm lens is because we have to standarise it so we understand it. It is not down to us to change standards or Sony.

When I read it as being a 24mm wide I know in my mind that a 16mm film frame size has a 25mm lens that would be equivalent to a 50mm 35mm film frame size In other words a C/U lens. Trying to make all sensor sizes adapt to the format size would be extremely confusing.

 

Not sure I understand what you are getting at.  EVERY lens I've ever seen if it is labeled is labeled with it's focal length.  That is a physics labeling not a Sony labeling.  We talk about an 8.8mm lens as 24mm in this setting because of the crop factor.  And for the record 24mm is wide.  Anything beyond 24mm is ultra wide.  So to say the camera does not "have much of a wide angle" is factually incorrect.  It has as much of a wide angle as my 17-55mm 2.8 IS gives me on my 600D.

 

 

 

A fixed lens at f2.8 is not good compared to other fixed lens cameras

 

 

Do you have any examples?  I just dropped over $800 on a Canon EF-S 17-55mm 2.8 IS lens.  That's a chunk of the cost of this camera.  Granted I haven't seen anyone put their lens through it's paces so I will reserve judgement but 2.8 on a zoom of any sort is pretty rare and usually quite pricey.  People are preordering at $1,300.  Hopefully with time the price will drift down and maybe approach the $1,000 level...  Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

 

 

 

 HDMI outputs 10-bit indeed, but it's 8-bit color depth and 2-bit of control signals (or so).

 

So this isn't going to be an improvement?  I saw something on the web saying an 8 bit signal just isn't enough to make an appreciable difference on HDMI recorders.  It's not like the HDMI recorders are cheap.

[RichST]

Reading the fine print some more it does indeed sound like Sony is only using every pixel in the binning process. In their interviews I never hear them say that they read every pixel as a discrete value like a still frame and then downsample it, rather they just use every pixel to generate video. Technically this is what the  5DIII probably does to get its video mode so I don't see that much to write home about other than reduced moire and aliasing. Resolution will still be poor.

 

For "true" 1080p there are pretty much two ways to do it:

A) Sample the entire sensor then use the jpeg processor to downscale to 1080 or

2) take a cluster of 4 pixels, bin the two greens, and read the red and blue values to get a kind of "superpixel" that has R,G and B values. This is what Canon did for their cx00 cameras. 

 

I find 2 to be the most unlikely since that method works best with about a 10-12mp sensor. One advantage to this method though is that the power is already there if you use processing chips from camcorders that have 3MOS sensors. I think Sony would be shouting from the rooftops that is what their new camera does if this were the case. And I don't think they're using A either since the number crunching involved is still massively staggering, much higher than a simpler, fully binned readout would require. 

 

What you might expect to see in the first consumer "4K capable" camera is one that is not done in realtime; i.e. about 5-15 seconds of 4k footage is taken from a full sensor scan (24 or more full size images per second), thrown into a buffer and then processed into a video file. It may lock the camera up for a few seconds while it's converting to video but the quality would be fantastic. This is basically what the Nikon One's so-called "4K" mode is, it just spits all the frames out as individual jpegs instead of a single movie file, but that's trivial to change. I've tried it in the store and the V1 can do the whole burst shooting, downscaling, jpeg conversion and writing to the card very quickly, especially if you select 1080 as the resolution. When the One debuted I had high hopes that was what the Motion Snapshot mode was going to do but unfortunately it didn't; I guess Nikon didn't want to spend the extra few dollars (if that) for a larger buffer or it was protecting its lucrative videocamera market segment (sarcasm). If its buffer could have held, say, 240 images you could have had 10 seconds of 24p footage, 4 seconds of 60p footage, 6 seconds of 30p etc.

 

[Tzedekh]

An f2.8 fixed zoom  starting at 24mm on a 1" sensor will not give you much of a wide angle nor bokeh.

 

That's the problem of citing full-frame 35-mm equivalents -- people start thinking the lens actually is 24-200 mm. Its actual focal length is 8.8-73.3 mm. The low end is like 16 mm or 17 mm on APS-C. While not a fish-eye, that's pretty wide angle.

[Axel]

So this isn't going to be an improvement?  I saw something on the web saying an 8 bit signal just isn't enough to make an appreciable difference on HDMI recorders.  It's not like the HDMI recorders are cheap.

 

You record an 8-bit 4:2:0 signal "as" ProRes or DNxHD 10-bit 4:2:2. You have an intraframe codec for editing. You can as well take the AVCHD and transcode it with 5D2RGB.

 

Once your hardware and software can deal with AVCHD, the output quality can theoretically be even better (ProRes is a copy, nothing can top original data). In reality, there is no visible difference. Don't believe it? Test for yourself. 

 

Atomos never cleared the confusion, they saw all the DSLR aficionados as lucky chance. So they fanned the hype further. It was Atomos at Photokina who announced which of the new VDSLRs had clean HDMI out. Some had no full resolution, some had artifacts, some produced psf like the GH2, but of no damned importance.

 

RichST wrote:

 

2) take a cluster of 4 pixels, bin the two greens, and read the red and blue values to get a kind of "superpixel" that has R,G and B values. This is what Canon did for their cx00 cameras.

 

How do they conjure True HD by this? Not by combining pixels alone. It's the lenses' resolution that only sees one 'superpixel', because that's it's limit. A very sharp photographic lens, calculated for 30 megapixels and above is actually worse. How do they conjure 4k by this (C500)? We haven't reached HonestHD yet, what do we want with false 4k? 

[markm]

 

Not sure I understand what you are getting at.  EVERY lens I've ever seen if it is labeled is labeled with it's focal length.  That is a physics labeling not a Sony labeling.  We talk about an 8.8mm lens as 24mm in this setting because of the crop factor. 

 

 

I may have been confused on this as I have read the lens was 24mm to 200mm IE

http://***URL removed***/news/2013/10/16/very-big-and-very-fast-sony-cyber-shot-rx10-first-impressions-review

It seems DP review has got this wrong and I went with it. The lens is 8.8mm that is equivalent to 24mm on a full size lens and so therefore wide enough. 
 

Do you have any examples?  I just dropped over $800 on a Canon EF-S 17-55mm 2.8 IS lens.  That's a chunk of the cost of this camera.  Granted I haven't seen anyone put their lens through it's paces so I will reserve judgement but 2.8 on a zoom of any sort is pretty rare and usually quite pricey.  People are preordering at $1,300.  Hopefully with time the price will drift down and maybe approach the $1,000 level...  Maybe I'm being overly optimistic.

 Of course you can buy individual lenses at f2.8 I also recently bought a canon 16mmm to 35mm lens But the point is I also bought some canon T1.5 T1.3 primes because it isn't a fixed lens camera. A fixed lens means you only have one choice.
 
 

So this isn't going to be an improvement?  I saw something on the web saying an 8 bit signal just isn't enough to make an appreciable difference on HDMI recorders.  It's not like the HDMI recorders are cheap.

Sorry I don't understand your question?
 

[Axel]

So this isn't going to be an improvement?  I saw something on the web saying an 8 bit signal just isn't enough to make an appreciable difference on HDMI recorders.  It's not like the HDMI recorders are cheap.

 

 

Sorry I don't understand your question?

 

If the Ninja exists for years and sells well, how can it be useless? Demand determines supply. Marketing creates demand.

[markm]

First paragraph: It's not a 4k camera, nor is it likely to output video beyond 1080p ever. HDMI outputs 10-bit indeed, but it's 8-bit color depth and 2-bit of control signals (or so).

Okay thanks for that.
 

Second paragraph: There is planned obsolescence going on, and if Sony really tried hard to make better cameras, they probably could. On the other hand, I don't believe it's easy to build a perfect camera for a budget. It's either that the big companies are not in touch with the VDSLR users, that they don't understand what we are asking for (easiest thing in the world, I was told by an engineer, to shit raw signals, spares you a lot of work for the processor and the codec implementation). Or it is that we are too few. That for a majority of Sonys consumer customers this camera is just the right alternative to an NEX, because they even hate to be bothered with lenses.

Nope its all about the money!

[markm]

If the Ninja exists for years and sells well, how can it be useless? Demand determines supply. Marketing creates demand.

The ninja records 10 bits or 8 bits in a 10 bit wrapper Maybe you meant convergent designs nanoflash However 8 bit was never useless but it is better as a finalising format and not for colour correction or capture. Although Canons C log on their 1DC looks amazing the problem is it costs £8500 but the game has moved on and it could have moved on much earlier but the manufacturers chose to cripple the cameras.

 

I don't agree demand determines supply Heh heh The demand is high for the BMPC but sadly few are getting made. Okay joking but that does highlight the point that demand is high for the cameras BMD make and yet none of the main manufacturers are satisfying that demand because it would ruin their pro markets and £15000 cameras.

Marketing does create demand and the way things are going in a very cynical way.

http://www.moviemachine.tv/video/comments-on-4k-philip-hodgetts/77230136/

[Axel]

Hodgetts says exactly what I think about 4k. As far as Atomos is concerned, they talk about the Samurai, HD-SDI!

[Damphousse]

Sorry I don't understand your question?

 

 

You are replying to a question I asked Axel.  It was regarding this...

 

 

Frankly though, unless you are planning on doing heavy grading or chroma-key work, and your camera outputs a real 4:2:2 colour signal, it's my experience and impression that using an external recorder to improve image quality from a 4:2:0 SIGNAL is an iffy proposition. I have yet to see one convincing real-world demo of such an advantage, yet alone from my own experiments. A true 10 bit signal also helps with refinement of tonal transitions during grading and keying.

 

 

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/accessories/atmos_ninja_2_review.shtml

 

 

So we would have to know what is truly being outputted via HDMI.  I have shot RAW on the 50D and there is no question about the improvement even on sharpness alone vs a mushy 8 bit compressed codec.  I just want to know if the clean HDMI out of this camera is really going to be that much of an improvement in image quality over the compressed 8 bit codec that is spit out of my camera at the moment.

 

The Ninja 2 is obscenely expensive.

[Axel]

So we would have to know what is truly being outputted via HDMI.  I have shot RAW on the 50D and there is no question about the improvement even on sharpness alone vs a mushy 8 bit compressed codec.  I just want to know if the clean HDMI out of this camera is really going to be that much of an improvement in image quality over the compressed 8 bit codec that is spit out of my camera at the moment.

 

The Ninja 2 is obscenely expensive.

 

Not if it made your $600 50D into a fully valid 10-bit 422 camera. Which it doesn't. If it did, the news hadn't been chinese whispers. People just don't grasp what ML and BM did for us ordinary Joes. 

 

I guess now that people start and develop a conscience for much better quality, it will be hard to sell old fashioned camcorders, no matter how many megapixels. I hope so. Bit depth is not considered redundant data anymore. But perhaps we are only a minority, too small to ignite a change of perspective. The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.

[Tony Anastasi]

I bet you can’t zoom in, focus, and then pull out the way you can with real cine zooms... maybe on the wish list for very few of us, but we can dream on can't we?! I know Cine zooms are designed so that focus tracks during a focal length change, and still zooms don't, but if SONY was really serious about this being a video cam, couldn't they of at least teased us a little haha.. most of my work is talking head interviews, so I will be adding this RX10 to my kit, maybe two if it works well enough.. at the moment I'm using RX100 ( org) and my old canon 550d and a borrowed black gopro3 for wide group shots.. but getting them to grade together is a total pain in the .... see my example here http://youtu.be/FSIRo8StYiM so my idea is to replace the 550d with a RX10 and get nice clean CU shots without the f-stop changing :) sweetness.

[Damphousse]

I know Cine zooms are designed so that focus tracks during a focal length change, and still zooms don't...

 

Not true.  The term you are looking for is "parfocal" and multiple Canon zooms do this.  I believe the two popular L ultrawides do this.  They are perfect for the APS-C bodies as walk around lenses.  Get one from a place where you can return lenses and see if one of them fits your needs.  The 17-40mm is cheap and very well made.  Unfortunately it is only f/4 and has no IS.  The 16- is a 2.8 but it is a lot more expensive and is also non IS.

 

A lot of still lenses are "varifocal."  But not all of them.

[Will Turner]

Not true.  The term you are looking for is "parfocal" and multiple Canon zooms do this.  I believe the two popular L ultrawides do this.  They are perfect for the APS-C bodies as walk around lenses.  Get one from a place where you can return lenses and see if one of them fits your needs.  The 17-40mm is cheap and very well made.  Unfortunately it is only f/4 and has no IS.  The 16- is a 2.8 but it is a lot more expensive and is also non IS.

 

A lot of still lenses are "varifocal."  But not all of them.

 

The 17-40L is not true parfocal. I have tested a couple of copies and they were nearly there but not quite perfect. 

[Husah]

More samples from RX10

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QLFHK2U0w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Na0G4TDPWqg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrrIrYsrMWU