The new trend this year is the selfie mirrorless camera being bundled so that Youtube and other social media Vloggers get a camera that can easily capture what they need with little fuzz. It is no secret that camera sales are in free fall and companies will try to market anything and everything to get some sales. Such is the case with the Panasonic Lumix G100. It has a very nice microphone, a diminutive body, a terrific bright day screen, and a very portable and good enough image from a micro 4/3 sensor.
So why all this negativity? Well for a camera that wants to compete with the smaller 1″ sensor but better overall featured Sony ZV-1 with excellent dual pixel tracking AF; the G100 is limited in a variety of ways. The 5x stabilization will only work in 1080p and be only electronic in 4k. 4k itself only lasts 10 minutes which is very constrained for 2020, maybe for 2016 as a spec but not 4 years later. Dig in for more info!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The newly announced CINEMARTIN FRAN 8K Camera claims some huge numbers in terms of resolution and performance. Up to 8K (8000×6000) RAW / Uncompressed 12 Bit video capture at 24fps and up to 96fps in 2k & 1080p for high frame rates but more on that later in this post. There is only one image of the camera we were provided with and that is the RED Brain like rendering above which sports a mounting port which in the lab is fitted with a Canon EF Mount which is preferred among cinema oriented users especially if it is an active one.
FRAN also offers in the spec sheet 15.5 stops of dynamic range at 12 bit which competes directly with the best cinema cameras out there. CINEMARTIN claims the camera will come in below the competition in price while offering a true global shutter sensor with no rolling shutter distortion. Using a 4/3 sized sensor at 50MP with 48MP being used for 8k Capture it may seem overkill when it comes to low light performance. It may be able to deliver resolution levels never before seen on cinema cameras but low-light will surely be a hurdle for the camera to overcome.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
With NAB 2018 getting near, new announcements are starting to trickle in. The two newest are the Canon EOS C700 FF Full-Frame Cinema Camera & the RED DIGITAL CINEMA EPIC-W BRAIN with Gemini 5K S35 Sensor. These two are serious cinema cameras aimed at recording in high-end codec formats and supporting RAW codecs. Both cameras support higher frame rates but do not offer extreme high speeds like dedicated slow-motion cameras.
In the case of the RED EPIC-W with Gemini S35 sensor, it is the first time RED has used a dual Native ISO sensor like the ones seen on the Panasonic EVA1 and GH5s which have two different native sensitivities to deliver extremely clean footage with the widest dynamic range. Witha claimed 16.5 stops of dynamic range in standard mode & a gain of approximately two stops of light, from 800 to 3200 ISO without increasing the image noise. DPs of all kinds will savor these advances to shoot in dark situations knowing the output will be dependable.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
There is no question the Sony a7 III just announced by Sony is making a splash in the midrange to professional camera markets. We have a $1,998.00 USD Full Frame camera that can shoot 10fps at the full 24MP sensor resolution with probably the best AF tracking system ever shipped on a camera aside from the slightly better Sony a9. The low light performance of the new a7 III is quite frankly impressive with nearly as clean video to the king of low light the a7s II up until ISO 12,800.
It also has the same high-quality 120fps Full HD mode in both full frame downsampling and APS-C crop modes with continuous reliable AF tracking that performs as good as the a9 system because when it comes to spec comparisons they seem identical. You will be better off with this camera if you are looking for 120fps full HD than any we have seen before as quality, low noise, focus tracking and dynamic range all come together to create a superb package.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Chronos 1.4 Team has now posted the first incarnation of the RAW Camera data to DNG File tool to convert the sensor information files to usable Adobe DNG sequences. They also have posted a sample image comparing the before and after characteristics of the image quality if saved on H.264 in camera and then the same scene shot and saved in RAW format which converted to DNG yields a substantial improvement in image quality as we explored in our previous post about this issue here.
The camera is expected to allow direct to DNG format file saving in the future but now you can shoot in the camera RAW format and later convert as an interim solution without sacrificing quality on the H.264 files. Maybe in the future, the camera will be able to simultaneously save RAW and H.264 files as a proxy feature to be able to easily sample clips in editing before conversion. We believe the DNG format should be your one-stop solution for this camera if image quality is important for your use case.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
We received a set of Adobe DNG image samples from Krontech to check the resolution, dynamic range and grading potential of the camera when using the RAW recording mode. As of now the utility to convert the raw data is still being tested but we were impressed by the results the camera was able to achieve by offloading the de-bayering process to a more capable converter like the Adobe Camera RAW module.
The Chronos files were already good when properly exposed but did suffer from some aliasing and moire in fine detail while resolution also took a hit by saving in a compressed H.264 format. Now with the DNG RAW capability, we are glad to see that the camera image quality made an enormous improvement in the resolution, color fidelity, and dynamic range. It really brings out the real potential of the camera for a variety of applications, also creating a cleaner result in the noise department when processed correctly.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
