A new article I have had published in Live View on Medium
In this article, I am looking at the ever more difficult choice of whether to bring a compact camera when I travel or rely on my phone. Will the iPhone 15 Pro finally tip the balance?
I thought it was time to blow the dust off my blog. To be honest, it has been so long that it is going to require the services of a Dyson to clear the dust. After a long quiet period, I have been going through a busy patch of blog worthy activities. As is often the case, this has centred on a big trip. I had planned, to mark my 50th birthday, to return to New Zealand. The last trip had been back in 1990 with my father. Now about half a life time later, I was going to return with my own kids. It took a while to find a window in which we could all go and that window meant going in winter. However, we did make it and the trip was everything I could have hoped for and more. There will be more trip related posts in the future. We brought back so much material that its going to take a while to get through it all. This post is more of an aside but is something of more current interest.
I have been toying with the idea of hiring some equipment for a while now. I have had many conversations with Guy from Hireacamera at various trade shows and hovered over their website. What has been holding me back is being around for the drop-off/pick-up and a tendency to buy the things I want - gear acquisition syndrome. So it needed to be something I really wanted to try, but only had an outside chance of purchasing. Last week Hireacamera posted up on Facebook they were getting the brand new Zeiss Loxia range of lenses in and I decided the 50mm f2 was the perfect item to test the service.
Zeiss Loxia 50mm f2
My interest for the Loxia is for my Sony A7s so the e-mount version. Sony’s A7 range of full frame mirrorless cameras has garnered a lot of attention. The e-mount is one of the best supported mounts for adapting lenses around but what has been in short supply are native lenses (FE) from Sony. The Loxia range is Zeiss’ entry into this market in their own right as they have with the Touit range for crop sensor e-mount. The first two Loxia lenses are a 50mm f2 and a 35mm f2. Just to confuse matters, there are already two Sony Zeiss lenses of similar specification. These are the Sonnar 35mm f2.8 and 55mm f1.8. So why have Zeiss bothered? Well the Loxia lenses come from a different route. One of the most popular mounts to adapt to the A7 series is the Leica M mount. Part of the appeal of the A7 series is its compact size. They don’t really suit having long heavy glass hanging off the front of them. Much of the existing full frame compatible glass tends to fall into that category. However, the diminutive Leica M lenses, as well as from Voigtlander and Zeiss, are a great match physically.
Sony A7r with Zeiss Loxia 35mm F2 look a natural pairing.
However, some of the designs had some optical issues when used with adapters so what Zeiss has done is to tweak their designs and put them in some sexy new housings specifically for this new breed of mirrorless camera. So now the A7 owner has some options. The Sonnar lenses have had some good reviews and they are fully electronic. If you want a manual lens with traditional teutonic build quality then look to the Loxias.
The modern full frame lenses that I own were all bought for my 5D Mark II. The A7s has replaced the 5D, but I have held on to most of the glass. I have a Metabones and Viltrox adapters (another one for later) for EF to FE mount. The heavy Canon L zooms feel unbalanced on the dainty A7s. So I have looked to the past for inspiration. I have stated my fondness for the compact SLRs from the 70s and 80s made by Pentax and Olympus. The A7s is similar to classics like the OM2 so it’s no surprise that the contemporary Zuiko lenses are a good physical match. I recently picked up a Zuiko 50mm f1.4 off eBay. I also still have my trusty Canon EF 50 f1.4. Lastly, I have Sony’s own 28-70mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens. This turns out to be a slow sounding 50mm f4.5 in this company.
From left to right: Zuiko 50/1,4 on a dumb adapter, Loxia 50/2, Canon EF 50/1.4 on a Metabones MkiV, 3.5" drive is for scale
I don’t have any test gear, so I my pixel peeping is going to be limited. I concentrated on taking stills though I would use any lens for video as well. The Loxia came out with me on a photo walk in my home town of Chester. I then went over to Wales with all the lenses to do some comparisons in the relatively controlled conditions of my Mum’s back garden.
When you open the lid of Hireacamera’s Pelicase for the first time, its hard not to fall in love with the Loxia immediately. It a very good-looking lens. Easing it out of the foam and the gear lust continues. It has just enough weight to feel expensive and hewn from solid without actually being heavy. The lens hood is metal and has a positive connection to the lens. The focus is smooth with a lovely linear amount of effort through its range. The aperture ring has a light click in third stops. I didn’t experiment with it, but the little tool to declick the aperture was provided with the lens - something video shooters will appreciate.
Once on the A7s the Loxia feels perfectly at home. It really is a nice combination. I was shooting in either aperture priority or full manual. However, the Loxia is not a dumb lens. It does have communication with the body and this bring some immediate benefits. Firstly, the body knows when you are focussing. This means that the zoom feature gets activated to get critical focus. When combined with peaking this is extremely useful. You will also get full metadata on the pictures you take. I did notice one handling downside. The aperture ring is perhaps guilty of form over function. Its a narrow, flush ring sandwiched between the mount and the much broader focus ring. It also has to bear the aperture numbering. I found it awkward to find with my normal grip. It was also too easy to nudge the focus when changing it which of course prompts the camera to magnify. People with big hands or wearing gloves will struggle more than I did.
The Zuiko wins on size but one its been paired with its adapter there is little in it compared to the Zeiss. The focus feel is similar but it can’t quite match the Zeiss’s linearity through the range. Peaking works but if you want to push in you have to do it manually. Zuiko’s trademark aperture at the end is much easier to find but you only have whole stops and it tops out at f16 not f22. When you stop down the screen will darken. Its like using the depth of field preview on an SLR. Even wide-open it seemed a bit darker than when using the Zeiss.
The Canon 50mm f1.4 is not an L lens and it feels a bit plasticky compared to the Zeiss and Zuiko. Its also noticeably bigger and heavier when paired with the Metabones adapter. Switched to manual focus the range seems very short after the 180 degrees of the two Zeds. It also feels crunchy like its not enjoying being out of AF.
The Sony kit zoom is a very different beastie from these primes. Its a bit larger but no heavier, though at the expense of feeling more plasticky. At nearly 4 stops slower than the fastest lenses here you are not in the same league for getting shallow depth of field. In manual focus mode, the ring is much smoother than the Canon but it’s laggy. Like all the Sony fly-by-wire zooms I have tried before, it senses inertia. It makes it unpredictable. The AF is quick and reliable though. It is also the only lens here which has stabilisation.
I was very pleased with the quality of the shots I got from the Loxia. Provided the dumb human pressing the shutter had nailed the focus, the results look sharp with natural colours. A senior moment involving my tripod plate meant that my planned semi-scientific test comparisons weren’t really consistent enough to publish. Would they do show is that Loxia can hold those performance characteristics across a wide range of apertures. Compared to the f1.4s (at the same apertures) it has the least vignetting.
The Zuiko takes a bit longer to get into its stride both with vignetting and edge sharpness. I don’t find the bokeh as attractive as on the Olympus. The images are about a stop darker using aperture priority so there is something going with the metering. By f5.6 it’s very good.
The Canon images did not look sharp in my test but I don’t think I nailed the focus. This is probably operator error but it also shows the limitations of peaking combined with a narrow focussing action.
The Sony zoom turned out to be very respectable performer. It may not offer the aperture range of the others but, within that range, it is very consistent. Whether the camera is giving it a little helping hand I am not sure, but I am working off the RAWs in Apple Aperture.
Amongst the lenses I had gathered there is no doubt which is the stand-out candidate. The Loxia is the best performer and the nicest to use. It is also the one you will most want to own. That ownership will come at a price though at over £700. A little more will buy you the Sonnar and AF. However, for a still/video shooter like me I would prefer MF and the declickability of the Loxia.
The Zuiko can be had for a fraction of that cost with the adapter. Ergonomically it works well with the A7s but, with no integration with the body, its more fiddly to use. The Loxia lets you work faster and with a better hit rate. On the plus side, I can use it with other bodies like my micro four thirds cameras.
To buy a EF Metabones just to use a Canon 50mm would make no sense. Its a good lens on a 5D but can’t match the Zeiss when adapted to the Sony. If like me you have a number of Canon lenses then a Metabones makes more sense. There are other premium options but most of those are larger like the Sigma Art lens. If there is a downside with e-mount it is with adaptability. The e-mounts short flange depth means the A7s can be adapted to most other lens mounts. The flip side of this is it means e-mount lenses can’t be adapted to anything else. So your investment will be locked into e-mount.
For myself? My credit card is still having to cool down after the New Zealand trip so I am not ready to make that call. My experience with Hireacamera was excellent so maybe I will go that route for now if I need one. Now the 5D has gone and I only have MFT and e-mount cameras I need to review my options. My Canon lenses are adaptable, but don’t physically suit the cameras I have any more.
NAB2013 has been and gone and its clear that 4K was a strong message from the show. So has anything really major changed from my previous scriblings in the latest round of announcements? I don't think so. I don't think the overall trajectory has changed.
Blackmagic Production Camera 4K
The leading area at the moment is acquisition with a strong growth in the number of 4K capable devices from Sony, Blackmagic, Phantom, Kineraw etc. The post world is keeping up with support for codecs, 6G SDI and Moore's Law helps with the processing. We have a problem with storage though. We are dealing with a double data whammy of RAW and 4K, but storage mediums are not increasing in density per cost much at the moment.
We have the same problem with distribution. Sony's announcements to support their 4K consumer devices are a bit of a drop in the ocean at the moment and not very compelling, even for AV enthusiasts like me. My 1080p projector can reveal the difference between a blu-ray and a more compressed HD signal (download or satellite) or an up-scaled DVD. Ultra HD has to be perceptibly better than HD blu-ray otherwise its just a waste of bits.
Sony FMP-X1 4K media player
I am getting more tempted to look at 4K acquisition. I do think there is a strong case for getting as good a "digital" negative as you can justify. Even if your post workflow/pipeline is going to have to wait a while to catch up, there are probably enough options round dual record and proxies to make it viable now.
At some point, the infrastructural and technical challenges will be sorted and the sheer desperation of the consumer electronics business for you to buy new stuff will succeed. Who knows, British Telecom may even realise that my rural exchange is still wired with string and replace it with something from the 21st century. At that point I will be able to take a trip on my hover chair to a dusty cupboard and drag out those old 4K files.
Film has been a pretty good archival medium. Maybe not in its nitrate days when it was close to a WMD level of danger, but in the post war years. I have pictures in my Aperture library going back to the turn of the millennium and my first digital camera - a 2MP Canon S10. I have scans from the same era from slides made with a slide scanner. Resolution, contrast, colour fidelity ... they have none of those things. However, a scan of a slide now taken with my multifunction printer looks like it came from a DSLR. There is little I can do now to my S10 files to make them better. Digital files will always be limited by the technology they were acquired with.
Zoom and Enhance - still largely Science Fiction
I really wanted to go this year and had pencilled in a trip taking my son Alex. In the end, it was just not to be and we only got as far as London for BVE. BVE is a good show but it doesn't have the international draw that NAB does. One of the big attraction of NAB is getting meet people who otherwise live only on the interwebs in Twitter, Facebook and blogs, not only from the US, but from across the world.
So whilst I promised myself I would stay at home and be productive, what I really do is get thoroughly distracted by every NAB tweet and post and slowly get dragged into Pacific Daylight Time. If you missed all the excitement, then I recommend paying a visit to Newsshooter.com whose coverage really rocked this year.
So which have been the biggest distractions from the show for those not in Sin City. This is my own personal top 5 in traditional reverse order:
DaVinci Resolve 10
Blackmagic Design have developed a real talent for the surprising over recent years. Any suspicion that these are merely headline grabbing publicity stunts has been largely put to bed by a history of delivery (with a few notable exceptions) and a real sense of purpose from their CEO Grant Petty.
Resolve has been a consistent example of their philosophy. Since they purchased DaVinci it has progressed from being a megabuck workstation solution through affordable Mac tower solution to free laptop solution in its Light form. This would be understandable if Blackmagic were letting development slide but they are still cranking out new versions. Resolve 10 has two stand out features: a built in NLE and Live grading. The cost for upgrading - free and the free light version gets most new features too. Why Mr Petty, you are spoiling us.
Movi M10
With a pre-NAB spotlight shone on them by Vincent Laforet, the Movi was sure to be a show hit. Vincent at hinted at something "game changing" before he showed his Movi short. "Game changer" is such a loaded term these days that everyone knew Vincent would not use it lightly. I got the impression from the interwebs that many folks went through the same journey I did. Phase 1 was guessing what this new thing was going to be. Phase 2 was mild disappointment when it turned out to be a rig instead of a 4K hover car for $1000. Phase 3 was enjoying the video but not quite getting the significance. Phase 4 was watching the BTS and say "Wow, thats so cool" a lot.
MōVI from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.
MōVI BTS from Vincent Laforet on Vimeo.
Nothing I saw in the show demos and interviews has dislodged it from Sub Zero on an NAB Top Gear style Cool Wall. It's not a game changer for me yet because I can't get close to justifying the $15k for the first model. Rest assured I will be watching this area closely from now on.
I own an Sony FS700 which I would have had in this countdown a year ago. Its usp is definitely its high speed modes but its main attraction was that it was a good all-rounder for the money. It fixed many of the flaws of the FS100 which is good but the feeling amongst my FS owning mates is no-one has quite nailed the picture profiles yet so that the FS100 still has a nicer look. Another major difference of the FS700 over its little brother was that it was 4K ready. Like many, I have a deep distrust of the word "ready" in a tech sense and this has not been helped by the trickle of vague information coming out of Sony. Well, they have opened the sluices a bit and the we now know a lot more apart from the 2 critical bits of when and how much. My mate Den Lennie has done a nice summary of what will be coming. In terms of outputs we have got much more than we could have hoped. Along with 4K, we are getting some arguably more useful 2K RAW options plus an unanticipated continuous high speed recording option. The downside is the known cost of the Sony hardware required. This isn't a surprise as much of it comes from Sony's very nice F5/55 line but the FS700 requires an additional interface unit.
Convergent Design Odyssey 7Q
So this is where the 7Q enters into our story. The Odyssey units are effectively a very nice monitor with a recorder built-in. This is the opposite approach to my Ninja 2. Convergent have announced a deal with Sony which will allow you to record both 2K and 4K from the FS700 onto the 7Q onto its twin SSD drives. It doesn't exactly match the Sony solution exactly, but it is close enough for most for what we expect to be less wonga. Convergent and Sony will still need to sort out their full pricing first before we will know the exact amount. As I need a field monitor, the 7Q is an attractive option. It stings a bit that it is likely to cost more to upgrade than Blackmagic's new 4K for $4k production camera does outright but the FS700's merits are extended and enhanced. Tony Reale from NextWaveDV recorded this great interview with Juan Martinez (Senior Product Manager) from Sony. Sony's new found enthusiasm for supporting third parties is encouraging. I think its clear that Sony understands that ending up with an FS700 that costs F5 money is pointless and they need to carry the fight to cameras like the Scarlet and 1DC by making alliances.
NAB 2013: DJI Innovations from Dan Chung on Vimeo.
The DJI Phantom is not a new item having been high on my gadget lust list since Christmas. The original standard GoPro mount made it the go to Cine Quadrocopter for those whose construction skills stopped at Lego (and not Technics either). It was a great My First copter but the film clips were always a bit lacking. The problem was rolling shutter effects caused by prop vibration and wind shear. DJI's solution is to pair the Phantom with a downsized version of their Zenmuse stabilised gimbal. DJI have specifically designed the gimbal for the Hero3 as it locks in like a GoPro backpack. As well as smooth, jello free shots, you now get the ability to tilt the camera in the vertical axis from the remote. If you don't mind holding the Phantom and looking like a child playing with a Corgi copter, you can even use it as a budget Movi. It is not necessary to make wumpa wumpa wumpa noises as you move it.
Blackmagic hit us with, not one, but two new cameras at NAB2013. Many would have chosen the 4K for $4K Production Camera as the star. Not only is it stealing RED's abandoned tagline but it also brings the much requested S35 chip too. If I didn't already have an FS700 I may well have made this number 1. However, I do, so my 4K aspirations are headed in that direction.
"Properly small" I call that
The Pocket Cinema Camera was the more surprising camera. If you read my earlier posts you will know that I have an Micro Four Thirds system built round the Olympus OM-D EM-5. I love shooting stills on the Oly, but a GH3 stomps all over it for video. I had considered getting a GH body, but it didn't really fit in with my nimbleness ethic. I could have traded in the EM-5 for a GH3, but it doesn't have the same appeal as a stills camera. So now in the Pocket we have a lightweight Olympus Pen sized body, supporting active MFT lenses and SD Cards with even better codecs and dynamic range than the GH3 offers. Its not perfect - its 3x (to FF) crop is great for using classic S16 lenses (if you own any) but not so good using MFT, especially at the wide end. It doesn't have the GH3's articulated screen, but it is usefully large and I am hopeful that, not being touch screen, it will be less mirror-like than its big brother's. We also have not seen any footage but chief tester John Brawley reckons its very close to the BMCC. It is still such a good companion for the EM5 that it has tempted me.
Buttons rather than a touchscreen
The original Cinema Camera has been the blot on Blackmagic's copy book in terms of delivery for well documented reasons. Blackmagic have given us new delights before managing to deliver on last years. Many folks are understandably hacked off about this. I have a pre-order deposit bet on them having learned from this. We shall see.
Last year, I went to NAB for the first time. After a couple of years of watching my social media contacts having a much better time than me I decided I would join them. It was a great trip and it was great to meet everyone. If there was a disappointment for me, it was that NAB2011 was more notable for the cameras that were not released than it was for those that were.
This year, I was not able to make the show so Murphy’s Law has kicked and we have loads of new large sensor cameras making their NAB debut. Many of these are not brand new at NAB but there is a distinct flavour to the latest announcements. There is no doubt that the early buzz was all around 4K. This prompted a veritable twitter frenzy about whether you needed 4K. I have covered this ground before in so I will move on to the cameras themselves.
First up is Canon. Despite recently having given us the C300 and the 5D Mk3, Canon still had some new toys to tempt us with.
The more expected of these two is the Canon 1DC as Canon teased it at the C300 launch. Unlike the C300 this is a proper convergence device. As a stills camera it has the same spec as the 1DX which means it is a full frame, professional grade DSLR. As a video camera it has some significant upgrades over the 1DX. The most significant and its ticket to the NAB in-crowd is a 4K capability. This is recorded to the CF card in good ole MJPEG at 24p. This is an odd choice and I am guessing that what we are really getting is an image sequence rather than a movie file. Its more like the stills shooting being sped up to 24fps rather than the movie resolution being doubled. It is also the first Canon DSLR with a clean full HD resolution video out (8bit 4:2:2). HD recording has the same codec options and speeds as the 1DX/5D3 but adds 1080p50/60. Canon has also added Canon Log Gamma. UK pricing is a slightly speculative £10,000 inc VAT which would make it twice the cost of the (now very delayed) 1DX. There is no doubt that it is the king of DSLR convergence as it out features everything in a DSLR shell. No lesser man than Shane Hurlbut did the demo shoot for NAB and the twitter consensus was it looked great on the big screen. Personally, I am just wondering who it is for. By 4K standards it is not particularly expensive but unless you need 4K you can have a couple of D4s or four D800s with only a small drop in feature set. More significantly, you can also have the much more shooter friendly C300. If you do want 4K, it is significant that the recording is onboard. With cameras like the FS700 we don’t know when 4K recording will come or how much it will be. The 1DC is 4K out of the box but you have just that one way of getting it. Its also worth noting that the eurotweeters were unhappy about the lack of 25p. You lose many of the current advantages of 4K if you can’t downscale to HD easily.
Canon’s second camera is a big brother for the C300 - the C500. Back on their shared birthday, the RED crowd mocked the C300 for being “only HD” and lacking RAW or high 1080p frame rates. The C500 is here to kick sand back in the face of RED for only twice as much money as the C300. OK, maybe that loses some of the impact. Since its launch, the C300 has built a enthusiastic following. Its picture quality and ease of use have given it a kind of baby Alexa reputation. The C500 takes the same sensor but significantly beefs up the picture processing to give 4K out and is the first implementation of Canons own RAW format. Speed has also been enhanced to up to 120fps. I know that Canon has been working with Codex on a recorder. Codex is the Rolls Royce option for external recorders (the worked with Arri too) with all that implies. This is the first major manufacturer to venture into RED Epic territory, although technically its probably more of a baby Sony F65. Its taken years for the industry to be get up to speed on RED’s RAW workflow. How will Canon fare?
RED haven’t produced a new camera for NAB, the Scarlet is making its NAB debut but the real news is about a new sensor called RED Dragon. This is the fulfillment of REDs main theme for NAB2011. Its not a new camera but a new sensor which is inline with RED’s commitment to modularity and upgradability. Resolution is up to an unprecedented 6K. This may seem excessive given the debate about 4K but logically some of the advantages 4K acquisition has for HD delivery pass on up the line once you hit 4K delivery. Of more immediate use is improved low light performance and dynamic range (without HDRX). The cost for an Epic is expected to be around £4000 which is not exactly cheap but is a lot less than, say, trading in your C300 to get a C500. Availability can be REDs achilles heel and the upgrade process won’t kick off till October. Scarlet owner have an upgrade path too but they will have to wait longer which will give them more time to save. Scarlet will be dearer because you effectively have to swap in Epic parts to get to Dragon. Note that this is not the long awaited Monstro chip. It is a touch bigger than the Epic but it is not yet full frame.
Sony’s only new large format camera is the FS700 I talked about recently. The F65 was at NAB2011 last year if only in concept form. Am I still enthusiastic about this camera now its in the context of all its piers? I think the answer to that is yes. It still represents what passes for value for money in the pro video market. The upgrades from the FS100 are worthwhile and, in the case of the high speed, innovative. It’s not upgradeable in the RED sense but the 4K 12bit RAW out shows some potential. I just can’t think of many projects you might want to shoot that you couldn’t with the FS700. I think Sony predicted the FS700 launch would get lost in the noise at NAB and launching before was a smart move.
Canon may have thought that launching 2 cameras would guarantee them the show buzz and for about 24 hours they were right. Then the Aliens landed!
Video processing specialist turned software guys Blackmagic Design lived up to their name and made Canon’s buzz disappear and reappear at their own stand. Blackmagic’s last trick was to make the cost of getting hold of the feature film class grading software Resolve they acquired first shrink from $100,000 first to $1000 and then disappear entirely. OK, that is a slight over-simplification but it shows they know have to think outside-the-box and drive value. Blackmagic debuted some Thunderbolt connected SSD recorders last year at an attractive price. This year they decided that as they do processing, recording and software all they really needed to do was find I nice sensor and they could make a camera - so they did. What they have come up with is the most blue sky thinking camera I have seen. Its a camera designed to be as filmic as possible. It is not a convergence device, its not going to replace your 5D in that regard. It has a Johnny Ive-like singularity of purpose. They knew their customers wanted a camera with excellent grading capability and wide dynamic range (13 stops). This meant shooting RAW. Rather than go proprietory as the majors have they used the open CinemaDNG format. It shoots at 2.5k and 12bit which gives scope for cropping but you can also shoot HD in ProRes (Apple) or DNxHD (Avid) formats. As befits the makers of Resolve, your Colourist will love you for shooting on this. To cope with all this data the camera has an integrated SSD slot. Again this is just a standard 2.5” SATA drive you can buy down at PC World. To get the data into your NLE or Resolve you can just pop the drive in an enclosure or use the integrated Thunderbolt port. This can also be used to connect your laptop to use the Ultrascope monitoring package that is bundled along with a full copy of Resolve (over £1000 value). For more traditional forms of monitoring and audio there is SDI out and 1/4 jacks. To top it off is a high res touch screen monitor with an iOS-like interface that should make the designers of the major’s menu interfaces hide in shame. So here we have a piece of gear with a hat full of ground-breaking tech and it costs £2300. No really, I meant to type that. OK then, don’t believe me - google it yourself. When everyone picked themselves off the floor and hit the twitters there was a huge buzz. This was shortly followed by the kill joys and fanboys chiming in.
So where do I stand. A week ago I was happy to imagine buying an FS700 (currently my camera budget is imaginary). Now, here is a camera which I can buy three of for the same number of (imaginary) pounds stirling. As I said earlier, the Blackmagic is a very focused device which will get you as close to film as you can for £2k. The sensor is slightly less than MFT size, close to Super 16mm film. This means a 2x crop. As it uses EF or ZF 35mm lenses this means a struggle to find good wide angles and a increased depth of field. Its also no speed merchant, frame rates span 24 to 30fps. Its OK in low light but not exceptional. It has a native ISO of 800 but early indications are it goes up to 1600ASA. It does not take stills. In fact it is almost the polar opposite of my 5D Mk II. The FS700 is much more of a workhorse. If you are not shooting a movie the AVCHD codec is perfectly adequate. You have all the niceties of built in ND, XLR, decent AF, peaking, zebras etc and a long shooting time. If you want to pimp up the image by recording externally (8bit 4:2:2) you can, but bear in thats going to cost you about a third of the cost of the Blackmagic on top of the base price. Expect much more than that to enable that 4K RAW option. I expect a new breed of 4K recorder to appear but the current ones cost more than the Blackmagic on their own. So, in summary, if you are working professionally on a mix of jobs and you want something that blends Sony EX3 convenience and versatility with a DSLR aesthetic then the FS700 still has the best feature set for the money. If you were waiting for REDs 3k for 3k Scarlet and feel disenfranchised by how things turned out then Blackmagic has delivered it for you. Just don’t sell that 5D MkII you bought while you waited just yet because it fills in a few gaps in the feature set. If you just want carry round one device to shoot stills or video to a high level of quality then a DSLR like the D800 or a compact interchangeable like the GH2 or NEX7 would be a better bet.
I think the Blackmagic is the first camera worthy of the woefully overused term “game changer” since the Canon and Vincent LaForet shocked us with Reverie. You can pick holes in its feature set but the real revolution is that Blackmagic set out to design a set of features in and the costs out. They have not skimped on the technology, much of it is a step forward at any price. Then they have decided on a price that presumably makes them some money. They have not chosen to position it in a range or in a market and it came out at 2 grand. If your allegiance is to another brand, how will it make you feel the next time you cough up 3 grand for a piece of firmware or £15 per Gb for proprietary media.
