Sony A6300

Panasonic GH5 leak: will have full size HDMI! (also, a new XLR audio extension, & low light improvement over the GH4)

Posted on by David Peterson

Looks like the bastard awful days of micro HDMI might be over? I’ve heard from a Panasonic GH5 tester that it will have *full size* HDMI! (am very happy to hear that!) One stop better as well, and IBIS too.

 

In other news, we can see this on top of the GH5 body at Photokina:

panasonic_gh5_hands_on_photokina

 

panasonic-gh5-xlr-audio-addition

 

panasonic-gh5-xlr-audio-addition-close-up

 

Very pleased to see, as I have many times suggested, that Panasonic should go with a Sony XLR-K2M audio addition instead of doing another YAGH again!

 

While it is exciting reading about all the new features the Panasonic GH5 will bring (such as 4K 60fps or 4K 30fps 10bit 422), it is somewhat  depressing reading on other places on the internet how quick the anti-MFT trolls are out, and of course their first red herring is “but it sucks at low light”.

This low light argument reminds me of the megapixel race, sure there was big benefits from going from 2 megapixels to 5 megapixels, then to 12 megapixels, but then at around 16 megapixels to 24 megapixels range… the arguments got a lot weaker. And for 99.9% of users we don’t need 50 megapixels!

Ditto low light, not being constrained by 50 ISO film is AWESOME, then getting to 200 ISO… great! And now we can do workable 800 and 1600 and even 3200 ISO!

 

 

The Panasonic GX85 is as good in lowlight as the new Canon 5Dmk4 (but the GX85 is a fraction of the cost! & has better detail):

 

Let’s assume GH5 carries on and is one stop better even than that? How is that not a very workable ability to handle?

Do we NEED to have clean 100,00 ISO?? Nah, that is over the top in nearly all cases. Like having a 100 megapixel camera (for some people they’ll *need* that, but for most of us it is serious overkill and a bad compromise to purchase a 100 megapixel camera).

Plus remember there is the Metabones Speed Booster XL that gives Micro Four Thirds an extra 1.3 stop gain with the lens you’re using, nothing else has that aside from MFT. And Micro Four Thirds mount has access to a uniquely wide range of very fast lenses (I love my SLR Magic 25mm T0.95!).

I’d rather pass on the unnecessary over the top extreme high ISO capabilities and have instead the well polished and extensive range of features that the GH5 will have (just like Panasonic had each time with the GH1/GH2/GH3/GH4, relative to the other cameras of their time). So while yes I agree, better lowlight would be nice, let’s keep some perspective about this (when do you ever hear anyone complaining about lowlight from a new Canon APS-C release?!).

 

Lens Options for 360 Degree Virtual Reality Camera Rigs? And other thoughts on cameras.

Posted on by David Peterson

Sony 360 Degree Virtual Reality Camera Rig

I’m a long way from upgrading my multiple (from six to a dozen cameras at once!) action cameras 360 Degree Virtual Reality Rig (thus I don’t need to worry about interchangeable lens options on this rig), but when I do I am thinking to go with Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera. Even though high resolution is very important for 360VR.

If you do go with 4K cameras then the Panasonic GH4 is a very popular 4K option (such as these guys using GH4 cameras for 360VR: http://shinichi-works.info/project_gh4.html). Also there is the Sony a7R mk2 / a7S mk2 options (but costs skyrocket, after all you’re not buying just one camera but many!) or Sony A6300 (which has overheating issues, an especially troubling issue if you have six of these operating all cramped up close together to each other! As then they’ll overheat even faster). Also Blackmagic Design has their Micro Studio Camera, but that requires an external 4K recorder, which introduces significant size/power/cost issues. Samsung NX1 is also very much worth a look (& NX500, but in 4K it has a harsh crop factor), but it is a dying system and ever since the NX1 hack came out the secondhand prices of the NX1 have been staying high.

Thus in the end I’d prefer the BlackMagic Micro Cinema Camera (BMMCC), because I’d prefer the dynamic range, bit depth, and color space of the BMMCC. And while the Panasonic GH4 / G7 does a max of 30p @ 4K, you are gaining resolution but giving up frame rate and I’d rather keep it at 60fps (as arguably high frame rates are nearly just as important for Virtual Reality as resolution is. Least you give the viewer motion sickness. And you can get higher resolution by using more cameras!). Presumably the GH5 will give 4K 60fps, but that will probably cost US$2K or more per camera (and you need many multiple ones of them of course for complete 360 degree coverage!), and it hasn’t even been announced yet so who knows.

Though given the likely length of time until I’ll be upgrading, we’ll surely see a Panasonic G7 sale by then which might make that option too cheap to resist vs going with BlackMagic Micro Cinema Cameras.

Anyway, I have still been putting a lot of thought & research this year into the various options for the future, and I decided I’d at last put the metaphorical pen to paper and share a few of my thoughts on this particular aspect of lens choices. We can broadly speaking split it into three groups:

  • a) native mount (i.e. MFT lens, or E mount lenses if a person was using A6300/A7 series instead), but then this can severely limit a person a couple of years down the track if they change bodies. It would be a lot smoother / cheaper if only the bodies need to be swapped out and not lenses as well. I’d like to have some degree of versatility with this rig.
  • b) full frame UWA lenses (in Nikon F mount of course, as I’ve explained in other blog posts), but not an option as you can’t then go truly wide if using them on APS-C or smaller bodies. And A7r mk2 / A7s mk2 are the only truly interesting options to consider here for use that are full frame. Maybe with the one exception of the Rokinon 14mm f2.8 lens, which does almost hit the sweet spot for price & focal length even when used on APS-C. Or the Rokinon 12mm F2.8, but then you have to deal with fisheye distortion.
  • c) APS-C UWA lens, this appears to hit the sweet spot of maximum versatility plus maximum FoV.

 

    APS-C lens options:
  • Sigma 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6, max FoV but I’d be concerned about the slow f-stop, as then you’d start to be losing one of the key gains of ditching GoPros with their poor lowlight ability.
  • Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 (or the newer Tokina 11-20mm f/2.8, but that costs more so no), this is the lens I own myself and is in my eyes the “best” UWA lens for normal filmmaking, but does that mean it is for 360VR too?? Hmm
  • Rokinon 10mm f/2.8, is lighter/cheaper/wider (all 3 keys points for a 360VR rig) than the Tokina but is a fixed focal length (probably not a disadvantage though at all! As you absolutely don’t want that focal length to change once you’ve set it, thus why people will tape down zoom lenses if using them on a 360VR rig). However the Rokinon 10mm f/2.8 isn’t cheaper than Tokina when you consider the older Tokina models can easily be picked up secondhand, but the Rokinon can’t be so easily found at all secondhand as it is a newer lens.
  • Rokinon 16mm f/2, the fastest option but by this point at 16mm it is only barely UWA at all.

Outside these options listed, I can’t think of any good UWA lenses, or am I missing something? Everything else that comes to mind seems that they’d all be a worse compromise somewhere in price/FoV/speed/etc than these four that I listed.

Keen to hear in the comments your views on my thought process and each of the options I reached at!