Some of these early criticisms sound a lot like the ones said about the original BMPCC. Hopefully the P4k will transcend its shortcomings, just like its ancestor, and be viewed mostly as a small camera with big image quality. But I must admit the criticisms got me thinking about cancelling my pre-order. Time to flip a coin.

This weekend I was able to get out and actually try shooting with the thing a bit rather than just testing it in the house. I busted out the Nikon 500mm mirror lens for shooting the mun:

And also managed to catch a barge traveling down the Illinois river at the waterfront. Unfortunately I didn't have a tripod with me so the footage ended up a bit shaky. I think it still looks pretty nice as slow mo from 4K60. I am happy with the image as an upgrade over my G85 at least. I do not know if this is vastly different from what you would get on a GH5/GH5s in V-Log, but the colors it brings out of everything remind me of my BMPCC.

Any news on when these will be in the shops? Seems to be all coming soon in the UK.

Alessio Avezzano

Camera settings:

Lossless RAW 4K DCI 25fps Samsung T5 SSD through USB-C Tripod Metabones EF to MFT Speedbooster Ultra with Sigma 18-35 and Canon 50mm F1.2 Lumix 100-300mm

Graded in Davinci Resolve 15.

Another of our interviews

@rockroadpix

No offense to anyone's work posted here, but I've yet to see something that blows me away

Can just get used NX500 or such, and spend all the rest to go and shoot something that blows others away.

Good idea.

@alcomposer The Z-Cam E2 is also a good option for high-quality recording if you have a bunch of good m43 lenses. It's not as cheap as the black magic, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I like it and its image, given how much I disliked the E1.

The E2 doesn't support CinemaDNG, but as soon as they are allowed to release the firmware for it, it can record ProRes 422 and ProRes HQ as well as the existing high-bitrate h.265 output. That's good enough for the vast majority of people out there. It also supports recording to a USB-C drive, but that still feels suboptimal to me vs just buying a few C.Fast cards.

The BMPCC 4K, GH5s, and E2 all use pretty much the same sensor, but with different dual native ISO setups. The E2 is definitely not a low light champion (dual native at 160 and 800 IIRC). They also seem to do less noise reduction in-camera than some other vendors. That can be a good thing (people look less like plastic), but can also be a bad thing (hope you like denoising in post unless you're intentionally going for a grainy look).

The Z-Cam folks have mentioned NDI in the past so I think that might be how they are syncing multiple cameras (or planning to sync them, support for that is still not ready IIRC).

The Z-Cam folks explained the WDR mode at some point. From what I remember, it isn't exactly dual exposures, but can still show some artifacting with fast movement. From the testing I've done, it works great and none of the stuff that I've shot with it that had motion in it looked weird.

Wow - this guy does not seem to know that the native ISO switches at 1250 and the jump in sensor signal gain explains the over exposure at ISO 1600. If he would have turned on zebras, it should have been obvious as the zebras show the peaking of the sensor output rather that the ISA calculated display output. At this point Prores has more dynamic range than RAW (under normal shooting conditions) as it is using the new BRAW demosaic filter. Once BRAW is available, we will have best of bit depth and dynamic range (it about a half a stop better as compared to RAW - every little bit helps).