powerup-sync workaround would still be useful if it works on the Pocket

These babies have LANC, so, I would hope that a LANC start / packet timing analyzer (like the LANC Shepherd) would be as effective - or better - than power-sync. That said, I can find no evidence that anyone has tried on any Blackmagic camera.

There will be one problem w/ using Panasonic and Olympus MFT lenses on the Pocket. Practically all of them (all zooms, all lenses below 45mm) have major barrel distortions that only get corrected in software. I.e. camera firmware or raw converters photoshop the optical flaws of the lens away. This works well enough on multi-megapixel images. But with the sensor of the Pocket being only 1080p, there will be no spare pixels for keeping these software corrections invisible. The image has to degrade/suffer partial pixellation.

And: Can the camera firmware apply these lens corrections at all, on the fly, when recording ProRes? Would the camera controller chip even have the required horsepower for this?

With lenses like Panasonic 14mm/2.5, the 20mm/1.7, the 14-40mm and the 14-140mm, distortions of the unprocessed images are very pronounced, or in plain English: really ugly. They're bad enough to render these lenses unusable on the Pocket unless the camera sensor actually has more native pixels than 1920x1080 for correction in firmware or in post.

@KeithLommel: I've simulated the result you would get with 14mm/2.5 (the lens which BlackMagic used to advertise the camera) by taking a raw 16:9 photograph with the lens on a GH2, switching off all geometry corrections in the raw converter and cropping into the medium 65.6% of the image to obtain the same field of view as with the BM Pocket camera. It's quite heavily distorted for a normal focal length on the BM Pocket, and would probably be even better visible if I had shot people.

This is how the 14mm/2.5 would look on the BM Pocket without geometry correction:

This is is how it should look if there was some clean way of applying the geometry corrections:

@gl: For serious work with the Pocket, I think we'll have to use manual lenses like Voigtlanders, and adapted Super 16mm glass. The electronic MFT lens option smells more like a marketing gimmick.

I believe the BM Pocket Cam will be highly successful and will cause lens makers to look to provide wide angle lenses for this camera. We've seen already how much the Niche Market Producers have responded with new products for m4/3. It seems to me that as soon as we start voicing our needs companies will start to address that need just based on the success of products they've already made for the m4/3 mount. I predict we won't be waiting too long for products to come along for the wide end on the BM Pocket Cam.

Guys, lenses already exist, and they're not that expensive.

http://www.1stvision.com/lens/kowa/LM8HC.html

http://www.1stvision.com/lens/kowa/LM6HC.html

and here:

http://www.kowa-usa.com/kowanewweb/lenses/fa8.html

My understanding is that the Kowa lenses do not fit c-mount adapters for Micro Four Thirds, at least not unless one modifies their mount.

@futur2, I found this.

@Tron, good user-name :).

@Ralph_B, those lenses are apparently designed for IR/near-IR capture. Does that have any impact on visible-light quality, eg. aberration & flaring?

Manufacturers like Samyang, SLR Magic and Voightlander would only have to make Perhaps a 5mm, 7mm and 9mm, I guess since they already have Rectilinear lenses from 12mm and 14mm, I don't really know what the best wide end sizes should be but you get the idea. Manufacturers would only need to go a bit wider than their widest lenses in their sets.

Having a flashback to the several years spent on a super16 crew filming Peak Practice ;p

Any footage somewhere?