Pawel, I agree with this completely. While all cameras are not equal that does not mean that perfect cameras exist. I’m not sure how you’d even define that. Alfonso’s tests are very thorough, and while most people do not seem to know how to do this kind of thing I’m glad there are people out there who do.

At the same time, there are a lot of people out there who think they can do such things and can’t, and that can be a bit damaging.

One should always look at everything a manufacturer says as potential marketing, and be prepared to test for yourself. You will spend a lot of time designing tests, interpreting them, and redoing them because you found things you didn’t expect. And you should also learn how to put them into context. For example, if a camera manufacturer says their camera has 16 stops of dynamic range, are those bottom few stops tones without detail or can you make something out in the noise? And how important is that to you?

Cameras, lenses, monitoring systems, etc. are all incredibly complex and they all interact. Don’t be surprised if you test something and find that your conclusion only holds up until you learn more, at which point you discover you were misinterpreting the results due to something you didn’t recognize or understand at the time. There’s no good place to learn everything that you have to know to evaluate this stuff. You’ll find yourself falling into a pit of knowledge that is both perpetual and deep.

-Art

_______________________________________________________​ Art   Adams Cinema Lens Specialist ​ ARRI Inc. 3700 Vanowen Street Burbank ,  CA   91505 www.arri.com  818-841-7070 x4212   aadams@... Get all the latest information from www.arri.com, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. ​ ​ This message is confidential. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. If you have received it by mistake, please let us know by e-mail reply and delete it from your system; you may not copy this message or disclose its contents to anyone. Please send us by fax any message containing deadlines as incoming e-mails are not screened for response deadlines. The integrity and security of this message cannot be guaranteed on the Internet.

Art Adams wrote: “There have been a lot of cameras sold with the promise of being as good as more expensive cameras for lower cost. I have yet to find one that I personally found to be as good as the more expensive option in one way or another. It still takes money and knowhow to tame physics.”

I tend to be with Art on this one. More often than not you get what you pay for. And, it is when you push the camera “out of the comfort zone”, the limitations become much more apparent.

What doesn’t help make informed camera choices is wide-spread misinformation and claims made by some manufacturers. This is why independent tests, like the one performed by Alfonso, are so valuable. (and, to be clear, I’m not saying that Sony is making misleading claims, they are in good books most of the time).

Through my own testing I found that most digital cinema cameras have very similar dynamic range (within a stop) despite vastly different claimed performance on paper. But, even though the actual dynamic range may be similar, there are other, more critical and more clearly discernible differences: like low light performance, noise, colour accuracy and range, contrast (MTF) and artefacts (compression and aliasing). In fact, some really striking differences and relatively easy to test side-by-side or, like Alfonso did, by meticulously measuring those properties in a consistent and repeatable manner.

This message is confidential. It may also be privileged or otherwise protected by work product immunity or other legal rules. If you have received it by mistake, please let us know by e-mail reply and delete it from your system; you may not copy this message or disclose its contents to anyone. Please send us by fax any message containing deadlines as incoming e-mails are not screened for response deadlines. The integrity and security of this message cannot be guaranteed on the Internet.

Art Adams wrote: “There have been a lot of cameras sold with the promise of being as good as more expensive cameras for lower cost. I have yet to find one that I personally found to be as good as the more expensive option in one way or another. It still takes money and knowhow to tame physics.”

I tend to be with Art on this one. More often than not you get what you pay for. And, it is when you push the camera “out of the comfort zone”, the limitations become much more apparent.

What doesn’t help make informed camera choices is wide-spread misinformation and claims made by some manufacturers. This is why independent tests, like the one performed by Alfonso, are so valuable. (and, to be clear, I’m not saying that Sony is making misleading claims, they are in good books most of the time).

Through my own testing I found that most digital cinema cameras have very similar dynamic range (within a stop) despite vastly different claimed performance on paper. But, even though the actual dynamic range may be similar, there are other, more critical and more clearly discernible differences: like low light performance, noise, colour accuracy and range, contrast (MTF) and artefacts (compression and aliasing). In fact, some really striking differences and relatively easy to test side-by-side or, like Alfonso did, by meticulously measuring those properties in a consistent and repeatable manner.

The camera choice is all too often driven by ego and politics, rather than camera capabilities.

This can be true. I once had to shoot a marketing product roll-out where the client mandated we shoot in 8K for 1080p release… because. There was no reason for it other than it was cool, and 8K was 4.2x greater than 1.9K.

But this is not always the case, or even mostly the case. I don’t know of any situations where someone chose to shoot with a cheaper camera because they liked the quality more than the more expensive camera.

There have been a lot of cameras sold with the promise of being as good as more expensive cameras for lower cost. I have yet to find one that I personally found to be as good as the more expensive option in one way or another. It still takes money and knowhow to tame physics.