HPX500 review

[smelni]

Here is a review I wrote about the HPX500 - I plan some followup articles including rez, vectorscope and waveform tests. Enjoy

http://www.slmproduction.com/mainsite/journals/reviews/

[dregenthal]

Great stuff--thank you for taking the time to post it.

[dolby]

Great write up!

You have found most all of the pro's and con's of this camera. The breathing of the Fujinon lens to be my biggest complaint.
In it's default scene files, there seems to a bit of a shift to green which is resolved a bit with bumping up the chroma phase.

How exactly did you do your lens shading? When I did mine, the white card had to be under exposed a bit to allow for the shading wizard to complete.

dolby

[eclaire]

Thanks for the review, smelni.:)

[smelni]

dolly - for the shading that is where the manual is not very good at explaining.

The zebra part of the shading process is NOT for exposure - its only to see if the card is lit evenly - you need to be able to zebra the entire card at the same time. Then usually you need to stop down for a good exposure for the shading function

its poorly explained in the manual

[BarryV]

Thanks for the great review. I appreciate the details. I'm looking at gettting 4 HPX500's for use in my new (rebuilt) studio. I'm very impressed with all the reports I'm hearing about the image quality. There are a few things we're working out to fit them into a studio configuration, with alternative use in the field with a flypack.

Barry

[ROKOKO]

what does it mean for a lens to 'breathe'??? And why is it a bad thing?

[smelni]

breathing is when the image size changes as you focus. So if you set the zoom to 30mm and then pull the focus from one side to the other - you will see the image appear to "zoom" quite a bit - more apparant at wide angles. More expensive lenses use zoom compensation to cut down on this.

also - primes tend to breathe very little.

[Beat Takeshi]

its cool that they flip the image finally but on a camera that uses cine like lenses seems to be a waste because thats what we are looking for in an adapter.

[smelni]

if you want to use true 35mm cinema lenses you still need an adapter so the flip is useful - but as of now I havent been able to find a relay lens to allow the use of the M2 - if anyone has ideas for that I would love to hear them

[G.A. Kokes]

Thanks for the review. Very helpful and informative.

G.A.

[GaryinCalifornia]

There was a company called www.lensmount.com that was making a relay for the JVC...

Had an email about a month or so ago and they were behind still...