Rented the k20D- hmmm, I like!

Matthew Bennett

Matthew Bennett

Well-known member
I rented the k20D for the weekend -


HERE's SOME FOOTAGE that I liked: My first experiences were quite horrific, but then I shot some footage/frame bursts that I really liked. It's pretty passable!
h264 480p:

http://www.qmediasolutions.com/guest/CAMERA_TESTS/Bennett_k20D_test_h264_480p.mov





The camera gives you 1500x1000 sequential JPEGS at best quality, in a 115 frame burst of 21 fps.
So if you convert that to 24p, you get five seconds of slightly sped up 24p.

What you do is set to burst mode, depress shutter and then it films for five seconds. And THEN it takes a whopping, painful 20 SECONDS! to write all that buffered data to the card. There's no way around this, I'm using the fastest available sdhc card. The camera locks you out of everything while writing to the card.
The 4GB card only holds 4.5 mins at this data-rate.

I did a couple of tests yesterday and was expecting gloriously gorgeously downsampled JPEGS...(cause of that test we all saw..) and was surprised to see some weird chromatic red/green fringing issues, slight stair stepping on fine diagonals

But I went out again this morning with the 18-205 pentax lens I rented with the camera, shot some telephoto stuff in Chinatown in Toronto, took those JPEGS into AE and made a nice, graded, 720p pro-res, and ... It's actually looking pretty good now.

Hard to find all the weird artifacts I found yesterday... I don't know what I was doing differently yesterday.

Anyway, I wouldn't buy this camera, but its actually really nice to be in COMPLETE control of ISO, shutter and aperture during a DSLR movie capture! What a joy.
It's like having a five second shot preview edition of the second generation Nilkon or Canon.

I definitely recommend renting for a weekend if you're a DSLR-movie fanatic like me.

I will post some results...

Also the camera has pretty much the same jello as the D90 if you're moving about... so no love there...

Oh and also it does this weird thing on every other shot, which is to just randomly switch the white balance around...

ON TO THE PICS:

Here's one of the first shots I took:, this is a JPEG directly from the group of sequential JPEGS the burst mode generated: They are usually about 500KB to 580KB each in size.
You can imagine my horror when I cracked this open .... Now from further tests I realize its the result of the sharpening and contrast being cranked up, (I now use a soft portrait-y mode..)

K20D_CA_issues.JPG
 
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I was just now looking at the rendered 720p pro-res... I like A LOT!

I'd actually be nice to have this camera around all the time... but only until we get the 5d of course.

I'll post a small movie and a couple of full-res frames later..
 
Matthew Bennett said:
I'd actually be nice to have this camera around all the time... but only until we get the 5d of course.
Click to expand...

Do you really expect the 5d to be better? I doubt that. The frames of the Pentax actually ARE photos while the frames from the Canon ...

Have you seen the latest samples at http://www.dpreview.com/previews/canoneos5dmarkII/page15.asp ? Even 40 mbits/s h264 looks compressed to me. I mean look at the individual frames. Do they look like JPEGs from a DSLR or more like still frames from a tiny sensor point and shoot? Thats not stock footage to me.
 
Yeah, the k20D is like a Gig a minute, which is 16mb per second, correct? Sweet data rate.

Uurggh, those Canon 5d DPreview samples are terrible looking, yes. When I playback the 5d clips I get a weird 'negative color' frame in the middle of the video, too.. getting that?
But the biker clip really shows off how blazing fast the sensor is.. not much detectable skew there.
 
Matthew Bennett said:
Yeah, the k20D is like a Gig a minute, which is 16mb per second, correct? Sweet data rate.
Click to expand...

Yes the Pentax is 16 MB/s and the Canon only 40mbits/s / 8 = 5 MB/s.
Your first Pentax sample is indeed far from the great samples from the Japanese Vimeo user. But you said the next ones where better.
 
The video looks pretty awesome, Matt. The latitude is great. Did you CC it at all?
You're right about the jello thing...at the end there's a moving shot where you can see some bad rolling shutter. It's too bad about the 5 sec restriction though, because even though the pentax suffers from the same rolling shutter issues at least it allows you to get very decent quality HD, while the D90 sucks when viewed at 720p.
 
I can totally dig this!

It is very very good for test footage.

It can actually hold up as a short piece on it's own.


There was a little bit of tripod shake in two or so scenes but not too horrible.

Great composition!

The editing is simply superb.


I like the Lazy Sunday Nature thing to Working Monday and Friday Despair kind of vibe I got.


I also liked very much la grenouille musique! ;-)


You have a very good eye and this is fun and interesting to watch!


A++++++ Matthew!



P.S. The 21p to 24p works so very well. It gives it this whole lucid dreamy quality. I loved it.
 
not bad

not bad

Watched this upscaled to 1600px w, 3ft from the monitor, and it holds up amazingly well, unless the attractive compositions distracted me..
stepping, weird banding at 4:29, misc JPEG artifacts etc aside, if a $499 camera can do this today, just about everything should be digital in 18-24 months.

Matthew, if you kept the originals, it would be interesting to see a short comparison clip at native resolution, just to see how much detail is hiding there. And did you try the composite video out?
 
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xxxxx1 said:
Watched this upscaled to 1600px w, 3ft from the monitor, and it holds up amazingly well, unless the attractive compositions distracted me..
stepping, weird banding at 4:29, misc JPEG artifacts etc aside, if a $499 camera can do this today, just about everything should be digital in 18-24 months.

Matthew, if you kept the originals, it would be interesting to see a short comparison clip at native resolution, just to see how much detail is hiding there.
Click to expand...

yes you can push it quite a bit. I'll upload a native sequence of JPEGs later on.
 
A year on, and I honestly still think this very first camera takes the better footage over the GH1 and 5d ;)

Sure we're only limited to 5 second takes... but it's just an interesting limitation!
 
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