AC90: Ac90 vs hmc150 low light?

F

firehawk

Veteran
The 150 is more light sensitive to begin with but the 90 has super clean gain.
So in the end, which one is better for shooting dark weddings?
And how about shooting receptions in the dark with crazy colorful flashing DJ lighting and such?
Can the 3mos ac90 handle that?

Thinking about getting one for an additional camera for multicam stuff and also handheld extra stuff due to price and excellent OIS. Concerned about above lighting situations and rolling shutter.
 
One thing you may want to consider when shooting a wedding with flashing lights and flash photography is that with any CMOS camera including the ac90, you may get some flash banding. Since the HMC has CCD chips, you won't have this issue. But I don't think this problem is as noticable as people make it out to be. Assuming you already have the HMC150, if you get the ac90 and use it as a B cam, then it should be a perfect set up. For the price, the ac90 is an overwhelmingly excellent value! As far as lowlight goes compared to the HMC, since the gain on the ac90 is so clean, I think it might actually be on par with the HMC150.
 
Pairing the 90 with a nice low noise/low light scene file configuration makes a big difference as well. Barry's AC90 book has some excellent file recommendations that might also be helpful.
 
That test shows a fairly dramatic diff in favor of the HMC150.If you already have a 150, then why not just pick up another one, if they are to be cut together. It will have better low light, plus it would be no problem cutting from cam to cam. The 90 is probably more like the 130/160 series in color rendition. Ain't quite the same as the HMC150. I have 2 HMC150's I shoot with a AC160. It can be a lot of work matching them up at times.
 
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thanks you everyone for the advice.

Last weekend we shot a wedding with 2 hmc150s and an ac90 so I was able to compare them back to back.

It seems that during the dark reception with DJ lighting and on camera lighting that the cameras were close.
We used HD norm scene files. The clean gain of the ac90 is impressive. Without the on camera lights I'd say the 150s have an advantage as the 90 tended to get muddy.
We limited the gain on the 150s to 6db and sometimes 12db when needed but with the camera lights on I frequently ran no gain.

Makes me wonder what panasonic could do if they mixed the backlit super gain tech of the 90 with larger chips. (I wish CCD) :)

We shot 1080 on everything and the 90 does look
a little sharper when the light is decent but not dramatically.

As a test I also used our new Sony nex ea50u with the kit lens and limited it to 24db gain. It faired pretty well too.
 
The 150's kind of soft at 1080 - it's uprezzing a bit, not a true 1080 chip. The 130's a sweet change.

Don't sweat the flash banding. Just save a clip of a white TIFF that's about 5 frames - fade in for 1, 1 or 2 full opacity, fade out for 2 or 3, and just drop it over every camera flash. Since you can't 'hide" the flashes, make 'em a little more hollywood. Even just 1 full frame will give you a CCD-look flash.
 
Thanks, Michael.
Yeah I sometimes do your flash band hide trick because I don't like seeing flash banding from our MOS cameras, but since a lot of the footage is CCD derived I try not to worry about it and let it all go. Seems clients don't notice or maybe just don't understand what is happening. That's good. :)
I'm still a CCD fan
 
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