AF100A price reduction?

Actually the ML hack is giving 24 fps video for at least 4GB. That's neither here nor there, as I agree with Lpowell...the "post count" of all these cams is inflated by curiosity and questions...just as the original AF100 was. Incremental upgrades don't bring about heavy posts, because most of the questions have already been answered.
 
I was looking for a large sensor camera recently and I really wanted to buy a Panasonic.
I currently own 7 Panasonic cameras that were bought new (4 are for sale now), so I could be considered a semi loyal fan, though I also use other brands.
The reasons i wanted to stick with Panasonic included batteries, remotes, etc that I already own, easier to multi cam match and I like the Panasonic "look".

The only Panasonic offering in my price range was/is the af100a so I looked at it and read many reviews. I read things like "too little, too late?" and comments that it should be more like $2999.
Well I'm not saying I agree or disagree with that. I think it's a good camera and I'd still like to have one.
But I bought a Sony Nex EA50 because it offered more of the features I needed and was less expensive.

The Sony Fs100 seems to be a lot more popular than the af100a despite costing more and lacking ND, but like mentioned earlier, much of the talk has already happened concerning the af100 since the "a" is just an update. It does "seem" like there is little interest in the af100a but that may not be the case at all.

I expect Panasonic to come back swinging whenever they release another model. I hope they do because I still like Panasonic.
 
jdv said:
Perhaps even more relevant is this very forum. The Mark III hack, the Black Magic cameras, even the Bolex would be camera all have hundreds of posts. The AF100a has perhaps two dozen.
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And the thread " How do some people get to 5000+ posts?" has 7 pages, 64 posts and over 2000 views, and this is indicative of... what?

Capture.jpg

That people would rather find out how to accrue 5000 posts than acquire a camera with a great image and a rich set of features?
 
I bought a new, factory-sealed AF105A for under $3K which I found too good to pass up, even though prior to purchase I had read the negative press that follows the AF100. I really find the AF most capable in the industrial settings in which I normally shoot. I also have a Sony FS700 which does have more DR, but I still very much enjoy shooting with the AF. Frankly, I wish the FS had the same waveform monitor the AF has.
 
so if i may go off on a bit of a tangent... how do owners/users LIKE their af100/a's? i have been semi seriously looking at cams for purchase for while now. at first i was dead set on a small sensor cam because any paid work i did would likely be in areas that wouldnt need shallow dof, but i do like the shallow dof look the more i see it, even for said situations. HOWEVER, i think the full frame size is just too much for many situations. so the af100 is a "smaller large sensor," correct? not quite as ridiculous as the 5d or similar. what about lenses? there is no video style zoom lens for this cam, right ( i.e. uses a servo motor, is parfocal, etc.? ) so you have to use still or cine lenses?
 
Josh Bass said:
so if i may go off on a bit of a tangent... how do owners/users LIKE their af100/a's? i have been semi seriously looking at cams for purchase for while now. at first i was dead set on a small sensor cam because any paid work i did would likely be in areas that wouldnt need shallow dof, but i do like the shallow dof look the more i see it, even for said situations. HOWEVER, i think the full frame size is just too much for many situations. so the af100 is a "smaller large sensor," correct? not quite as ridiculous as the 5d or similar. what about lenses? there is no video style zoom lens for this cam, right ( i.e. uses a servo motor, is parfocal, etc.? ) so you have to use still or cine lenses?
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Elsewhere on this board there are some excellent answers to your question, which appears to be not so much AF100-related as it is "what should I buy?"-related.

When the AF100 was first announced, I thought for sure that as soon as my two AF100s showed up, I'd be putting my HMC-150 onto eBay and would never look back. I still have my HMC-150. There are so many ways that a small-sensor camera with a wide-ranging zoom makes so many things so much easier. Do I *love* the look of the HMC-150? No. Does it do a good enough job that I don't need to apologize for its image quality? Yes...barely.

The AF100 opens new territory creatively, but every new thing requires mastery, which is in short supply. I was hoping that the IQ of the AF100 would be hugely better than the HMC-150. It's marginally better--which means I can intercut more easily. I have many great lenses for the camera, but the fiddly controls don't give near the control over aperture that they should. The Voigtlanders (I have both the 17 f/0.95 and 25 f/0.95) are wonderful lenses and their manual apertures work perfectly well, but they don't zoom. The zooms I do have don't zoom very smoothly, so I never try to make zooming a part of the shot. Instead, it's just a convenience for not needing to change lenses. In my world, once a camera is set up, I cannot change lenses in the middle, which means the AF100 are pretty much stuck as static cameras, while the HMC-150 gets to roam the scene, zooming far and wide. In that scenario, the HMC-150 remains my A camera, and the AF100 are just a pair of B cameras.

The AF100 is extremely intolerant of less-than-perfect lighting. Overexpose caucasian fleshtones just a bit and things get yellow and nasty right quick. Underexpose and you will pay with an image that just looks bad. Get it right (which means both exposure and dynamic range of the scene), and the image is perfectly unremakable, meaning that it will *not* call attention to itself and say "HEY!! My 1080p24 image format can barely resolve 680 vertical lines!!!". How I wish it *would* call attention to itself and say "HEY!! Look at me resolving the full 1080p24 image at 4:2:2 going into your BMC Hyperdeck shuttle!!" It doesn't do that at all.

As Phillip Bloom writes in his blog about the Great Camera Conundrum, every camera is a compromise, and you will be happiest if you know what you actually need, not what you think you need.

I still have my AF100s because I realize that most of the time, it's me, not the camera to blame for bad exposure or poor image quality due to a wrong shot concept in the first place. I believe (but it would cost me $30K to find out) that the SONY F55 with S-LOG is more forgiving. I believe (but it would cost me $40K to find out) that the RED DRAGON with RED RAW is also more forgiving of exposure and IQ problems caused by less-than-perfect framing. But I'm not quite ready to part with that amount of money just to compensate for my fundamental laziness.

I believe (but it would cost me $15K to find out) that the C300 will give me the IQ I was hoping to get with the AF100. But I fear that the C300's 8-bit C-LOG imaging technology is going to put me right back into the soup exposure-wise, and that's my bigger problem. So the C300 doesn't seem to really seem "better" than the AF100, given my limitations.

Believe it or not, I think my next camera may well be a 2/3" HPX600 or thereabouts. This should give me all of the things I like about the HMC-150 without most of the things I don't like, plus many of the things I wanted with the AF100, with the sole exception of shallow DOF. Which, honestly, turned out not to be something that rocked my world. But I'm hesitant to move in that direction, because a properly outfitted camera (with a High-IQ wide-angle zoom lens) is still a $50K proposition.

So the AF100s continue to be part of my stable. Not really loved, but better than most everything else for doing the job they do within the limitations I have.
 
Michael. Excellent and well thought out comments. I was once told, buy a camera that meets 80% of your needs and rent for the other 20%. As I mentioned in a previous comment, both the AF100A and Canon C100 meet most of my current needs. I would like to "future proof" my next camera purchase as much as possible. But in this day of "Moore's Law", that may not be possible.
 
Thank you, Michael. I can relate very much to what you said, and you answered some of my thoughts about the af100.
 
Josh Bass said:
Yeah. That sounds very wrong for me. For a cam i need something more versatile than what you've described there.
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You probably want the AC160 (if you your NLE can tolerate AVCHD, which, unbelievably, is not yet all of them). Or the HPX250 (which, had it been available when I was buying the HMC150, would have probably made me a happy camper). Small chips + long zooms = lots of versatility.
 
Thanks. Trying not to derail the thread any further but I have looked into all of those and have my various reasons for passing, at least for now. It's cool. I shall remain camera-less for the time being.
 
Regarding the price and sales of the AF100A, the AF100A is an incremental upgrade that provides great value to a new owner but less to current AF100 owners. Maybe that is a factor in it's overall sales.

For instance, FA; we all figured it out with the AF100. I have a TVLogic monitor and use that when I need to zoom in to focus. The 1080 60fps isn't that important to me as the 60fps on a 24fps timeline works great for those types of shots. Lastly, I don't use an outboard recorder, and many who have had the AF100 for a while didn't see a big enough benefit to it. It would be fun to find out how that new output records but not worth an upgrade for me.

I agree with Barry that there isn't much like the AF100 out there so I'm sticking with it as it works well for the work I do. People who don't really care about cameras love the images and so interest keeps coming in my work. I bought a GH2 over a year ago and never really liked shooting video with it, especially when you're making pages and busting through a full day. The tools on the AF100 work to get good exposure and good reliable shots.

I keep an eye out... if I had 20k to plunk down, that Sony F5 looks like it's got a nice feature set but it's 5 times the price! I'd need a lot more work to justify that one. The s35 BMCC... if it ever comes out, doesn't interest me. The images look pretty good but at what cost!? No OLPF, and you can't even swap out the battery! The waveform monitor requires a laptop. I think they could do a lot better with that.

The Canons have nice images but it's still 8bit and they're pretty costly for what they are. The C100 is limited in framerates. I think that a lot of crossover guys benefit from the tight integration with Canon lenses, push to focus, etc. People who have them seem to like them a lot.

I have a friend that has the current BMCC and a hacked GH2 before that who LOVES them. He's a great guy and a great shooter, just likes to work differently. I'm spoiled by the tools the AF100 has and now I don't really see a good replacement for me, yet.
 
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hscully said:
I'm spoiled by the tools the AF100 has and now I don't really see a good replacement for me, yet.
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It works well. It can adjust to a lot of situations. It produces nice pictures. It does not cost an arm and a leg. Easy choice to just go on with it.
 
hscully said:
The s35 BMCC... if it ever comes out, doesn't interest me. The images look pretty good but at what cost!? No OLPF, and you can't even swap out the battery!
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I know this wasn't the point of your post at all, but the built in battery is such a plus. I wish every camera had a built in battery so that I could hot swap external batteries. There are plenty of external battery solutions for the BMCC from small and compact, to v-mount batteries that a good amount of shooters already have.
 
IMO, all cameras are designed for a certain price point/feature set for the marketplace. For a certain price you get a certain set of features. Many seem to want the feature set of higher priced cameras at a lower price point. Not gonna happen. So there is a lot of whining that will come to no good end. Is the AF-100A the best camera at its' price point? The marketplace will decide. AF-100s are selling for about 50% of original purchase price on ebay (about what I would expect in its' life cycle)

I've learned to work around the limitations of my AF-100 and it produces the images my client desire. I'll will probably be upgrading in about a year an half (when I reckon Panasonic may have a new replacement for the AF-100). Until then you will not find me complaining that the AF-100 does not do this or that. It is what it is and either you can live with it...or not. If you're not sure whether you want to own one or not rent one and see if it meets your needs. I'd be sure to use Barry Green's camera profiles to see exactly what the camera is capable of.
 
The AF100/AF100A is an incredible camera that can meet the needs of ANY director with talent, vision, & a great eye. Period. The rest is undercover competitors soliciting detractors and hyping up alternate brands or products. An old trick but I can see now how slick some of the DVX members THINK they are in their sheer contempt for this camera. Very interesting indeed. I wonder who they're really working for. Black Magic? Sony? Canon? Because you would definitely not have so much time to lay out the details of your discontent if you were a content producer. Or am I wrong? I can't recall a SINGLE post I have left in the forums while on a shoot...lol
 
dreallen said:
The AF100/AF100A is an incredible camera that can meet the needs of ANY director with talent, vision, & a great eye. Period. The rest is undercover competitors soliciting detractors and hyping up alternate brands or products. An old trick but I can see now how slick some of the DVX members THINK they are in their sheer contempt for this camera. Very interesting indeed. I wonder who they're really working for. Black Magic? Sony? Canon? Because you would definitely not have so much time to lay out the details of your discontent if you were a content producer. Or am I wrong? I can't recall a SINGLE post I have left in the forums while on a shoot...lol
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If you're referring to my post(s), I've produced/directed 4 full length features, dozens of shorts and commercials, as well as crewed on dozens of other productions. I've been working in this industry in some manner for over a quarter of a century. In other words, I've produced plenty of content.

My "diary" of the making of my 5th full length feature:
http://rabiddoll.com/node/2340/diary-from-an-indie-horror-film-no-7.html

Weekly blog about the production:
http://www.crowboy.com/evilgenius/forum/index.php?board=60.0

My last post was made at 6am... when I was finally done shooting for the night on my 5th feature (kinda hard to shoot a horror movie with a blazing dawn sun at your back...). I also generate much content for... movie related sites. As such, I write both quickly and, I think, logically.
http://1701news.com/node/266/star-trek-motion-picture-look-back.html
http://rabiddoll.com/node/2328/failed-dune-helped-birth-alien.html

Couple of things - never once in any post in this thread have I mentioned a thing about the quality or merit of the AF100, or A model. All comments remained about what the OP asked about - the price drop of the A model. Nor did I one time sing the praises of any other model, mention pricing of other brands, or in fact compare the Panny to any other camera in terms of capacity. Again, I only wrote about what I perceive as a lack of interest in this newest offering from Panny. I did not say it was fair - or smart - only that it seemed to be true.

I certainly am not a stealth writer for any camera company. Any allegation of such would be libelous. When I do review a camera (which is rare) I do it openly and honestly as is possible. I have never taken a cent for or received free gear from any company. Of course, I wasn't reviewing the AF100A, nor in fact mentioned an iota of what it can or can't do, much less a contemptuous word about the camera.
 
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