starcentral
Veteran
It was a delight tonight to unbox my new F55! I have to thank Colton O'Keefe from Vistek Toronto for everything he did for me!
I thought I would share some initial feedback and mild heart attacks I had along the way tonight as I got things up and running.
Preface: I decided to upgrade my F3 to the F55 and honestly I thought for the longest time I would go with the F5. Over time I got more attracted to 4k XAVC however and the thought that if 4k XAVC would be robust enough to handle grading and other post finagaling it would save me a lot of time, hassles and storage space over shooting 4k raw when it's not always needed. (ie. 512GB per 70 minutes of 4k raw). For feature film work (which I plan to do more of this year) I'd have no issues shooting RAW but for smaller low budget and faster turn around projects 4k 16-bit linear would be overkill. Obviously global shutter and extended color gamut on the F55 were also pretty cool features to have too. I was a bit concerned about the reduced ISO sensitivity but also know how clean Sony's sensors have been since the days of the VX2100.
The first couple hours with the new camera out of the box left me with these thoughts:
- How the @$^* do you work the menu? Oh you need to look in the viewfinder to see the menu.
- What is the burning smell? (The F55 breaking itself in!)
- Why won't the light for the SXS card come on?
The camera has an absolutely great finish and is very metal-like, not plasticy like the F3. The bottom of the camera even has tiny rubberized pads for setting down gently on a table. I really like the top handle and it has 9 mounting holes which can be useful for mounting a variety of accessories. The OLED VF is something I'm personally going to have to get use to. I shot off small LCD's and monitors primarily and got real use to it. I feel the OLED VF sticks out oddly like some kind of ill growth but I know in time I will learn to appreciate it and eventually get use to it.
When I first turned the camera on I didn't even think to look in the VF for the menu, but once I figured that out it wasn't hard to navigate it and look for burried treasures. My camera shipped with version 1.01 firmware so one of the first things I worked on was updating it to v1.03 which was pertty easy and took under 5 minutes. After about an hour the base of the camera got warm and I noticed the fan was audible within about 14-16" of the camera. I put a 32GB SXS-1 card in slot A and the camera never recognized it until I formatted it. (mild heart attack). I put the camera in 4096x2160 23.98fps mode and the time remaining displayed 16 minutes. I recorded to it (no lens installed) and it worked no problem even though the camera warned that the media was not proper for the camera. The fan got a louder when recording but there is an option under SYSTEM to turn it OFF while recording.
Back to buried treasures and a couple cool things I saw in the menu: MPEG2 proxy function (F55 only) will record MPEG 1920x1080 to the same card while recording XAVC 4096x2160. There is also a BASE SETTING which can be changed from YPbPr to RGB - but I have no idea what this does. There is also a NORMAL or S-GAMUT setting under COLOR SPACE.
The F55 body is small next to the F3 but once you throw on the OLED VF and a decent v-mount battery you can really see the F55 doesn't seem that small anymore. The F55 with OLED VF, PL mount and 96wh v-mount battery weighs on at approx 10lbs while the F3 with PL mount, BP-U60 and also no lens weights around 7lbs.
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