FS7: FS7 lets you change ISO without realizing it

B

binba

Active member
I have the fortune of helping prep and optimize a newly-bought FS7 for a production company. I may compile my findings to an article or blog post later, but right now there is one pressing and disturbing issue that I haven't seen any discussions about.

If you assign any of the dials to ISO, I realized that the image brightness changes without any feedback to the user. E.g. your ISO is set to 2000 and you go through 12 clicks of the handgrip dial before it goes down to the next value. But those clicks change the ISO!

After much digging, page 38 in the manual mentions this "fine ISO adjustment" "feature". The only ways to disable or cancel it are to flick the L/M/H button to another position, turn on (and off) AGC, or not assign ISO to the dials.

This seems not only unneeded, but rather disturbing for me. You're supposed to be able to know and quantify anything your camera is doing for brightness - f-stop, frame rate, shutter, ISO. My proposed fix would be:
a. Add a menu option to disable that feature altogether and stick with the standard ISO increments.
b. Report the correct ISO. If I'm at ISO 1860 or something I want to know it.

As far as I know this issue doesn't exist in CineEI mode.

I know that I may get better response in the Sony forums where Alister Chapman and co reside, but this is my home forum so I start here. :-)
 
binba said:
I have the fortune of helping prep and optimize a newly-bought FS7 for a production company. I may compile my findings to an article or blog post later, but right now there is one pressing and disturbing issue that I haven't seen any discussions about.

If you assign any of the dials to ISO, I realized that the image brightness changes without any feedback to the user. E.g. your ISO is set to 2000 and you go through 12 clicks of the handgrip dial before it goes down to the next value. But those clicks change the ISO!

After much digging, page 38 in the manual mentions this "fine ISO adjustment" "feature". The only ways to disable or cancel it are to flick the L/M/H button to another position, turn on (and off) AGC, or not assign ISO to the dials.

This seems not only unneeded, but rather disturbing for me. You're supposed to be able to know and quantify anything your camera is doing for brightness - f-stop, frame rate, shutter, ISO. My proposed fix would be:
a. Add a menu option to disable that feature altogether and stick with the standard ISO increments.
b. Report the correct ISO. If I'm at ISO 1860 or something I want to know it.

As far as I know this issue doesn't exist in CineEI mode.

I know that I may get better response in the Sony forums where Alister Chapman and co reside, but this is my home forum so I start here. :-)
Click to expand...

Wait, so in another word: If your ISO is set to 2000, and you turn a dial that is assigned to ISO, you could theoretically change your ISO (to use your example, to 1860) but the screen will still say "ISO 2000"?
 
That's exactly what I'm saying. I'd be happy to find that I'm wrong. I foolishly only checked this visually and not with a waveform monitor, which would make it very clear. There are also plenty of small issues or quirks with the FS7 that are known by now, and I haven't seen anything about this. I'll report back once I find out more.
 
As far as I understand, if you are in CineEI you're recording at ISO 2000. The only way off of this would be to enable the MLUT for your recording channel (internal or via SDI/HDMI). As a result, I wouldn't expect this to be an issue in CineEI mode.

Haven't tested much outside of CineEI, but will over the next few weeks. Thanks for the heads up!
 
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