Mitch Gross joins Convergent Design

During IBC, I was told 2 weeks for US market and 6 weeks for the rest of the world.

So it should be early october for US and early november for the rest of the world.

Cheers.
 
S.Blanchardon said:
It would probably be around early-mid october I think.
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I probably shouldn't speak for Dan, but I asked him about it at the show and I believe he said end of October. Also I stopped by the booth and the 7Q seems quite amazing as far as features for the price, but the FS700 component was very unfinished. I'd say the 7Q is probably a no-brainer purchase already (the 4camera live monitoring/switching and 2 camera monitoring+wfm/scope features alone are unheard of). It seems likely that it will become an industry standard device.

There are a couple caveats, from what I saw, though. The FS700 support seemed very rough even in the latest firmware, only 2k DNG support so far, 4k in the engineering test build, but the debayer looked like the worst possible nearest neighbor debayer, which I'm sure they will improve, but it leaves questions about whether they will be able to achieve high quality debayers for 4K or even HD 60p YUV recordings from the 4k RAW stream, and whether it will be possible to monitor 2K up to 240fps with a high quality debayer. Also there was a question of whether it would be possible to shoot different formats on the same SSD, which means if you want to switch from 4k 60p YUV to 2k RAW for 240fps you may have to have two separate SSDs that are only used for 2k RAW DNG recordings. Hopefully they will be able to implement at least one common format for all shooting modes to avoid this issue so you can shoot both 4k and 2k in the same format, for example supporting Prores 2k 240fps or 4k RAW DNG (prores is preferable since 500-800MBps recording is pretty useless to most people).

The only other issue I saw was that there is very little in the way of calibration options for use of the device as a monitor. There were 3 brightness modes which are actually three different OLED calibrated curves since changing brightness of OLEDs is not as simple as dimming the backlight like in an LCD. Besides that there is only brightness (black point) and contrast (white point). Hopefully they will find a way to support other calibration functions such as color/phase or perhaps just support using calibration devices. I noticed Atomos's Samurai blade supports hooking the unit up to a computer with a standard calibration probe attached and using their software to probe and save calibrations on the device, so an option like that or at least just supporting the standard bright/contrast/phase/color options would be important for anyone using the device as a monitor. SmallHD seems to be using the same OLED panel in their DP7OLED which is the same price as the 7Q but with only 1 input and only 720p proxy recording, but they are marketing the monitor as their first real high quality wide gamut field monitor without any of their usual gamma/dithering/noise issues, so it would be amazing to have that kind of monitor functionality in the 7Q as well. It was a bit hard to judge at the show how good the 7Q will be for judging color/exposure, but with the right software it could probably be better than any IPS display, so hopefully CD takes advantage of that.
 
Congrats to Mitch and Convergent Design. Mitch has always impressed me with his forum/CML/online presence. He's informative, has a helpful attitude, and the incredible tools and resources he's brought to our attention/delivered has been tremendous. If anyone needed a forward thinking, tech savvy, and knowledgeable guy, I can't think of anyone better than Mitch.

Best of luck!
 
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