Mounted a couple of new toys on the mighty F3 this week, which can also play with any of the other Fs:
1. The new Tokina 11-20 f2.8 WA. I've rented the older 11-16 before for those tight quarters shoots, and liked it a lot, so I bought the newer 11-20 to get the same WA view, and a little longer set of legs. Lens is very sharp and showed almost no flaring while shooting in a master bath environment with many CFL light sources. Only two complaints, one minor, one more significant--82 mm glass for filters means a new set of gear to go with the lens. NBD. Bigger issue for me is that this 2.8 lens appears to ramp a bit on the long end. According to my in camera spot meter, about a 12% loss of light from wide to telephoto. This is signifcant enough that I can't really use a real time zoom (not that these cine-style lenses lend themselves to that), but we all have those directors that ask "can you also do a pull on that?" I'm curious to hear if this ramping is an unavoidable part of the new lens specs, or whether I've got an issue. My other 2.8 Nikon glass, by comparison, averages only about a 1% change over the zoom range.
2. Zacuto Gratical OLED EVF. My Alphatron is off to get its LCD screen replaced due to burn-ins, so I rented a Gratical to use. Wow. This is a great image for an EVF...bright, good color, extremely sharp! Very easy to focus, and a very wide range of diopter adjustment for those of us with old eyes--far superior to the diopter ring on the Alphatron, which just disintegrated into several pieces last week . Lots of nice tools inside...can lift the picture to the top of the screen and display histos, WF and vectorscope below.
As always, a few things that could be better: This puppy is expensive by today's standards. Of course, I also paid nearly $9K for a color viewfinder for the HDCam years ago, so everything is relative. The Gratical has a soft rubber magnetic diopter cap that flops back over the eyepiece as soon and you lift your face away from the EVF. It took about 5 minutes for this to become a real pain. The tiny OLED also means there is no flip-up of the eyepiece to monitor the image from outside close quarters. The Gratical runs off Canon 5D batteries, and you only get about 3 hours of burn time, even if you try to reliably turn it off between set ups. There is an optional D-tap cable, but it looks like kind of a clunky Canon battery simulator that clicks into the battery slot on the outside of the viewfinder, so not an elegant solution. Two other minor issues: there are four assignable buttons, with two-stage inputs. But if you, for instance, add zebras to the button, you lose the zebra function every time you turn the viewfinder off, so you have to hit the assignable button again on power up the zebras. I could never get it to repeat reliably, but on some power ups, the Gratical displayed nothing but a white screen on the OLED display. It seemed to happen most often when the Gratical was powered up before the camera, but not always. Each time it took a power cycle of the EVF (with the camera on) to restore full function.
Always fun to get some new gear and put it through its paces...
1. The new Tokina 11-20 f2.8 WA. I've rented the older 11-16 before for those tight quarters shoots, and liked it a lot, so I bought the newer 11-20 to get the same WA view, and a little longer set of legs. Lens is very sharp and showed almost no flaring while shooting in a master bath environment with many CFL light sources. Only two complaints, one minor, one more significant--82 mm glass for filters means a new set of gear to go with the lens. NBD. Bigger issue for me is that this 2.8 lens appears to ramp a bit on the long end. According to my in camera spot meter, about a 12% loss of light from wide to telephoto. This is signifcant enough that I can't really use a real time zoom (not that these cine-style lenses lend themselves to that), but we all have those directors that ask "can you also do a pull on that?" I'm curious to hear if this ramping is an unavoidable part of the new lens specs, or whether I've got an issue. My other 2.8 Nikon glass, by comparison, averages only about a 1% change over the zoom range.
2. Zacuto Gratical OLED EVF. My Alphatron is off to get its LCD screen replaced due to burn-ins, so I rented a Gratical to use. Wow. This is a great image for an EVF...bright, good color, extremely sharp! Very easy to focus, and a very wide range of diopter adjustment for those of us with old eyes--far superior to the diopter ring on the Alphatron, which just disintegrated into several pieces last week . Lots of nice tools inside...can lift the picture to the top of the screen and display histos, WF and vectorscope below.
As always, a few things that could be better: This puppy is expensive by today's standards. Of course, I also paid nearly $9K for a color viewfinder for the HDCam years ago, so everything is relative. The Gratical has a soft rubber magnetic diopter cap that flops back over the eyepiece as soon and you lift your face away from the EVF. It took about 5 minutes for this to become a real pain. The tiny OLED also means there is no flip-up of the eyepiece to monitor the image from outside close quarters. The Gratical runs off Canon 5D batteries, and you only get about 3 hours of burn time, even if you try to reliably turn it off between set ups. There is an optional D-tap cable, but it looks like kind of a clunky Canon battery simulator that clicks into the battery slot on the outside of the viewfinder, so not an elegant solution. Two other minor issues: there are four assignable buttons, with two-stage inputs. But if you, for instance, add zebras to the button, you lose the zebra function every time you turn the viewfinder off, so you have to hit the assignable button again on power up the zebras. I could never get it to repeat reliably, but on some power ups, the Gratical displayed nothing but a white screen on the OLED display. It seemed to happen most often when the Gratical was powered up before the camera, but not always. Each time it took a power cycle of the EVF (with the camera on) to restore full function.
Always fun to get some new gear and put it through its paces...
