Now It Goes Sony F3 vs C300

I've shot a bunch of times with the F3 and recently got to play with a C300. I've also gotten to take a look at some low light comparisons between the two.

It seems like image wise they're neck really hard to tell apart. They both look amazing plain and simple.

My vibe is it really depends more on the kind of shoot you plan to do. If you want to do something larger in scale with a bigger crew and have more post options, the F3 is the better choice. It has the potential to feel like a "higher-budget" camera with S-Log and 10bit recording. It's also a bigger camera that has a standard PL mount for your big PL mount lenses (of course, you can adapted it to Nikons and Canons just as you can adapt the C300 to PL). I just get much more of the "big budget" studio vibe from the F3.

The C300 feels much more like a DSLR and a lot of the ease that one got from that. It's much smaller and lighter and the EFS mount means I can use my light-weight Canon zooms or my EFS adapted Nikkor primes. It feels like a camera I'd much rather have when I'm doing run and gun stuff. I don't see myself outfitting it with mattbox or a lot of other gear.

I'm not planning to buy either as I'm broke. When it comes to renting though, it's totally based on the job. For stuff where we have a bigger crew and we're not going to be moving around too much; it makes sense to have an F3 decked out with everything. I used it last weekend and I loved how it treated us. I'll be using it again next weekend with some super speed lenses. I considered trying the C300 for this second weekend since we're going to do more hand-held stuff but we're getting the super speeds as part of a package with the F3 and I really need to have an 18mm lens that can open to a 1.4. With the C300, the EFS mount can be a problem as Canon (nor Nikon) simply don't make 18 or 20mm lenses that can open any wider than a 2.8. If you're shooting in low light in cramped conditions, this is a deal breaker.

That said, the shoot I'm DPing two weeks from now, I'm planning to use the C300 because we'll have a smaller crew, the director has NO intrerest in grading, and I know we're going to be running around a lot. It seems like a better tool for this job.
 
DavidBeier said:
With the C300, the EFS mount can be a problem as Canon (nor Nikon) simply don't make 18 or 20mm lenses that can open any wider than a 2.8. If you're shooting in low light in cramped conditions, this is a deal breaker.
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David, if you have the F3 and super speeds, that's great, but I wouldn't be nervous in the future shooting in low light at f2.8 on a C300 with the ISO cranked up to a max of 10,000. I've been on 4-5 shoots with my C300 so far, and this guy is great in low light. Two stops (1.4 to 2.8) is a substantial amount of light, but at 2.8 at 5000+ ISO your light needs will be extremely minimal. Everyone has their personal tolerance for noise. I try not to go beyond 5000 ISO, but I think 10,000 can be acceptable for some projects.
 
TwinCitiesShooter said:
David, if you have the F3 and super speeds, that's great, but I wouldn't be nervous in the future shooting in low light at f2.8 on a C300 with the ISO cranked up to a max of 10,000. I've been on 4-5 shoots with my C300 so far, and this guy is great in low light. Two stops (1.4 to 2.8) is a substantial amount of light, but at 2.8 at 5000+ ISO your light needs will be extremely minimal. Everyone has their personal tolerance for noise. I try not to go beyond 5000 ISO, but I think 10,000 can be acceptable for some projects.
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Very fair point and I havn't shot in the same conditions with the C300 that I have with the F3. I've just played with it at EVS and seen tests.

My feeling was just this: From what i've seen; the cameras appear to perform equally well in low light with a high gain boost. +18db seems to look as clean on the F3 as 6400 so ultimately, it seems like you're in good shape either way. That said, if all things are equal and you don't want to push the gain/noise up that high; it's nice to be able to get an T1.3 on wider lenses like an 18mm or 20mm. Of course, if you have a PL Mount C300 then this is no longer a consideration.

From what i've seen of comparisons; the image quality of the two is really more the same than different. I doubt any of us could see footage from one and know which camera it was. Rather, the bigger concern seems to be form factor and recording options. If you want run and gun and the ability to easily use some EFS lenses, then the C300 is the better choice. If you want a more solid camera body and the ability to recording in S-LOG with the added benafit's of dynamic range, the F3 seems like a better choice. It just seems to come down to the right tool for the right job.
 
DavidBeier said:
Very fair point and I havn't shot in the same conditions with the C300 that I have with the F3. I've just played with it at EVS and seen tests.

My feeling was just this: From what i've seen; the cameras appear to perform equally well in low light with a high gain boost. +18db seems to look as clean on the F3 as 6400 so ultimately, it seems like you're in good shape either way. That said, if all things are equal and you don't want to push the gain/noise up that high; it's nice to be able to get an T1.3 on wider lenses like an 18mm or 20mm. Of course, if you have a PL Mount C300 then this is no longer a consideration.

From what i've seen of comparisons; the image quality of the two is really more the same than different. I doubt any of us could see footage from one and know which camera it was. Rather, the bigger concern seems to be form factor and recording options. If you want run and gun and the ability to easily use some EFS lenses, then the C300 is the better choice. If you want a more solid camera body and the ability to recording in S-LOG with the added benafit's of dynamic range, the F3 seems like a better choice. It just seems to come down to the right tool for the right job.
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Fair assessment, i'd say - and yes, always pick the right tool for the job. However, I would quickly challenge the notion that the C300's magnesium alloy & weather sealed body is any less solid than anything on the market.
 
cowpunk52 said:
Fair assessment, i'd say - and yes, always pick the right tool for the job. However, I would quickly challenge the notion that the C300's magnesium alloy & weather sealed body is any less solid than anything on the market.
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Yes I have the F3 and the build is not that solid, not flimsy but I'd like it a bit more robust. I'm pretty sure that the C300 "wins" in the build department :)
 
Forgive me if I posted this before, but the biggest difference I've seen between the C300 and the F3 is in moire. I very briefly compared both cameras looking at the screen on a Mac Book Pro and was very surprised at how much moire I saw on the C300. Actually I thought the F3 was not so good as it is worse than my EX-1 but the C300 was much worse for shooting screens. That's a big deal for a lot of corporate work out in Silicon Valley where I am.
Don't know how that plays ut in other kinds of imagery. I agree with a lot of the other comparisons. Both produce great pictures and each has their pros & cons.
 
That's odd to hear about your experience with moire on the F3. I have shot over 100 hours of footage with mine (sharpness set to off) and have only seen moire once, it was on a wide nylon strap of a shoulder bag. Is your detail setting set to on?..
 
Lenilenapi said:
I very briefly compared both cameras looking at the screen on a Mac Book Pro and was very surprised at how much moire I saw on the C300. Actually I thought the F3 was not so good
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Yes, a bit puzzled - both cameras perform particularly well in this area. In fact they are very sharp indeed. So sharp in fact that watching them on a MBP and not in full screen will make it appear as though the image has moire - but its only in the way its being viewed.
 
Its not something I notice at all in regular use (once on a sports jacket though) but i frequently have to shoot computer screens. Here it becomes critical and sometimes the computer or the phone is the subject of the whole shoot. Its very hard to eliminate moire on a computer screen.
I'm monitoring on 17" panasonic or Flanders monitor.
I usually have detail set pretty low but not entirely off, But that doesn't usually solve the problem. EX-1 was definitely better than the F3 though C300 seemed worse than either.
Have you tested either camera on a computer screen?
 
DavidBeier said:
That said, the shoot I'm DPing two weeks from now, I'm planning to use the C300 because we'll have a smaller crew, the director has NO intrerest in grading, and I know we're going to be running around a lot. It seems like a better tool for this job.
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Not like I have experience with C300, but reading and looking at some raw footage suggest that it's not very good with color accuracy.
F3 on other hand in 709 mode is very accurate- seen it on my own eyes :)
If you want out of camera footage F3 should be better- C300 footage is rather "made for grading".
 
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From my very brief tests, either camera will be perfectly fine for this purpose. Frankly ( as an F3 owner) I thought the out of the box default setting on the Canon looked better on flesh tones. There are lots of good 709 settings for the F3 that look just as good though.
 
Lenilenapi said:
From my very brief tests, either camera will be perfectly fine for this purpose. Frankly ( as an F3 owner) I thought the out of the box default setting on the Canon looked better on flesh tones. There are lots of good 709 settings for the F3 that look just as good though.
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Is C300 not way oversaturated?
 
I didn't see any problems but I didn't look too hard. A monitor and a trip to the menus should fix that awfully fast anyway. Are you judging by stuff you've seen on the web ?
 
No- based on raw footage and comments.
There is some F3 v C300 comparision on XDcam-user site.
 
I don't find the C300 to be oversaturated at all. When I started shooting with it, the thing that impressed me constantly was the accuracy of the camera in both color and contrast. Very true to life, and very different than the stylized 5DMII image. And there are indeed menu settings to tweak the color all you want.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Have you tested either camera on a computer screen?
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Any three-chip full raster camcorder is going to perform exceptionally well in any type of moire test. They will always out-perform a single-sensor camera, every single day of the week because, well, that's how physics works. Shouldn't be a surprise to anybody. That being said, I have tested the C300 on a computer screen, a 23" Apple Cinema Display to be exact. It's entirely possible to get the moire nasties, and it's just as easy to avoid them, too. No surprises for me, and the results are very similar to what I experienced with the F3 - they just suffer at slightly different frequencies.

These are both from the C300 and compressed as jpg for the web:

kB5m6.jpg


0Rtfp.jpg
 
Did you actually have the F3 and the C300 next to each other or were you just comparing to the F3 from memory?
All I can tell you is what I saw looking at a laptop and the difference was dramatic. My experience shooting plenty of screens for a living is that it is often not at all "easy to avoid them" , in fact its often impossible to be completely free of them. I have a group of anti-moire filters I also use when they can help which is only on occasion.
I do intend to test again as soon as I can.
By the way I can't open your pics.
 
Hm, odd - the pics should just appear right in your browser, they're embedded into the post. Anyway, no, I did not test side by side, I had used the F3 a few months before the C300 was available. Yes, I agree that it is often very difficult to be completely free of moire when shooting computer screens, but with either camera is relatively simple to find a "sweet spot" to avoid it - as long as your shooting straight on! When you shoot a screen at an angle, you're almost guaranteed to have moire with any single-sensor camera because the as the perspective of the pixels shrinks away, it will eventually hit the frequencies at which moire appears.

My recommendation, if you're shooting a lot of computer screens, is to avoid single-sensor cameras all-together and use full raster 3-chip camcorders like the XF300 or HPX250 or EX1. You'll be far less likely to run into moire problems then. It's all about picking the right tool for the right job!

ps - try selecting "Open in a new tab" on the pics via right-click or control-click
 
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