Oncamera 35mm mount? The future?

rawfa

rawfa

Veteran
Anyone who knows me around the forum knows I'm a 35mm addict. I think allowing the use of a 35mm lens on a videocamera was one of the most revolutionary moves in the history of digital cinema (up to date). During years I've tried some of the best and worst adapters around and I've shot loads of projects with them. I have nothing but respect and admiration for the people who made this possible. BUT, I cannot stop wondering when will the future of digital cameras start adopting this as part of their original designs (if this ever happens). I've grown kind of tired of losing light, adding weight to the camera, having to zoom in, having to buy ad ons like flips and achromats and diffusers and so on, and a ton of additional things that turn my camera into something that only a body builder would be able to use for hand held shots. I would kill for a camera where you could simply screw a nikon on without the need of an adapter, achromat, flip, etc. Red is a maximized version of that, but the costs are not for everyone. Does anyone think this could eventually be picked up by companies like panasonic, canon, sony, etc? It would probably be expensive in the beginning (like HD was), but if could probably be more affordable with time...not as fast as HD, of course (since not everyone wants 35mm lenses).
 
Well, there's no way to bypass the adapter route. You can slap a 35mm lens on a video camera, but without a large enough sensor you're not going to get the same DOF. Best you can hope for is a camera with a "built in" 35mm adapter. That is, the camera still has a stock lens, but it is essentially a prime lens that's already set for Academy ratio (or maybe even configurable for multiple standards), with a locked off back focus and no zoom control. You'll still have light loss from the stock lens and the adapter itself, but such a setup would presumably be optimized to give maximum sharpness and minimum light loss for that particular camera
 
Huy Vu said:
Well, there's no way to bypass the adapter route. You can slap a 35mm lens on a video camera, but without a large enough sensor you're not going to get the same DOF. Best you can hope for is a camera with a "built in" 35mm adapter. That is, the camera still has a stock lens, but it is essentially a prime lens that's already set for Academy ratio (or maybe even configurable for multiple standards), with a locked off back focus and no zoom control. You'll still have light loss from the stock lens and the adapter itself, but such a setup would presumably be optimized to give maximum sharpness and minimum light loss for that particular camera
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Sorry, I was not very clear. I meant something like that.
 
This'll probably never happen for the 'mass market'. You give up way too much -- autofocus, OIS, telephoto reach, compact size... the mass market would never stand for it.

If it's gonna happen in a produced off-the-shelf solution, I would think it's only likely to come from Red. That company is producing dedicated digital cinema cameras, and the 35mm DOF is really only an advantage for cine-style shooting, so -- maybe the Scarlet will be what you want?
 
Barry_Green said:
If it's gonna happen in a produced off-the-shelf solution, I would think it's only likely to come from Red. That company is producing dedicated digital cinema cameras, and the 35mm DOF is really only an advantage for cine-style shooting, so -- maybe the Scarlet will be what you want?
Click to expand...

I'll keep all my fingers crossed for that.
 
The sadly I don't share your optimism. The fact that Jim Jannard stressed many times the word "pocket cam" doesn't lead me to believe it'll have a nikon mount.
 
I was thinking about this the other day. There has to be some way to get 35mm depth of field onto a smaller sensor without having to film off a ground glass screen. Maybe some caltech genius could figure out the optics of it.
 
How does this work with digital still cameras? I know some of them have a crop factor because of smaller sensor sizes but can still use 35mm lenses, how does that work?
 
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