SD Lenses that would work with Varicam 720p?

Mike Krumlauf

Mike Krumlauf

Award Winning Filmmaker
I've read online in numerous threads that most of the latter SD lenses right before the companies moved into HD actually have HD glass in them but are marketed as SD, is this true? Are there any decent SD B4 Zooms I should check out second hand for my Varicam.. I have a tiny bit of spending cash for the holidays and wanted to treat my varicam to something. :)

Thanks in advance!
 
It's a tricky subject, much discussed. Some SD lenses are better than others, same with HD lenses. There does seem to be something of an overlap where the best SD lenses are better than the worst HD ones. It also depends on what you think of as good enough, and more importantly what your clients think.
Do a search on here and dvinfo, there are some comparisons, including by me, on Varicam and 1080 cameras (I used PDW700)...but it's still a little inconclusive. The science says always use HD lenses, and it is probably best advice, but in testing and A/B viewing it can be quite hard to separate them.
To a large extent however, this is not such a big deal these days as it was say 5 years ago, as HD lenses can be had relatively cheaply now. Back then you were faced with a choice of perhaps a £750 SD lens or a £10,000 HD one - pretty significant saving! Today the price of HD glass has plummeted - in fact if you're into cinema shooting I think the best value around at the moment are the Canon HJ Cinestyle lenses - I bought an HJ21x7.5 and an HJ11x4.7 for £900 each 2 years ago...then struggled to sell them for the same amount a year later - and these are both £17,000 lenses! And they're lovely :)

Steve
 
I'd love to get an HD lens.. my budget through is very cheap in comparison.. something in the $500 range which leave me in the used SD field on ebay.. no HD for that price.
 
I had a Fujinon A8.5x5.5 which looked excellent on a PDW700 and Varicam, they're crazy cheap. It really is a question of case by case testing with different lenses - maybe I just had a good one. Actually I also tested an HJ21 cine at the same time I seem to remember and it was terrible! Yet the one I had a couple of years later was top notch.

Steve
 
Alrighty. I found a good deal on that Fuji you mentioned and it has a return policy so if all else fails, i test and return.. i think i may give that one shot. if i do, i will let you know what i think. thanks as always for your help guys! :)
 
When looking for cheap lenses I would pay close attention to build quality, that's a good way to assess what grade the lens was in its day - whether it was a top-grade broadcast lens, a TV lens, a "Pro" (ie cheaper!) lens. Something like the Fujinon A15x8 was an example of a top-grade broadcast lens, pretty sure when I had my Digibeta they were about £12,000, top-drawer for their day. Now you can find them for £200! But they were good SD lenses and could well look decent on HD, as opposed to something like the Canon YJ series, which were much more corporate-level lenses, much cheaper build and price - and I'd guess so not hot on HD. Same goes for the "cheap" HD glass that started to appear after a year or two - for those folks who shuddered at paying £20,000 for a Canon HJ22x7.6 you could get a "bargain" KJ20x8.5 at "only" £7,000...but it was very poor, in both build and optics.
Couple of thread here http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-eng-efp-shoulder-mounts/137814-hd-2-3-lens-tests.html and http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/sony-eng-efp-shoulder-mounts/129742-hd-vs-sd-glass-again.html
Steve
 
HD glass. Period. Used to work with a guy who tried the SD glass route. The guys in video kept complaining about it and the client(tv network) finally forced his hand to buy HD glass. We were shooting tape VariCams at the time. I shoot with a guy, one of my best friends, who has, what was once an expensive broadcast W/A, but it's SD. I've done multi-cam shoots with him and asked him to check his focus, then his back focus, then I remembered, oh yeah, that's an SD lens. I've also been on multi-cam live shows with him and the control room/AD has said something and he'll throw an excuse like "it's because they're not sitting on the same plane, that's why the one guy looks soft". No, it's because the whole lens is soft. Some people will just never believe that a manufacturer would actually build different quality/spec'd lenses. And/or the tired 'ole excuse that's been thrown around for years, "By the time the video makes it into the viewers house, no one can tell the difference."
 
Run&Gun said:
HD glass. Period.
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The guy's just said he can't afford it, so it's SD glass. Period. :happy:
As I said, it's a case by case basis, perhaps the SD lenses you have seen were just not great, but the tests certainly do not support the idea that SD=no good and HD=good.
Steve
 
Thanks Steve, i was just about to say the same thing. Yes, as much as I wish I had the budget for HD glass I just don't.
 
Just purchased the Fuji A8.5X5.5 BVM-28 on ebay. Should get here before the end of the week. I will post test images on this thread once it arrives. Lets hope it does me well. Thanks again for your help!
 
If this is just for personal project stuff, you can slap whatever you want on. But when you have a contract with a network paying you $2K a day one man band and they tell you to buy an HD lens because they don't like the way your SD lens looks, you buy an HD lens.
 
Run&Gun said:
when you have a contract with a network paying you $2K a day one man band and they tell you to buy an HD lens because they don't like the way your SD lens looks, you buy an HD lens.
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I agree there, in fact more than anything that always seemed to me the strongest reason to make sure you had an HD lens - so that you didn't have any awkward questions to answer or justifications to try to make, and if anything went wrong you had your back covered. In terms of actual performance though, it's definitely not an open and shut case. And what about an HD lens with a 2x extender on - chances now are even greater that if you shoot it with the 2x engaged and compare it vs a very good SD lens shot without a 2x that the SD lens could well perform better - does this mean then that the HD lens is only HD when used without the 2x extender? And if that's the case then why is the extender on there at all? Just trying to say that it's not black and white, it's not HD lens = good, SD lens = bad, it's a sliding scale, and somewhere along that scale is a line of acceptability, which varies according to your end use.
Steve
 
steve phillipps said:
I agree there, in fact more than anything that always seemed to me the strongest reason to make sure you had an HD lens - so that you didn't have any awkward questions to answer or justifications to try to make, and if anything went wrong you had your back covered.
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Yes sir. I agree with that. I even bought my first HD W/A while I was still shooting Beta. I needed a W/A and I knew I was probably going to be going HD in the next couple of years, so I killed two birds with one stone. They were paying us above market rates to shoot HD, on HD gear. When this guy wasn't, I looked at it sorta as a lie. Especially since the client was constantly complaining. It would have been different if no one could tell.

Yes, we are talking about 720, but I'm talking about sub-par results I've seen first hand with broadcast SD lenses on 720 cams, too. I saw it on H series tape Vari's and HDX-900's and P2 Vari's. The biggest tell is usually the edges of the frame. The first example I have, the guy was using SD Fuji broadcast W/A's on a 27H. The current story, it's a Canon SD broadcast W/A on an HDX-900 and 2700. Overall, the Canon seems much worse than the Fuji. The guys Fuji seemed fine in the center, but went to pieces on the edges. The Canon my friend is shooting with seems to be soft all over. And I will say this, I think the only time that my friend has anything said is only on multi-cam stuff with me where it's being seen side-by-side with my glass. All of my 2/3" lenses are Fuji HA series W/A' s and long lenses and I usually send them to Fuji once a year for a clean and check and maintenance if any is needed.

I do agree that there are great copies of SD lenses out there and there are crappy HD lenses, too. It's just from my personal experiences, the results I've seen(that I knew) with SD glass on HD cameras, the results are sub-par compared to HD glass. What really sold me on HD glass was back probably around 2004 or so when I used to shoot a lot with the F900. I slapped my SD Fuji 20x on just to see how it looked on there and even on a small monitor and shooting 24p, it was painfully obvious that there was a difference. After that, I was a believer.

Now, let's talk about this 4K/8K mumbo jumbo... ; )
 
Thanks for all the input. I wish I had the money to invest in HD glass and i most likely will in the late future but as for now im stuck in the SD market.. the min a freelance gig makes me buy HD glass and budgets for it, it's a done deal.. i'll never argue that SD glass is better than HD.. just because i cant afford HD glass does not mean i think SD glass is better.. i just have to work within my means at the moment. The Fuji zoom I have is really old.. it's even missing its handgrip! I love my PRO35 but its not great for everything due to its amount of light loss. I feel like you can get away with a little more shooting at a lower res like 720p compared to 1080 on the F900 and modern HDSLRs, etc.. idk why but the varicam H to me has a more filmic look to it than the F900, Red one, or any HDSLR.. but its all personal preference.. i wouldn't be investing so much money and time into this old varicam if i didnt believe in it and enjoy working with it. at the end of the day, a camera is just a tool right? ;)
 
Not trying to bust your stones or anything like that Mike. Just giving my honest feedback and observations.

And I do agree with the image from the Vari. When set-up right, it's still beautiful. My old girl put a smile on my face the other month when I had to pull her out of retirement for a shoot, even though she's 10 years old and has been technologically surpassed many times over.
 
Not that it helps Mike's situation any, but I will note that an HD lens on an SD camera could still visibly improve the image. There are a bunch of aspects to the improvement of the glass and frankly it just kinda shows that the lens makers were kinda slacking during the SD era.

To try to help you feel a little better, I can cast another vote for the quality of the Varicam image. My friend Buddy Squires, a very accomplished doc shooter (he does all of Ken Burns' films), finally moved away from his beloved Varicam only once the Amira came out. He loved the camera so much he nursed it through a complete prism block replacement and banged it around across continents shooting all sorts of productions. He still has it for when he needs to match older work.

But he does use HD glass. ;-D

Did you know the original Planet Earth series by the BBC was all short on Varicam?
 
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