Sony f55 vs red epic

K

Kenneth Lau

Active member
RED EPIC is reducing its price to $24000 to match SONY F55.

What do you guys think about this?

Will you invest on a EPIC cuz is cheaper, or you will wait and see what the SONY F55 will be like ??
 
Simply for the eliminated rolling shutter. And the customer service. I'd go Sony. Granted RED is awesome and all, but I need a camera to get out of the way.

That said, I have the money for neither. I know which one I'd rent though, and that's the Sony.
 
To many things really to mention but the biggest advantage would be that I don't see anything missing and reliability. I don't want to step into something RED.
 
Neither! I no longer consider buying a camera an investment, as quickly as technology is changing. When I was shooting on film you kept a camera between 7 and 15 years. Then when we started shooting digital your average camera lifespan went from 7 years down to 5 years. In the last 2 years technology has progressed so quickly that you are lucky if your camera has a 3 year lifespan, and the quality level that was $60K 5 years ago can now be had for under $10K now. We have now reached the point where camera technology and lifespan is changing every 18 months. Sorry camera manufactures, but I am no longer going to play your camera upgrade games every year. I will keep a coupe of lower cost cameras in house which can be payed off quickly, and then rent specific cameras when needed. In my business model in just does not make sense to "invest" in a higher end camera platform like the Red Epic for example, and then be locked in to shooting with this camera for X amount of time to pay it off while technology passes it by, when I can rent any camera ever made and have it shipped in a day.

All the Best!

Dave
 
Coming from film also... taking the advice of an old post house supervisor when Avid's hit and their high costs... he said you need to be able to pay it off in a year... I think its the same here with cameras now...
 
Ha! I don't know where you guys got your business models, but back when I owned an Aaton film camera I always figured on a maximum 18-month return. And I first bought the camera almost 20 years ago. Even while I owned it, from any given date I looked at what I could sell it for used and figured that if I could not make at least that much money off of it in the next 8-12 months then it was time to sell. I finally sold it about five years ago, mainly because my work had transitioned as I'd taken my position at AbelCine. Plus I could see where the market was going for Super-16 and needed to get out (just in time).

This is not a hobby. If it is for you, then just buy whatever you want and don't worry about ever paying it off. But for a professional, you should buy gear with the idea that it should pay for itself within about a year, and frankly you should have work lined up that will pay for the first 1/4 to 1/3 of the investment. Don't buy equipment hoping it will get you a job, that means you are selling the camera, not yourself. Get the job and then buy the equipment to suit it.

I circled around buying an Aaton for a couple of years and then finally pulled the trigger when I landed a doc. that covered almost 1/3 the original purchase. From then on I used buying new gear as a sales tool: "I believe in your project. If you hire me I'll buy a videotap just for this job at no extra cost to you." It worked like a charm.

I bought a Sony Z1U early on and it was the single best return on investment I ever made. Got it for a 2-month job that paid almost twice out the cost (that's over and above my salary). While on a weekend break from that job I flew back to NY and shot a piece for Apple for the launch of Aperture, and that job paid for the entire cost of the camera over again. Two weeks later I was driving down to see my family for Thanksgiving and got a call to shoot Nicole Kidman for a last minute feed to Australia. It was on her schedule and when the Australian network needed it (uplinked to a satelite), so again it was a pretty penny, because I had the camera in my trunk which could shoot the right format and I knew the right guys.

I think that within the first year the camera had paid me back 12 times its purchase price, in part because it could capture and spit out just about every broadcast format clients cared about at the time (NTSC 4:3, NTSC 16:9, PAL 4:3, PAL 16:9, 1920/60i, 1920/50i). Now think about all the formats the Sony cameras can record internally. That's pretty attractive for certain types of camerapeople. For others if they can do it in post then that's fine, which would mean Red. But the point is that you have to look at the work YOU will get in the next year, the work YOU will generate. I didn't get any of the above mentioned work because of the cameras, I just used the cameras to earn more instead of renting. I purchased the cameras that made sense for me to own for the work I was doing at the time.

So step back and stop asking yourself what camera is better than the other. Instead ask what camera is more appropriate for the work I do. Even better, ask yourself what work will you be doing in the near future and what camera you would need for that work. Then decide if owning or renting makes the most sense, and if owning, what will satify your clients best.

Anything else is bad business.
 
sorta my thoughts in my above post... but not as much detail... and why you look at different cameras is to step back and decide which one is for you...
 
David W. Jones said:
Neither! I no longer consider buying a camera an investment, as quickly as technology is changing. When I was shooting on film you kept a camera between 7 and 15 years. Then when we started shooting digital your average camera lifespan went from 7 years down to 5 years. In the last 2 years technology has progressed so quickly that you are lucky if your camera has a 3 year lifespan, and the quality level that was $60K 5 years ago can now be had for under $10K now. We have now reached the point where camera technology and lifespan is changing every 18 months. Sorry camera manufactures, but I am no longer going to play your camera upgrade games every year. I will keep a coupe of lower cost cameras in house which can be payed off quickly, and then rent specific cameras when needed. In my business model in just does not make sense to "invest" in a higher end camera platform like the Red Epic for example, and then be locked in to shooting with this camera for X amount of time to pay it off while technology passes it by, when I can rent any camera ever made and have it shipped in a day.

All the Best!

Dave
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This. Still a big want factor though. :-D
 
Mitch Gross said:
So step back and stop asking yourself what camera is better than the other. Instead ask what camera is more appropriate for the work I do. Even better, ask yourself what work will you be doing in the near future and what camera you would need for that work. Then decide if owning or renting makes the most sense, and if owning, what will satify your clients best.

Anything else is bad business.
Click to expand...

Preach it Mitch.
 
Yeah as Mitch said the much more appropriate question is which camera suits you and the style of work you do better, something that tends to get lost in all the hype of new cameras these days..... practicality.

Plus it's difficult to stay on track in a fruitful helpful discussion when it was began under a potentially combative pretense, which can be hard not to rile the emotions especially once the FUD starts to fly.
 
Great post Mitch!

I wonder how much most of you bill for equipment? I generally use the old formula of 5% of cost.

Best,
Bern
 
Depends on the gear and how frequently it will rent. 2% is quite common. I recall back in my early Aaton days when I needed to supplement my gear with rentals from a local equipment house, a videotap rented for about $150/day and a two-sided follow focus rented for maybe $40/day, yet they both cost about the same to purchase. The difference was that every single job always needed a follow focus. Another factor was perceived lifespan. It takes forever to pay off a tripod. But a good tripod should also last you forever as well. The same isn't true for your average flavor of the month video camera.

Wanna know what pays off incredibly well? Monitors. Y'all are crazy renting monitors from us and other rental houses all the time. $200/day for a monitor that costs less than $4K new? That's 20 days people. I wish I could start a company just renting monitors. Talk about ROI. Everyone should go out and purchase a nice onboard monitor and a nice field monitor to pad out their kits, then charge back to your production. What jobs don't have to have at least one of those on set if not both?
 
Mitch - you speak the truth but there is one thing you didn't touch on and that is the pipe dream of the early adopter and the road to success because the owner is among the first. It has happened to a few but there story has been lauded and praised and the red forums capitalize on this a lot. Unfortunately many get burned in the aimless and senseless follow the leader.
 
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J Davis said:
Mitch - you speak the truth but there is one thing you didn't touch on and that is the pipe dream of the early adopter and the road to success because the owner is among the first. It has happened to a few but there story has been lauded and praised and the red forums capitalize on this a lot. Unfortunately many get burned in the aimless and senseless follow the leader.
Click to expand...
I feel bad when people over there fall for the line that 1080/2K is a mistake or a scam. The world isn't black and white like that. 4K/5K RAW may be right for a high-end application, but not everything is a high-end application. It's like that saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

The whole thing reminds me of the housing bubble and now the student loan bubble. So many people have been convinced that they need to own a home or go to college and to do it at any cost. All other options are vilified. Renting? Are you crazy? You're just throwing your money away. Trade school? Why go there? Don't you want to aspire to something better? So people follow the herd and take on $$$ in debt, regardless of what is the most practical thing to do.

So when someone gives you one-sided advice, always be suspicious.
 
Just curious, has anyone here taken a loan out on a camera like the epic or the f55 in the past? Just curious, as I would never dare buy a camera I didn't have the cash for 100%. Just wondering if all these people that buy epics at full price when they were like 40k + just plopped down cash for them or what? I would love to have that kind of money, it just surprises me that so many DPs can afford to do it, even if it is how they make their livelihood.
 
Agree on that monitor thing. That was my conclusion a year ago and I got one of the Panasonic field monitors. Every time the client asks - Do we have a monitor? Basically a thing you will bring on most set shoots.

I charge about 3% as a daily fee for my equipment based on an exceldokument with what I've paid for each thing. I noticed that if you go to a rental house sometimes they charge more for certain things and sometimes less. In the end I usually end up 25% less than the rental house.
 
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