QuickHitRecord
Veteran
Want to see something silly?
I paired a 2011-era Lumix FZ47 bridge camera (one of the last 1080P cameras to be manufactured with a 1/3” or larger CCD sensor) with a Redrock M3 DOF adapter, which essentially gives me a CCD camera with an S35 field of view. Both of these were purchased on eBay for about $200 total.
Rigged up together, they form an ergonomic conundrum: there's no HDMI output for a monitor (it only exists in playback mode) and to make matters worse, there's no no articulating screen. Also, the LCD goes dim after a few seconds of recording. The lens retracts every time you turn the camera off, but at least there's an option to have the camera “remember” your zoom and focus points, and return to them when powering it on.
As for image quality, it's no F35. Pausing the video will reveal nasty temporal compression artifacts and lots of noise, even at the lowest video ISO of 400. That being said, I kind of like the look when it's in motion (this camera only captures 30fps, which I conformed to 24fps in Premiere). There's a kind of lo-fi softness to it that I think sets it apart from most of what I've been seeing for the past couple of years. Obviously, at 17Mbps it doesn't grade very well, but the colors aren't too shabby to begin with. Here's some test footage:
I would never put up with this thing on any but the most non-committal of projects, but in some of those instances, it might actually be a good fit.
I paired a 2011-era Lumix FZ47 bridge camera (one of the last 1080P cameras to be manufactured with a 1/3” or larger CCD sensor) with a Redrock M3 DOF adapter, which essentially gives me a CCD camera with an S35 field of view. Both of these were purchased on eBay for about $200 total.
Rigged up together, they form an ergonomic conundrum: there's no HDMI output for a monitor (it only exists in playback mode) and to make matters worse, there's no no articulating screen. Also, the LCD goes dim after a few seconds of recording. The lens retracts every time you turn the camera off, but at least there's an option to have the camera “remember” your zoom and focus points, and return to them when powering it on.
As for image quality, it's no F35. Pausing the video will reveal nasty temporal compression artifacts and lots of noise, even at the lowest video ISO of 400. That being said, I kind of like the look when it's in motion (this camera only captures 30fps, which I conformed to 24fps in Premiere). There's a kind of lo-fi softness to it that I think sets it apart from most of what I've been seeing for the past couple of years. Obviously, at 17Mbps it doesn't grade very well, but the colors aren't too shabby to begin with. Here's some test footage:
I would never put up with this thing on any but the most non-committal of projects, but in some of those instances, it might actually be a good fit.
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