The FS100 - A different perspective.

Hehe, well don't construe my argument as saying the FS100 is on the same league as the F3. All I am saying is that "PROFESSIONAL" is a gray area, and that I think the FS100 is a professional camera, just not the same professionals that the AF100 or F3 at different levels might target.

A person who films weddings or does professional music videos may have other requirements. I've NEVER seen a videographer at a wedding have an external LCD or anything else attached to the camera to record in anything other than what the camera records. Given you cannot repeat a wedding very easily, having the redundant capture IN camera is going to be a huge hit.

I myself put the FS100 and AF100 in the same category. They each have strengths and weaknesses. But really, almost none of us have used the FS100 so there are A LOT of questions we still don't have answers too. I think before jumping to conclusions, people should actually wait for facts. Didn't we go through this with the AF100 before all was known?
 
The Fader is one of the most genius ideas ever, and it's sooo promising -- except that it's just horrible. As others have said, yeah -- the image gets horribly soft at long telephoto, and on wide angle they're useless (like all polarizers) because you get massive banding in the sky -- polarizers work best at 90 degrees to the sun, and don't work at all at 180 degrees or 0 degrees. So if you've got a nice wide 100-degree field of view, and you're pointing the camera at maybe 45 degrees to the sun, you're going to have the right side of your sky really dark and the left side totally bright, and as you pan that dark band will pan through the sky.

It's possible that the Singh-Ray VariND performs better and would be the proper implementation of the variable-ND concept, I don't know, I haven't used one. But I went the same route everyone did, thinking "oh, hey, this'll be just as good and it's cheaper" and I got burned hard -- just like every time I try that. There's a reason good stuff costs more than crap...

In summary -- love the concept, hate actually using it. If someone thinks a Fader ND is a solution to not having real ND filters, well, they're welcome to it, because I got burned and don't want anything to do with it now.

Barry (and everyone else).....thanks a ton for the explanation. I was thinking
of buying a fader ND and a DSLR to play around with. I think I'll pass now
that I hear this.
 
Here's the interesting thing though....and it's perplexing - The BBC/Alan Roberts report is showing the F3 at -48.5db, not the claimed -63db. He also says the sensor is 12.9 MP.(REALLY perplexed) So it looks as though the FS100 will not have more DR than the AF100....if the F3 doesen't. Maybe there are errors/typos on his report but I don't know. He says there is significant noise reduction being applied to the image.

He also said a lot of bad things about AF100. But that F3 report by Alan was very sloppy though. The way he calculated the pixels was WAY out there and I stil have no idea how he came up with that sensitivity.
 
Since Jimi's name was thrown into the hat earlier, I thought I might add that during the making of the track "Crosstown Traffic" see here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUCNsZXCd58

it was deemed appropriate to wrap a piece of paper around a plastic comb to get the sound which Eddie Kramer (his producer) mixed hot to 'drown' the sound of the Fender strat. Now he could have used a more professional instrument known as a Kazoo, but what the heck it sounded great so they ran with it.

The moral of the story is - you use whatever to get the job done.

If yo movie is great and has a smak script maybe you only have to bust yer ass once...

My only gripe about the FS100 is it's twice the price it needs to be.
 
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