F3: Very interesting test: Arri-F55-F3

The F55 definitely stood it's ground against the Alexa, both with no color grades / natural colors looked really good. The tester said the F3 was hand color corrected with color shifts in the red, therefore it's not the F3's real color which was the cameras real weakness IMO, as the skin tones always looked plastic to me; which was greatly improved with CineEI. Of course with a bit of color correcting, most cameras can look great, but one of the true marks of a camera is the out of box color science, which the F55 does well, even against the Arri.
 
Alexa did an incredible job retaining the highlight information in that fabric on the bottom left while +3 stops overexposed. The other two clipped pretty hard there.
 
Nice to look at for us camera geeks. But the thing about these tests is that they are often under studio lighting or other controlled environments. Under good lighting any camera should look good.

Furthermore, camera comparison tests tend to be more camera matching tests than a real test. You can make a F55 or F3 look similar to an Alexa or F35 under a specific lighting set up. The key point is that you are trying. In other words you have to work harder to get there. Then under a totally different lighting scenario it would take a different approach to match. Not much point in my opinion.

Under harsh direct sun light and no control, the Alexa would be just so much ahead of the other two for example.
 
well, what regards f3, the color correcting took a couple of minutes as the only things what was bad was red color rendition. I still do have a thought, that it might have reacted to infrared heaters standing not far away more than other cameras. Will be able to check that next week.

What concerns f55 and alexa, both look good out of the box with just lust. We didn't do any color grading except bringing levels back to normal. This was the test to test cameras in extreme conditions having over/under exposed. When under exposed, F55 seemed cleaner than Alexa, probably due to resolution.

F55 has a little les DR, probably half a stop. From the raw material you could think that it's way more, but once you grade it, you don't see much difference.

Of course, Alexa was and is kind of picture quality in digital cameras, but for the money, F55 is very good. Costing 3x less, does an excellent job.
 
Nice test. very well done. The reds out of the Alexa are really something.

I'm testing the Bolex D16 with a friend and interestingly the camera has a similar fingerprint to the Arri. The reds in particular are very good, probably due to the Kodak / Truesense CCD. I've been told that this has a lot to do with the very high quality dyes used in the bayer pattern filter that were developed at Kodak.


Here is another one I found interesting... Alexa vs F3 sLOG vs 7d

https://vimeo.com/30859426
 
Red colors were most accurate on Sony F55, but then again, i think it might have happened due to the reason of infrared heaters not far away, and f3's and alexa's sensors just were more sensitive to that than f55. Will confirm that next week.
 
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