HPX250: Wide shots, soft image

Doug_EX

Doug_EX

Well-known member
Hi everyone,

Yesterday we were filming a play with a Tricaster. I had my Hpx250 on my Jimmy Jib connect in the tricaster via SDI (not does this matters...). On wide shots (iris wide open) the image was soft. When zooming in a bit the image was better. Another thing, I notice with some specific lighting set-up the image was even softer.
I bought the 250 to have more detail than the 170 in wide shot when using my jib. I would have swaped it for the 170 if I had it with me.

Barry or someone else...
 
Lens, lens, lens. It matters when you're shooting less than ideal lighting condition. This is where the producer must choose the right tool for the job. Pref. 2/3" super wide angle lens will solve all sharpness problems. It's beautiful & breathtaking on a jib w/ its 93 degree POV. But if the budget doesn't allow, then...

The HPX250 doesn't perform well under non-ideal lighting condition at extreme wide or close up. I'd zoom in a bit and the MTF should improve a lot more. But unfortunately for the beauty jib shot, that takes awake the visual impact.

For your case, I'd increase the 3 detail settings all the way to 7 to increase sharpness & detail. Even that, unfortunately it can't escape the lackluster stock lens. But helps in overall look.
 
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bump up the video gain to +3 or even 6. It's still pretty low noise. Then close down your aperture a stop or so. Just don't go over f5.8. Wide open is a bit soft in wide, but a little better with a stop or so down.
 
JohnnyD said:
bump up the video gain to +3 or even 6. It's still pretty low noise. Then close down your aperture a stop or so. Just don't go over f5.8. Wide open is a bit soft in wide, but a little better with a stop or so down.
Click to expand...

Yes i know, but it's really not ideal. The image is not just not sharp, it's very very soft! in some lighting conditions, it's just not acceptable.

Here is a very quick test in front of my computer monitor.
First one is at 4.5, the second one is with iris open.

Iris 4.5.jpg
Iris open.jpg
 
I was just going to start a new post regarding this very subject. I have just finished shooting 2 live events where the lighting was anything but ideal and after looking at the footage, I am noticing in
shots where I am zoomed out there is a softness to the image especially around the outer edges of the frame. Is this to be expected in low lighting situations?
I thought this camera was going to be sharper in this scenario? Does this mean I can't be at the widest focal length in low light situations? What is ironic, is that the lens has a wider aperture at the wide end
for low light situations, but it produces soft images, so having to zoom in causes the aperture to close down making the picture sharper but also darker.
 
From the grabs, I see that the HPX-250's lens has serious issues w/ ghosting artifacts commonly found from bright light source. I also notice corner shading softness and a variety of other optical limitations typically found w/ stock lens. These problems will gradually diminish as the cost/quality of the lens increase. Unfortunately the lens can't be changed w/ the HPX-250. What can be changed are the shooting & lighting parameters.

I think many of us are pushing the $5.5K HPX-250 to the extreme max optical limit. The limitations are magnified on a 1080p sensor. If it was on a 720p native sensor, it's less noticeable.
 
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>>I thought this camera was going to be sharper in this scenario? Does this mean I can't be at the widest focal length in low light situations?<<

You can but that's the worse part & light condition of the stock zoom lens, so why bother?
 
lonewolf2koc@hotmail.com said:
I think many of us are pushing the $5.5K HPX-250 to the extreme max optical limit. The limitations are magnified on a 1080p sensor. If it was on a 720p native sensor, it's less noticeable.
Click to expand...

I understand your point...but I don't think that shooting zoomed out with iris wide open is considered pushing the limits. Knowing this, Panasonic shouldn't put this lens on the 250. It's a major flaw and is not acceptable.
When looking at the tricaster monitor (the night of the play) the image looked extremely soft on the 250...not near acceptable. The other cams (Sony nx5 I think) didn't have this problem. And it's a 4000$ camcorder.
So, I don't think that a 5500$ camcorder should react like this...it's a major flaw!
 
I knew what I was getting into when they were demonstrating the HPX-250 for couple hrs. The HPX-250 was set inside a dimly lit room w/ fluorescent lighting, I noticed the reduced sharpness at the widest. I asked who makes the lens as it was dropped Leica to some anonymous one w/ the HPX-250. Never got a clear answer from them. I don't think this is Zeiss or Leica as previously found on 1/3" cam generations. If it were the two major brands, they'd be flooded w/ returns. This in turn limits my creative shot dramatically as I can't really shoot a lot wide shots during non-sunny scene. Have to constantly keep a mental note of the HPX250's lens limitation.

I don't know how wide the Sony NX5 can get, but it appears that wide angle zoom is a big challenge for this anonymous lens mfg on the HPX-250 to keep the costs down while maintaining reasonable quality.

Enclosed is a typical widest HPX250 shooting when it's darker. Notice how soft it gets on the edges when light is not bright like during the sunny day. When I zoomed in to about 10-15%, the sharpness increased to acceptable 1080p quality. But don't have that frame grab to show. Sadly the only way to salvage this shot is to intentionally add a soft ellipse-shaped vignette in post to hide the lens' limitations.

No AVC-I 100 or the upcoming AVC-I 200 codec can makeup for mediocre lens. Forget about 4K until cost of the lens dramatically reduces ($90K ->$5K). So far I don't see it happening on a mass scale.
 

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I agree with Doug in that, I don't think shooting zoomed out with the iris wide open is pushing the camcorder to do something it shouldn't
I just wish I had known this before purchasing the HPX250, I may have chosen differently.
 
Doug_EX said:
I understand your point...but I don't think that shooting zoomed out with iris wide open is considered pushing the limits. Knowing this, Panasonic shouldn't put this lens on the 250. It's a major flaw and is not acceptable.
When looking at the tricaster monitor (the night of the play) the image looked extremely soft on the 250...not near acceptable. The other cams (Sony nx5 I think) didn't have this problem. And it's a 4000$ camcorder.
So, I don't think that a 5500$ camcorder should react like this...it's a major flaw!
Click to expand...

+1

i agreed, i got soft images problems too, i'm doing a home improvement and sometime, for no reasons, the hpx250 is just soft at full wide even if i use two divas in a 10 x 10 room.
 
Well I can give you my experence with the wide shots. I shot 95% on stage productions and I have found no issue as long as I run the correct PAP setting first then color balance with Y get at 70-80% and watch my focus. I also must run with Zebras and Waveform on. On my portable display I run for brightness so I keep it in the pink to yellow and flip between focus and brightness. Since I have followed these steps each time I have almost no issues in low light. So question to you is have you done your own tests before you shot in a special envirominte? I ask because for me it helps to make sure I will have no issue before the production starts. Does the lens have issue, could but I first must address my own issue before I look elsewhere.
All cameras have limits and you have 2 choices either figure out what you can do with what you have, or purchase another camera. The choice is up to you, no point in getting frustrated as it will not solve the issue.
Just giving you a different viewpoint :-)
 
I'm trying a particular filter Neat Video, Reduce Noise to minimize the grainy artifact when video clips are processed from not so great source. It is taking very long time when filters are combined. Results are OK to my personal taste. Somehow it's not the same as shooting it with a good quality lens to begin with. It looks artificially processed if there's people in the scene. It works best when there's no people. There's no one size fit all setting. The biggest cost I see here are filter setup, GPU&CPU processing time and extra electricity consumption from all of the 12 cores in the Mac Pro. From 220w-450w when maxing all the cores fr. the CPUs & GPUs. It serves as a mini heater during night time. These little things seem trivial, but add up quickly. I'd say about $50-60 more per month in power bill alone. Overall, minimize shooting extreme wide on the HPX-250 for non-sunny or well lit scene. I'm not alone in this because the demo'd HPX250 back during the summer had sharpness issue@widest focal length (3.9mm).
 
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The lens was designed and manufactured by Panasonic. They spoke a great deal about it on their Tumblr blog.

Recently, however, we were hearing comments that it was inconvenient if one couldn’t shoot a long tele image with a palm camera. If that is the case, we decided, we should make a new lens for a palm camera that could produce stunning images from wide to tele positions. From that point is where the difficulty of R&D began.
Our internal codename for the product was KG (for Kadoma G….). We gathered all the lens building knowledge within Panasonic, and I believe we created a wonderful lens.
We wanted to include a KG logo on the lens, but were forced to abandon the idea when we couldn’t register the trademark. It would be nice if it could continue to be unofficially known by all Panasonic fans as the KG lens.
tumblr_lqtx9qSxQu1qlgpo8.jpg
 
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KG it is. Fr the photo, it's remarkably small and compact with not so many special optical elements. There have got to be some sacrifices made to image quality for its small size. This brings an important question: How can I get the lens maintained?

I hope Panasonic doesn't think the the HPX-250's KG lens will be disposable after 3-4 years of use. For all of my 2/3" lenses, I have to bring them back for deep cleaning, focus realignment and all sort of checks up every 3-4 years to keep it in top broadcast quality shape.
 
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I am kind of shocked reading this thread. All of the strife with the autofocus on the AC series and now this with the HPX-250. One thinks of diffraction as being the enemy of 1/3" chip cameras, not the reverse. Saying you can't open up on a full wide shot is just insane imho. First we are not supposed to move the camera due to rolling shutter, then pro's don't need autofocus and now you are not supposed to operate the camera at large aperatures with a wide shot? Of course, everybody knows that...right? Although I do not remember this issue on previous cameras I have used. I have to wonder what Panasonic is doing and what corners they are cutting with these recent cameras.

Is this the same on the AC-130/160 cameras? It does not mean much but I have not seen these issues with the XF300 or the EX-1 (I know... it's 1/2" but it is still small).
 
>>I have to wonder what Panasonic is doing and what corners they are cutting with these recent cameras. <<
Bring back Leica or Zeiss lens quality as found w/ the DVX100s. Many corps are facing tremendous pressures fr. competitors. Keeping costs as low as possible is pretty much the norm these days. I'm willing to pay several more $Gs for decent optics. AVC-I 100 and CAC can't miraculously coverup mediocre optics.
 
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I think the compactness of the lens design was in order to balance the camera for hand holding, not to make it cheaper, that said, of course it has to be cheaper if you want to meet a $6,000 price point. It's not fair to compare the camera or lens to a $30,000 plus broadcast camera with a 2/3-inch chip. As far as a soft wide shot in low light situations, that has not been my experience at all. I have shot nothing that looks as a soft as those monitors in the post above. I had to stop using my Sony Z7U because after a year the wide shot went very soft in low light situations. There have been many complaints about the EX1 and 3 cameras with soft picture issues. At least those cameras are in the same class as the HPX250. I'd like to hear what Barry thinks about this lens issue at least with some of the 250s. Clearly some people are having problems.
 
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