sina Cam

The main problem I had testing was the lenses, the Kowa 8.5mm is a lovely lens and ideal for use on small 3D rigs but. You knew that was coming, the iris is clearly marked and spaced from 2 to 8 but after that it's just lines with tiny spaces between, impossible to do my usual half stop tests but you'll get one stop variations that will be sorta on the one stop mark!

The focus on these lenses is subtle as well, infinity, 0.5mtr, 0.2mtr and I think that there are closer ones as well. Not easy to position accurately. SC do make lovely gear attachments for these to allow the use of follow focus and I'm sure that would make them much more useable.

The images are a little soft, I had sharpness turned down all the way, but a tiny bit of added sharpness in SpeedGrade or Resolve and you're fine. You can turn it up in camera but I prefer to do it later.

In the wide scenes that I did the contrast handling is amazing, you can pull the tree shadows up as much as you want, backlit scene with tree in deep shadow exposed for sunny side.

There seems to be a lot more shadow latitude than highlight. As you underexpose a chart you can keep pulling it up and seeing the difference between the -2 and -2.5 patches on the G&D chart right down to minus 7 stops exposure, yes, it does get noisy. The highlights don't fare near as well and I want to check these before I talk about them. They are really nice and smooth but there are only a couple of stops.

To keep things simple in a basically uncontrolled daylight situation all shots were at ISO 200 with SLogext the overexposed series were shot at a shutter speed of 1/50 from T22 to T2 and the underexposed with a shutter of 1/1000 fron T2 to T22, the views were shot at a shutter of 1/500 at T8

There are two images at "correct" exposure as they were ends of a series.

All recorded at 10 bit 4:4:4 on a Gemini recorder.

The JPG's and DPX's were created in CS6 SpeedGrade with no grading applied.

As usual click on any of the thumbnails and you'll get a full res DPX, if you download the DPX's of the underexposed files I think you'll get a surprise!