I was waiting for part two to post this, so now that it's live, here is Philip Bloom's latest camera shootout pitting the Canon C300, Sony NEX5N, Panasonic AF100, Panasonic GH2, Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 7D, Sony FS100, Sony F3, and Nikon D7000 against each other in a variety of real-world situations:
Bloom, myself, and anyone else posting camera tests often starts off with a disclaimer, "don't judge final image quality based on what you see here, because of internet compression." But what percentage of video content these days goes through a similar compression pass? There's the theater, there's cable/satellite (compressed, but differently), there's Blu-ray and DVD (also compressed, but with higher bitrates), and the rest -- Vimeo, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, etc. -- are all compressed in a similar manner. So to me, you can judge the images even though they're being degraded by compression, as this represents a "real world" viewing circumstance. Should one make final judgements on these images? Perhaps not. But regardless of how you feel about evaluating internet-compressed footage, these tests are very informative. The Panasonic GH2 impresses in the bang-for-the-buck department, and I'm always a smitten by the Sony F3 in S-Log -- it's been said in the past that the S-Log mode turns the F3 into an entirely different camera, and it shows here. And the C300 is, as advertised, a hell of a low-light camera.
If you're wondering why there's no RED camera in the shootout, you missed this whole incident. Thanks to Philip and co. for the tests! Thoughts on the cameras here?
