Personal View site logo
Make sure to join PV on Telegram or Facebook! Perfect to keep up with community on your smartphone.
Pop Quiz: the 4 cams
  • Which cam is the G7, which cam is the GX85, which cam is the ax100 and which cam is the Samsung Note 4 in this dimly lit church?

  • 7 Replies sorted by
  • I don't fully understand these quizzes - with ILC's, the biggest factor is what lens is used, and at what aperture too. Not to mention the settings - NR, Picture Style, contrast, sat, sharpness...

    I watched this video at 4K on my 4K monitor. The medium shot from the stage right is soft, blocky and noisy (maybe due to YouTube compression, maybe due to too much NR (a setting)). Yet it has a wide dof, suggesting it was shot at a relatively small aperture, so the shot was starved for light. Not a camera problem. (A closer shot with limited dof, isolating the face from the cluttered background might have made this a bit more interesting).

    Since you can see the G7, one can tell which shot was from that, although there was a smooth zoom that surprised me from there. But you cannot see the lens. The shot from the back was likely the AX100.

    Anyway, nice sound, although a tad too much reverb for my taste (that's just a choice).

  • If there is a point, it is that one cannot really tell the difference unless you know ahead of time, even when using a cell phone. The G7 is just a dummy, I have several of them.

  • Quote: The medium shot from the stage right is soft, blocky and noisy (maybe due to YouTube compression, maybe due to too much NR (a setting).

    I think if you look more closely you will see that focus is set on the background.

  • @caveport Interesting. Not sure if I see that. But which one is the cell phone?

  • Cell phone appears to be the wide shot from the right side of stage. The medium shot referred to above is out of focus on the subject and in focus on the background. You really can't see it?

  • Can't say I see it, no :)
    But if you randomized the focus scenes so they were unlabeled, you would get random answers, just like with the cameras.

  • @caveport I was curious about your comment, so I looked for the focus point in a still taken directly from the video. The smallest detail that can be resolved in the image is the stitching of the threads, and the thread holes, in the shirt collar of the soloist. These holes and thread are far less than 1mm diameter, but can be seen clearly in the frame. Similar stitching one foot forward cannot be resolved, and small details one foot distant also cannot be resolved like the note heads of the music or the dots in the painting of the harpsichord lid. These more distant objects are of course far larger than 1mm, more like 3-5mm.
    That would put the depth of field at about 1 foot, and the focal plane at the face of the soloist.
    Of course the video looks muddy, and that is due to the fact that there is fairly strong backlighting, and, also, that the light forward is quite dim. The A7 series could probably do better in this regard.
    Objects in the background, such as the walls or the statue, have numerous small chips, dents and marks larger than 1mm. Like any church, if you look closely at any surface you will see these marks; however, you can't see them in the photo--the walls appear smooth.

    Sharpness reference still.jpg
    3840 x 2160 - 1M