BM Pocket Camera now half-price

ItDonnedOnMe

ItDonnedOnMe

If you've been on the fence about this camera, now's probably the time to buy - they've dropped the price to $500:

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/press/pressdetails?releaseID=61418

They say it's a temporary reduction for the summer, and that the price will return to $1000 at the end of august - I'd assume that just means they're clearing inventory and version II will be announced then. At the current price though the camera's an amazing deal compared to any of the DSLRs in the same price range. It can be a pain to work with, but the quality it's capable of is pretty amazing, and the recent batch of firmware updates has addressed most of the original issues it had.

Adorama's offering $100 off if you get it with a speedbooster. I was thinking of picking up a GH4, but may just go with the pocket for now at this price - the camera, a speedbooster and the sigma 18-35 would run the same as the GH4 body alone.
 
How does it compare to something like a T3i? Just curious! That's a deal that would tempt me away from my T3i since I could drop the camera body used and utilize all my lens and accessories on this. Though, I love having a decent photography camera as well, so at the end of the day I'd probably shy away.
 
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It doesn't do stills at all. Well.. I suppose you could roll a few seconds of raw, and then pick a frame to use.

It's got a much smaller sensor than the canon. The canon has an APS-C, the black magic is a super 16 size. However... the black magic shoots RAW natively, and various flavors of prores. The new update that was released today added Prores proxy and LT, so now it's got Proxy, LT, and HQ prores, and cinemadng raw.

It's also a micro 4/3 mount, vs the canon ef mount. Which give you a lot more flexibility of lenses as mounts are available for virtually every mount type to micro 4/3. Then there's the metabones speedbooster which will give you an extra stop of light, and make the blackmagic pocket behave as if it's a super35 sensor.

If you want to shoot raw you have to use Sandisk extreme pro (95MB/s) cards, any others don't work without dropped frames, if they'll even allow the recording to start at all. Those are about $100 each. Batteries are cheap, but you can expect them to only last about 1hr, less if you're doing playback on the camera too.

The blackmagic has an impressive 13 stops of dynamic range, the t3i has something like 10-11 I believe
 
From a standpoint of pure video quality the pocket camera will give you better results. Greater resolved detail, less aliasing/moire, better color rendition, and better dynamic range. The recording format has four flavors of ProRes, all of which are 10bit (vs. 8bit on the T3i) as well as the option to record 12bit raw. It'll give you much more latitude to manipulate the image in post, which may or may not be of value depending on your skill with color grading.

Audio performance is probably a wash between the two... 1/8" inputs, low-quality preamps, etc.

The sensor on the pocket camera is equivalent in size to 16mm film, while the T3i is basically super-35 sized. As a result your lenses will be cropped tighter on the pocket, unless you add a metabones speedbooster. The speedbooster also gives you an increase of over 1 stop in terms of exposure, so it will improve your low light performance.

At high ISOs the pocket will have more noise, but it's very fine, sharp noise that cleans up very well in post with something like neat video. The T3i will have less noise out of the camera, but it tends to be splotchy color noise that doesn't look as good and is harder to remove in post. The 10bit video from the pocket also handles raising the exposure in post much better in severely underexposed situations.

The one big problem with using your lenses on the pocket is that you won't get aperture control with inexpensive adapters. You'll need metabones' latest speedbooster which is designed for EF lenses, but also costs $559 even after adorama's $100-off bundle deal. I have some manual nikon lenses, and planned to get the sigma in a nikon mount, so that I can use it with the nikon mount speedbooster which gives mechanical control over the aperture on modern nikon lenses - there's no real equivalent for canon lenses due to their design.

There are some inexpensive EF-m4/3s adapters that have a built-in iris which you use instead of the lens' aperture - they work, but can add some vignetting at wide-open settings. You also won't get the light boost or crop scale, so your lenses will produce an image that's less wide than they do on the t3i.

So I'm not sure whether it would be worth it to you or not - with the EF speedbooster you're still looking at over $1000 for the package. If you go with the cheap adapters you'll have to deal with the crop factor, but you'll still get all the advantages of the sensor and recording factor.
 
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In other news Mosaic has an olpf for this camera on the way.

If I wasn't in the middle of moving and uncertain about how much work on my docket for August/September I would have already ordered one.

I kinda still might.
 
If you're on the fence about it, you probably should.. it's a limited time price reduction, and at this price, kind of a no brainer.
 
Damn, that's tempting. I could sell my trusty T2i for $400 to off-set the purchase price. I'm super-broke at the moment (my workplace is crazy slow in the summer), but damn, it's like they're practically giving it away!
 
It's a temporary price reduction.. aka a sale. But $500 used when the regular price is $1k is more realistic than used for $700 or $800.
 
I ordered mine yesterday from Adorama. Already out of stock (which I expected).

One question I have from doing a bit of research, though - somebody above mentioned using a Sandisk Extreme Pro card and the BMPCC manual reinforces that. However the manual only mentions 64 and 128 GB cards. I am used to keeping a bunch of smaller (16-32) cards on hand for several reasons, is there any reason why BM would exclude them from the recommendations, other than raw recording time?
 
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Word is the demand has been so great at this price they've exhausted inventory and the deal is over. There are a few places like adorama that appear to still be taking orders at the discounted price - I'm assuming the may have enough of an order in with BM to fulfill more than their current backorders, but in any case it's likely to end soon.

They also just released another firmware update today, only for the 4k at this point but coming to the others soon apparently. It adds a histogram, audio meters, and time remaining counter to the display - which just about addresses all of the remaining functionality issues people have been clamoring for on these cameras. The only remaining one I can think of is the ability to delete clips in camera, but from comments they've made it sounds like that may never happen because it potentially fragments the recording medium and can result in dropped frames.
 
Technically the sale price is good through the end of August, so they should absolutely honor that whether there's stock or not. On the other hand, I read something someone commented about elsewhere saying that it was a "while supplies last" deal.. I didn't see that qualifier in any of the official announcements though, but that comment prompted me to move quicker on it than I may have otherwise -- good thing too considering I have mine now, and any new orders will be waiting months. :lol:
 
SixOhThree said:
Great info, thanks for posting it. I would have gone straight for a handful of 32's had I not read that list.
Click to expand...

While waiting on my 64GB sandisk extreme pro I figured I'd pop in the one card I had handy... a 16gb class 4 kingston. The camera doesn't even recognize it's there. Not like, it sorta works, but sucks because it's slow.. nope as far as the camera is concerned there's no card at all. My sandisk arrives tomorrow though. :D
 
So glad I have mine! Done a little bit of test shooting over the last few days,now to learn how to colour grade RAW properly....gulp.
 
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