Blackmagic Design have really nailed this one out of the park. The latest firmware (v1.8) for the BMC upgrades it in to an all new level.
The most important change for me has been the super improved anti-aliasing moire reduction function of the prores debayer. (huh?) If I’ve lost you then have a quick swat up on what moire is on wiki — essentially it’s when two grids overlap, you sometimes see imaginary grids which are just an illusion created by the difference between the size or placement of the two real grids. In everyday life you’ll see this when looking at one fence through another fence, or a piece of folded muslin. It’s the same principle in photography, apart from there need only be one fence, as your image sensor is effectively the other fence. The effect shows up in single chip cameras most obviously as they tend to have bayer patterned sensors which means that the grid of red pixels is out of alignment with blue pixels which is in turn out of alignment and frequency with green pixels. This creates the classic rainbow moire pattern in black and white contrast as the aliasing frequency differs per colour channel.
It is absolutely astonishing how far they’ve managed to fix the worst trait of this camera with a firmware upgrade. The camera has always looked good with nice soft lenses, but the Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 has always been too sharp for the BMC. Until now. Click the image below to take a closer look at the results.
The second most important fix for me is the sound processing. It seems to have been changed certainly, but I’ll do a proper follow up on exactly what difference it makes at a later date. The video below is recorded using a juiced link audio preamp attached directly to the BMC’s balanced audio jacks. So that should give you an indication of the usability for vocal recordings. It is my understanding that there is still quite a bass roll-off, but we’ll explore this in detail in another blog.
Another fantastic feature of the firmware upgrade is the green focus peaking. Now this might seem like a trivial change to most, but when you’re shooting high contrast images with a lot of white in them and you are trying to determine what is in focus and what is not, then the white focus peaking of the previous firmware was little help at all. The green really jumps out at you, especially if you set the display to log viewing mode. Subtle change with great performance difference.
Please ignore the moire in this image – that is due to the mismatched grids of my iphone’s camera, and the BMC’s screen, nothing to worry about!
The overall menu and meta data entry seems to be quicker in terms of response. I don’t know if that’s just confirmation bias, but it certainly looks nicer if that’s not true.
Take a look at my moire review video here to see more examples of the improvements and hear me waffling about how awesome everything is now that my camera doesn’t moire up all day. All the tests were done with the extremely sharp Sigma 18-35mm @ f/5.6 for extra sharpness. I cannot recommend this lens enough.
As always, please feel free to hit me up with your questions where ever you’ve seen this posted. Thanks for reading and/or watching. Goodbye.
Chart image credit: SpikeyG of http://ensas.org/ I googled “focus chart” and it was hosted on imageshack.
