@MILCman: You contradict yourself. First you claim that the FX3 was made in large part to work with the Airpeak Drone.

Then you claim that "the drone itself has nothing to do with the design of the fx3." You were the one who mentioned the drone as a reason for the FX3 to exist. You were the one who brought it up. Oh the irony.

And I"m no expert in drones but it doesn't seem like the Sony drone has been that much of a success.

And certainly the FX3 was created to satisfy other needs than working with the drone.

But yes, the software update for the FX3 should have also gone to the A7SIII...no reason not to, except to segment the products and try to force purchases of the FX3.

@MILCman:

This is what you wrote in your first post: "it seems clear from the comments below that people who don't shoot video don't understand why sony made both the fx3 and the a7siii.

one big reason for that was the sony airpeak drone"

Then you wrote: "the drone itself has nothing to do with the design of the fx3."

That is a clear contradiction. You claimed Sony made the FX3 for the air peak drone...then in your very next post, after someone called you out on it, you said that the drone had nothing to do with the FX3.

If you can explain that, please do.

“What’s happening Sony?!?”

Have you contacted them?

Yep. It's still having issues. Reset settings and it helped for a few hours then the problems all returned. I'm going to reinstall the firmware, sacrifice a lamb, and pray to the gods. Pretty sure that'll do it!

Aha! It was a bad SD card, replaced it and all seems good👍🏼🤞🏼

Glad to hear you got it sorted.

TBF

all video centric cameras need to have these features:
1. Shutter angle
2. Focus peaking/map/whatever assist tool
3. Lut monitor
4. Full HDMI/SDI
5. Codec collection
6. External battery or way to get a lot of power easily, they all need a way to be powered by NPF IMO. Either that, or a battery grip, because it requires so much power. IMO, USB-C is a crapshoot implementation, even with cameras that accept 27W power.
7. Zoom rocker of some sort
8. Audio monitoring
9. Basic IBIS for static shots

there are more, that I omitted like waveforms and vectorscopes, which I think are nice, but not totally necessary

shutter angle can be convenient, but it's a relic from the film days and it doesn't offer any better control than shutter speed does.

there are many things that are more important for video than setting shutter speed with shutter angle.

"amateur hour" is putting a tiny mini-hdmi port on a hybrid or video-centric camera, like canon did.

MILC man: shutter angle is more convenient than shutter speed if you end up shooting clips with different frame rates. It means that I can jump from shooting 24p to capturing some 60 or 120p footage for slow-mo without having to completely re-work my shutter speed between each clip.

Also, can we please discuss specific issues without bringing other brands into it?

@Richard Butler does shutter angle matter all that much with slow motion? I havent studied those types of clips, but generally, when I use 60+fps, I generally do NOT factor in shutter angle, simply deal with whatever shutter gives me optimum ISO. Usually, the cameras will limit how much you can go.

side note, is that shutter angle increments on my panasonic, dont seem they can go as fine as shutter speed, it's a nice feature for sure, but working with SS and angle, I find that there's little or no time saved due to angle

My understanding is that slow-mo clips give you a little more leeway in terms of the shutter angle range that looks good, but I'm no expert in that regard.

But, let's say I'm shooting at 1/48 sec in 24p, as soon as I engage 60 or 120p shooting, my minimum shutter speed may shift to 1/60 or 1/120, depending on how the specific camera works. It still means having to shift away from 1/48 and then back again afterwards. Whereas if I set a 180 degree shutter angle, all I have to do is adjust my ND.

Ultimately I'm not here to argue that it's essential for everyone, but I've found it to be a useful way of working.

@rb - it's convenient when it's automated shutter speed adjustment; what i'm saying is that it's not really shutter angle, because video cameras don't have rotary shutters, there is no angle of anything... wrt this hybrid market, manufacturers use the term as a sales gimmick although that could change with global shutters.

it looks like you know that with video, shutter speed shouldn't be changed, so there are only a few combinations of framerate and shutter to remember... worst case is write it on a piece of silver gaffer tape and stick it on the camera :-)

for me, i don't like 24p and i don't like editing footage with weird mis-matched framerates, i guess that it goes back to the interlaced fields nightmare but there is a lot of weird video out there these days where the stuttering is awful.

@MILC man - I think we're broadly in agreement. I certainly take your point of there being something off about perpetuating terminology that refers to a component that doesn't exist.

What makes shutter angle less useful is when you're shooting indoors. I shoot 24fps and 1/48 often gets bad flicker from the lights when compared with shooting at 1/50. Also when I switch to 50fps shooting for slow mo and I shoot this quite a lot, I prefer to choose whether to engage 1/100 or keep it at 1/50.
Shooting outdoors there is good reason to favour shutter angle, but the amount of shooting indoors makes shutter angle too unpredictable for me. I've tried several times and just had to give up and switch back to shutter speed.

@SteveV4D, Totally! happened to me two weeks ago in a foreign country!!!

I am absolutely with @Milcman! If you record with multiple frame rates, far the most professional way is to use various presets saved in the number of memory banks. This is the quickest and most reliable way to switch between modes. So in practice shutter angle option has almost zero relevance.

Multiple posts have been removed.

(Or I was having an argument with myself. 😂)

Too bad DPR doesn't at least have a "post deleted" placeholder so that's more obvious. :)

Believe it or not DPR does try to keep the trolling down here. It’s sort of a hopeless job because of some specific people that post regularly. But they try. And generally when they see obvious examples they handle it as they did here. But they can’t and don’t review every comment.

Anyway I give them credit for trying to manage it.

Not much focus breathing compensation is possible on A7siii and Fx3 without losing 4k, right? Hardly worth it, really. A1 is another matter.

i have an A7siii and definitely want 4k. Others may be happy to shoot 1080p. Speaking personally, the only time I would care about focus breathing would be when pulling focus with the camera on a tripod (usually not hard to fix in post anyway). In contrast, moving around on a gimbal, it’s really hard to see. In those situations (95% of what I shoot), I’m grateful to have such small, light primes, rather than larger lenses that don’t breathe.

I really hope Sony adds custom LUTs to the A7siii. That would make a big difference to me. Although I can get by monitoring with custom LUTs on an iPhone, it would be really nice to have them in camera too.

The Sony FX6 has focus breathing compensation and uses the same sensor as the a7S III and FX3. You can still shoot in 4K with breathing compensation enabled on that camera, but there is a slight field of view crop (about 10% or so) when it is turned on.

The native sensor resolution is actually 4.2K which presumably is how it is possible to crop in and still deliver 4K output. Notably, breathing compensation is not available when shooting 4K at 120fps, a mode which already has its own 10% sensor crop to start with.

The A7siii is doing 4k as an oversampling from 4.24k to 3.84k, so there is actually enough room to perform focus breathing without losing 4k.

I don’t understand how flexible ISO is different from just adjusting ISO with the control wheel but I suspect it’s different.

I think an explanation of these new modes:
Flexible ISO
Cine EI
Cine EI Quick
would be a great topic for the quick 1 minute videos or a short Chris/Jordan video…

Yes it’s the ability to choose your iso when shooting in slog instead of being locked to the 2 native iso modes of the sensor 800/12800

NDT are you sure? Certainly the A1 lets you choose any ISO even in slog. I believe all the Sony hybrids do. I don’t believe Sony really publishes the Dual gain ISO breakpoints even. You’re saying the FX3 doesn’t let you choose ISO3200 for instance when shooting slog before this update?

@mike ran ok after a bit further reading, it looks like this function pertains only to the Cine EI mode. From what I can gather, flexible ISO allows you to adjust your ISO at will whilst your in Cine EI mode like an A7. Cine EI mode restricts you to going into the physical menu to change the base ISO from Low/High and cine ei quick allows you to change the ISO with the thumb wheel. Its quite confusing because thought the point of Cine EI was to keep locked at the native ISO for minimum noise. check this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3TWqb6LYTY&t=111s

Yeah. Thanks. I’ll check the video.
Nice to actually mutually beneficial discussion on here. :)

Thanks Richard. The explanation in the article is clear!

@BrentSchumer
Incorrect. The A6300 has the IMX284. A6100, A6400, ZV-E10 and A6600 has the IMX271.

Is the 284 materially different from the 271? Everything I've read about things like noise and rolling shutter indicate that they perform similarly or identically:
https://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Compare/Side-by-side/Sony-A6300-versus-Sony-A6400___1072_1281

"The A6600’s nearest competitor in terms of sensor size is the one it replaces, the Sony A6500. It’s intriguing that that older model with a similar 24 MP sensor and on-chip phase detection autofocus has slightly better dynamic range and has significantly better color sensitivity throughout the sensitivity range."

It is similar, but it's not the same.

@BrentSchumer
That really doesn't matter, I just corrected the statement that it's the same sensor. If you argue about those kinds of semantics, then many sensors from several models from different brands would be grouped together where no obvious upgrade in image quality is seen.

I definitely think there should be a newer sensor in the next model, but I would prefer if it were radically different. I do not think the sensor in the X-T3 would be worth releasing in a model at all, even when it was new. To small of a difference. An interesting fit would be on the same level as the X-H2S/X-H2R or some kind of hybrid in-between.