USER REVI EW | Z CAM E2
scratched too much. I have pre- orders for cages for my cameras and Z Cam are again helping me with those.” Jon’s company is shooting the new Top Gear series over the course of 2019 and so the E2’s off- frame ability might come in to play, especially with 240fps on offer in HD; Top Gear is only an HD show. “You’ve got a quite inexpensive camera here that you can mount on a car right down next to wheels and so get some nice slow-motion shots.” IMAGE QUALITY Jon was instrumental in some development for the Panasonic GH5s and was more than pleased to find the same sensor in the Z Cam E2 mainly because of the great image and the dual native ISO feature. “So it’s effectively a GH5s in a different form factor,” he says. “The native ISO
RIGHT The E2 has lots of inputs and outputs, making it flexible enough for a range of uses.
BELOW You can plug a phone into the back of the camera to see a live video image.
generation and that is the use of your phone as a viewer monitor through the USB host feature. “You can just plug your iPhone in to the back and you’ve got full control and a live video image from the camera. So if you don’t have an external monitor you can still shoot and monitor until you do. “You can also use the USB as a network point so you can plug it in to a computer and it will actually speak to it as if it was plugged in to a network. Everything on there has multiple uses so there’s a lot of effort going on there. Another thing you can do with the USB ports and something they are marketing quite heavily is recording to these little Samsung thumb drives, it’s like a mini SSD and is really small and almost looks like a memory stick. You can get them in one terabyte sizes and then plug it in to the back of the camera and record to it. “So if you have a cage like the one from SmallRig they’ve actually got a holder built in to it to clamp one of these SSDs. They’re pushing that as their cheaper media option. It’s a really good idea and I’ve not seen that any other system. If you had one built in to a fully waterproof enclosure for instance, then you could effectively remotely record to one of these devices in a separate case that you open and then you can swap your media around without having to access the box with the camera potentially risking fogging it up.”
is all at chip level but I’m not sure at this stage whether it’s automatic like the GH5s, I’ve got to do some more shooting with it to work that out. But Z Cam is very good at taking feedback from users so every time there is a firmware update things can change a fair bit.” At just under US$2000 the E2 is attracting the prosumer shooter as well as pros like Jon. For monitoring there is something immediately useful for the iPhone
54 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 20 1 9
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