Z CAM E2 | USER REVI EW
PRO SPEC “Another big plus point for the camera is the professional
connectors on board especially if you think of the potential prosumer customer base. It may be a shock for a lower-end user to order a LEMO synch cable for instance, which is about £20. There is a LEMO I/O and also a LEMO port for a dual channel XLR microphone but you’ll need a separate XLR audio connector. Power included, these are the three most important connectors on there and they are all of professional standard. “The camera is also exceptionally well made with an all-metal construction apart from a few robust plastic bits.” Z Cam with its latest firmware claimed 15 stops of dynamic range and also more with what they call WDR which is a post process that Jon isn’t really interested in. “As far as I’m aware you take an underexposed frame and an overexposed frame and you put them together but as a post-processed feature I’m not really interested in it. You have to be careful with that kind of feature as in high motion you can end up with a bit of ghosting, it is just merging two frames. “But with the new Z-Log2 feature you can get real 15 stops out of it which is very impressive. A lot of this is testament to that sensor which is what made the GH5s so good, too.” MFT MOUNT Jon’s shooting is predominately with mini cams which means using MFT lenses; Creokinetics now have
“IT’S EVERYTHING YOU WOULD EVER WANT IN A LITTLE CAMERA”
BELOW The E2’s near all-metal construction makes it very robust.
RECORDING The E2 doesn’t have a Raw recording mode and at the moment records in .mp4 and .mov. “On the .mov you can choose between H.264 and H.265 for the 10-bit performance, but Z Cam is at approval stage with Apple at the moment for ProRes. I think that will be quite a gamechanger for them, with that, many pros will be looking to buy this camera as for some it’s a deal breaker. It’s an industry standard that people are comfortable working with, and .mov is a little bit of a headache to work with. “I’m still doing a lot of testing with this camera but at the moment I’m kind of waiting to find out what the catch is because it does seem a bit too good to be true at the moment. It’s everything you would ever want in a little camera. There must be a downside somewhere. We’re not even on V1 of the software yet so there are bugs in there but I’m not worried about them.”
around 100 of these lens types. “All of those lenses work on this camera. Also if you wanted to do a really compact rig even the Olympus Pen lenses will work nicely, the image from them is really nice as well. You can control the lenses through the camera and even remotely so again you could even do remote iris change and focus change from a tracking vehicle too, if you wanted to. “There’s even a passive synch mode on the camera with a switch on the back which has three positions: M, I and S. You can turn one of the cameras into a master by switching it to M and then as many cameras as you want to S which will just slave off that master camera – so press record on that one and they’ll all run. So for shots like a timeslice, for instance, you could potentially have 200 of these cameras in a big array and plug them all together, making one of them the master, and away you go.”
JANUARY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 57
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