It is NAB time in Las Vegas and Blackmagic Design surprised us again with the new batch of cameras. I wasn’t too eager to get the last year Cinema Camera as it was not suitable for my style of shooting but the new Pocket Cinema Camera convinced me to pre-order and upgrade my always-with-me camera Sony NEX-5N. What I liked with Sony was small form factor, swivel LCD monitor, ability to shoot 50fps at 1080p and great lens mount to use almost every lens with various adapters. What convinced me with this new Pocket Camera was great dynamic range of 13 stops, ability to shoot high quality Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) and lossless compressed CinemaDNG RAW small form factor and micro 4/3 mount which is as great as E-mount for using various lenses with the help of adapters. The sensor size is the same as Super 16 – 3x crop factor (12,5mmx7mm) which opens the possibility of using all this great old Super 16 glass that exists out there unused.
It shoots on SD cards and has a removable Nikon battery. The LCD is fixed which is bad but you can’t have everything.
You can also use new micro 4/3 lenses with optical stabilisation, auto focus and aperture control as the mount is active.
The LCD isn’t touch enabled as it is on it’s bigger brothers but the menus are simple and I hope easy to control. A sun hood will be mandatory for shooting outside.
Active micro 4/3 mount and small sensor size brings a lot of possibilities for using different kinds of lenses.
LANC control, headphones, microphone, micro HDMI and aux power. Not much and pro as they would like to sell it but enough if you would like to attach some accessories to the camera. There even seem to be a time lapse interval option.
The price is 940€ and I preordered it from CVP. I hope that the cameras will be shipping in July as stated and there won’t be such a backorder delay as it was with their previous cameras. I plan to use the camera for some remote work in hard to get places, maybe some green screen shooting (raw codec and great depth of field is perfect for that) and it will always be with me to shoot some family moments or stock footage.
Below you can see unveiling of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera on this year’s NAB with great Dan Chung from News Shooter.