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Our first disappointing experience with our Panasonic HPX370
After a year of tremendous images, we just had our first disappointing experience with our Panasonic HPX370. (Up to date scene files and OS) We were shooting a lady with darker hair and complexion in front of a window using a 1200 HMI and Chimera. She had a black lab puppy and a yellow lab sitting next to her. Sounds like a camera shoot-out doesn’t it ? It was a real scene for a prime time animal program.
The exposure was perfect, but when I looked carefully at the resulting image the woman’s complexion and hair were very noisy, as was any deep shadow, almost as if gain were used. But we were at -3 as always. I asked the shooter what his settings were and he said, “like always I was using full ND and shooting wide open, trying to limit depth of field with that damn sensor.”
I have a vague memory of past conversations about noise with the HPX370 camera (stock lens) when shooting wide open. Anybody have thoughts or experience with this issue ?
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1 Reply
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What lens were you using ? I replaced the stock lens with a fujinon Th 13×3.5 and the results were a lot better. With the stock lens I found the same results you had whenever I pushed it – usually trying to copy the DOF I get from a dslr. Because a lot of shooters will be used to dslrs they probably open the lens right up and use the heaviest ND to achieve the shallowest DOF possible. Unfortunately this pushes you into the soft and spongy area of the lens causing the cameras shading to increase noise in the image to reduce vignetting. I find the advantages of this camera in terms of colour detail and latitude over a dslr far outweigh the whole DOF thing anyway.
For me I leave a stop in the lens and forget about getting razor thin DOF, I use composition and lighting and work to the cameras advantages instead of trying to make it something it’s not. I own a DSLR kit and it mostly sits in it’s case I just find the colours from them anaemic. When they start bringing out dslrs with 4:2:2 then I will get excited.
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