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HPX 500 Evaluation/Green Preset Bias
I’ve been shooting with the Panasoinic HPX500 now for about three weeks and over all the experience is good. The blacks are cleaner and the low light capability is better than the HVX200. Having the four 16 gig cards is great. On the negative side I would have to say the view finder is a bit cheap and my camera has a extreme green bias in preset. I’ve tried to contact Panasonic’s service department via email……forget it….no response. Has anyone else experienced the same problem?
bp
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6 Replies
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I’ve seen mention of a green bias in postings on a forum somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it now. It was just a short thread on settings tweaks and someone mentioned a green shift they had to compensate for. (It sounded like most of the posters in the thread did not yet have the camera)
I don’t remember them characterizing it as “extreme” but at least someone else has noticed something similar.
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Video Photographer / Avid Editor
Maximus Media Inc. -
Hi Bill-
Yes, I have a HPX500 and thought I was experiencing the same green/yellow shift you are experiencing. I was also posting on the other forum as mentioned above. I am using the Fujinon 17x kit lens.
My problem really boiled down to two main issues. The first was incorrectly setting the lens shading as described on pages 92-94 of the manual. If you leave it on the default, or do the shading incorrectly as I did, you can get seriously ugly results.
The second issue was totally unrelated to the camera, although at first I jumped incorrectly to that conclusion. It had to do with a newly aquired first generation LCD production monitor and the angle of view.
Once I got the shading straightened out, the colors were spot on. Another new owner decided to shift the chroma phase to +2, but that is more of a tweak than large scale adjustment. Lens shading straightened out his green results as well.
I hope this helps.
sn48
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We’re on our second week of shooting with the 500. We’ve seen no green shift. The blacks seem a bit high in preset, but that’s been corrected easily with the paintbox. Overall, the results have been terrific in both SD and HD. It is one sweet camera!
John
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Interesting that you brought up the Lens shading issue. I have noticed that when I rent cameras like the SDX-900 that have Fuji Lenses that they are on the green side compared to the ones I rent with Canon Lenses. The correct shading should take care of this but who really has time for that when swapping lenses. On one job I had to swap out Fuji Lenses from the rental company for Canon so the cameras matched better. I could have also gone all Fuji but that would have cost me money since I had Canon Lenses for my gear.
Daniel Epstein
Gold Teleproductions, Inc
New York, NY
http://www.goldtele.com -
Happily, you can save the lens shading informtaion on an SD card for each lens you rent or own. Changing this setting after swapping lenses takes less than ten seconds. I think this approach really opens up your choices.
sn48
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Regarding your comment about the viewfinder “being cheap” – at NAB, a Panasonic guy at their booth told me that this was the case, and that if he bought the 500, he would spend the money to buy one of their “higher-end” viewfinders that come w/ their other cameras, such as the 2000 . . . I’m thinking about getting the 500 camera, and following through w/ this suggestion.
Grant Taylor
SunCloud Productions
Santa Fe, NM
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