[David Hudson]

I would have one person just to run cards and one or two people off loading. Make certain they know the workflow back to front and blindfolded. Always write protect the cards before you put them in a machine. Did I mention P2 Genie?

When we do this every camera is numbered and has an envelope with it’s name on it to put shot cards in. These are picked up by the runner who delivers them back in the same envelope.
Don’t forget to clearly mark each card.

P2 is not the way to do this cheaply. You need a lot of folks.

[David Hudson]

My sentiments exactly about the price point. I try to send a package out in the 1000-1200 price range.

If you can buy a 200A too as your some of your younger clients wont’t get the shoulder mount thing.

Good luck.

[David Hudson]

This is directly answering Nates questions.

You really have to ask yourself what you’re going to do with the camera and who your clients are. If you’ve been shooting with a 200 or an SD camera yes you’ll be impressed.

If your clients are used to full HD cameras like the 900 or others of their ilk and you try to sell them on the 500 the answer is no, particularly if you’re doing alot of big nature photography. To my eyes the pixel shift tech really falls down on big wide shots. They always tend to look a bit soft and noisy. I notice this with the 200 too but to a greater degree.
It’s also more noticeable on high res computer monitors then it is on HDTV. But of course the first place you usually see the stuff is in post, on a computer screen.
I know there are technical reasons for this but it just gets boring. Pixel shift tech is a compromise to get HD cameras to certain price point. The bigger the chip the lower the yield so the higher the price per chip. So if you can make small chips perform like big chips with some elec wizardry you can produce a camera that looks pretty good most of the time for a reasonable price.

I shoot with a lot of different cameras not just the ones I own so I have a pretty good idea of the looks they’re capable of producing. Don’t just read the brochure. Rent the camera first and see if you like it or at least go demo it somewhere.
Am I glad I bought it a while back? No. But not for the reasons of tech. This is the first Panasonic camera I’ve bought or used that just didn’t grow on me. I think a lot of it had to do with the preset problem. This was something so obvious that they should have caught before the cameras shipped. It was always in the back of my mind and left me with the nagging feeling that there might be another surprise waiting. On set with the train of production rolling down the tracks is no place for equipment in which you have no faith.

Cheers

[David Hudson]

Rennie please read all the previous posts. There is no atw on the 500.

Thanks for your concern.

[David Hudson]

I bought it at WH Platts in Atlanta. They’re a Panasonic dealer here.

The last time I talked to them about this they said Panasonic wasn’t going to do anything about it because enough people hadn’t complained.

Maybe now they will.

They seem like good folks although I’ve had like zero contact with them after I bought the camera.

I really don’t see why I can’t take it to Panasonic service center and let them handle it. There are at least two of them in town. It’s kind of scary that only one guy in the country can fix this problem. Although if they’ve got to de-solder then re-solder an eprom to a circuit board that can be tricky. Too much heat in the wrong place and its good bye board. Most manufacturers would just throw the whole board away and plug in a new rev board.
But that would probably require a whole new fab and probably cause them to lose whatever profit they’ve made on the cameras. I really think this camera didn’t take off the way they thought it would. So they’re less then willing to do anything but try to sell out the ones they’ve already built and move on.

I’m a little leery of even sending it up there because if they do screw something up fixing it I’ll have to go through the whole process all over again. Warranty not withstanding the best warranty is reliable equipment. A Hyundai comes with a 10 year warranty but I still rather buy a Toyota with a 3 year warranty because you’ll probably never use it. Don’t buy the warranty because equipment in the shop isn’t making you money.
The 5 year warranty is great but this seems to be something so sensitive that only the the high priests at Panasonic can fix it.

Which brings me back to my original conjecture, Are they embarrassed to let field techs know what happened? Is the fix so funky that face will be lost throughout the organization? Did legal get involved? Hey who knows.
It’s really just a mess any way you look at it.

[David Hudson]

I’m sorry but every camera on the planet except the 500 has a decent 5600 preset so don’t act like its a special feature. Thats just ridiculous.

5600k is black body radiation at specific frequency and not just some arbitrary thing like you seem to think it is.
You may argue with Lord Kelvin about that but I don’t think you’ll get an answer. He’s dead. BTW he’s the K in 5600k.

Making it sound like I want something special is particularly silly when you could look it up in any high school physics book
or even google color temperature.

But the real problem here is color cast. What you want any camera to do is to provide presets the look reasonably close to what your eye sees in the same situation.
Most cameras can do this especially outside. Having a gorgeous blue sky render yellow-green is not even close to what the eye sees and this is what the 500 does. You can see it on scopes and you can see it with your eyes.
Why it does it I don’t know but it does it.
But I’m still left with the nagging feeling that it isn’t a mistake but something that was done to enhance some other part of the cameras performance.
Maybe the reason it took so long fix is it was hard to do it without breaking something else.
The fact that its in the yellow green part of the spectrum is interesting. Especially since that carries the luminance info.
Perhaps too high a voltage to all the green pixels?
Who knows. Maybe you should have just used an daylight filter in the filter wheel.

On another matter I’m not sure why I should be fiscally punished for your mistake. As I said before all I did was buy the camera. You built it and sent it out with a problem.
If you really cared about your customers you’d pick up the shipping to fix a problem like this. But obviously you don’t.
Good luck in your future endeavors as this will assuredly be the last Panasonic camera I buy for a long, long, time.

[David Hudson]

Just an aside.

I really thought Yamada san had made more changes at Panny NA but I guess not.

You’re still too slow. Sony is ur house eaten all ur food!

[David Hudson]

If I want my 5600k preset to be 5600k exactly? What kind of newspeak is that?

As per your last post I thought this was a software issue in the DSP. Now they’ve got a kit they’ve got to install. OMFG. How about just puting in a whole new correct vision block and dsp.
Thats probably what it really needs.
This is a warranty issue I’ll be happy to take it to a local center but if it’s got to go to you in Jersey its on your dime. No excuses or you can have the whole camera back. No BS.

What about the noise issue as compared with the 200A?

I’m really tired of the BS.
Act like a real professional company or suffer the consequences.

This is all in public now no PMs

[David Hudson]

The noise is not just in the outside shots and I’m not complaining about the noise per se just the fact that their cheaper camera may be less noisy than their more expensive camera. I know they’ve probably done this to keep pace with the Sony ex-1 to whom I assume they were losing sales. But still if the tech was available so quickly to fix the 200 you would think they would have incorporated it into the 500 from the get go.

Sorry I’m a little under the weather today and I had to cancel a shoot because I’ve got a bad cold. So my so called thought processes may not be up to snuff.

The 2x is almost always worth it. Baykeh was just a joke relating to the fact that under some situations the Bayer filter on the ccd can cause some odd looking backgrounds on teleshots. It usually shows up as the foreground object being in focus and the background looking like a series of diagonal lines. It happens alot when you’re shooting outside and you have a lot of small objects like leaves in the background.
It was a joke relating to the quality called bokeh that is the quality of out of focus images so prized by the Japanese that they invented the term. Leica still camera lens have what is considered the best. Panavision and zeiss have it in spades in movie camera world.

[David Hudson]

Sure you can work around it. You can carry a 5600 balance around all day in one of the a/b slots but why should you have to.
The camera should work as advertised. There will be many times when you’re shooting as a pro that you’ll need all the white balances you can get. Indoors, outdoors, mixed tungsten daylight
,mixed flour tungsten, and all in the space of about 20 minutes.
And you have to ask yourself as I have many times why would they let them leave the factory this way. I’ve heard all the explanations my favorite being they balanced them under the wrong lights at the factory which if you think about it too long is almost as frightening as it is laughable.
Oh and When you get your 500 flip on the 2x and shoot something at the tele end of your lens with an out of focus background stopped down and tell me how you like the bokeh. Or should I say Baykeh.

Now you’ll probably hear people chiming in about all the other problems with other cameras like the Sony etc. but like your mother says just because everyones doing you shouldn’t do it too.

bon chance mon ami