Dear brother in arms – lucky owners of Sony PXW-FS7, this post is for you.
As you might know, EcoFilms is working on wildlife a lot. And who needs HUGE focal lengths when filming? Right – wildlife folks! So, as soon as we could update our camera to newest V3.0, we started testing quality of “2K Central Scan” option which multiplies focal length two times. It’s a huge advantage sometimes, but is footage good enough for production?
To fire up this 2x crop you have to go Menu->System->Base Setting->Image Scan Mode and select “2K Center”. By the way I highly recommend keeping “Base Setting” in your “User Menu”, it’s much faster.
We tried out three lenses: Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro, Canon 70-200mm 4.0, Canon 400mm 5.6. All used via Metabones converter.
We tested two first lenses in studio on lens test sheet and 400mm 5.6 both in studio and outdoors. Here is how file list looks. Hope file names are self-explanatory.
I uploaded complete archive though (download archive here), not files separately, saves 1/3 of size. Feel free to comment, let’s discuss the quality.
My opinion is that there is no significant loss in sharpness of picture. Some minor changes in gamma are visible. No extra noise, no artifacts, no light loss. So – it’s good to have this option.
Again, this is a studio test and in real life things usually turn out to be not that nice. Our spring will be all wildlife filming trips one after another, so I hope to be back with field report sooner or later.
