Thanks for posting this.
For a while now I've held the belief that all this excitement over cameras means little if the optics on the front of the camera isn't upto snuff and as you've said here, good glass can make the world of difference.
I've put my EX1 up against our FS100 with the kit lens. At the long end of the lens there is nothing in it picture wise and because of the ergonomics I'd take the EX1 over the FS100. That might change with a good, fast zoom on the FS100.

Bob.

Thats good to know. Nice.
Been looking around for a while for practical f2.8 or better zoom. This lens gets great reviews. Its a good focal range too for crop sensors. Wide to tele through the 50mm mark.

Just a side note: Do lenses have to be expensive?
Well i was trawling around ebay the other week and found a TAMRON SP 28-80mm ADAPTALL 2 fit. Thinking to myself, i already have an adaptall 2 to nikon adapter, this would fit on my FS100 with the MTF NEX to Nikon. Anyway, won the lens and its actually a very practical zoom. Cost - £15. :)
Well, no where nearly as good as yours! its f3.5 to f.4.2, but its a super lens for the money. I get a warm fuzzy feeling inside when i shoot with it.. lol.

Paul.

While of course it's difficult to even compare the heavily ramping kit lens of the FS100 with the truly ENG-style, servo-zooming, parfocal EX1 lens - I must say the SEL18200 lens is great for what it costs.

The most positive thing about it great image stabilization. And as for ramping, what I do while shooting outdoors in full light is set the aperture to F6.3 (the max speed at tele end), and use my Heliopan vario-ND filter as the main exposure control. Ramping is not a problem anymore!

And even at F6.3, with the S35 sensor I can still get nice and shallow DOF (but deep enough to make maintaining the critical focus much easier than with faster & fully opened lenses, which I only use for those beauty shots with the tripod).

That said, F6.3 is not fast enough for the low-light - but even there, the virtually no-noise FS100 is usable with this lens...

Piotr

Bob,

I am really interested in your EX1 vs FS-100 experience. The EX-1 has a half inch sensor which used to seem huge but now is dwarfed by the larger sensors of DSLRs and camcorders such as your FS-100. The EX-1 can do an f-stop of 1.9 however as compared to the 3.5 to 6.3 range of the FS-100. So the question is how does a half inch sensor at 1.9 compare with a much larger sensor at 3.5 or greater? In my case, with the DSLR, the sensor is much big but since it is A 16 megapixel image and in video mode, the camera is only using a fraction of these pixels, the light gathering surface is nowhere near as big as the sensor size would suggest. That means that the larger sensor has an effect on depth of field, but not nearly as much on video noise. Add to that that an EX-1 has three sensors whereas an FS-100 has one, with the one surface being shared between RGB receptors. It makes sense to me that your not seeing the huge improvement in image that everybody is raving about.

Laurence,
you've very well summed up the technical reasons why in lowish light I've found nothing much between the the FS100 and the EX1. For what I mostly shoot the EX1 is still the best fit. I could shoot on our PMW 350 but as great a camera it is unless you're a full time cameraman it is not an easy camera to live with.

One event I shot recently had me standing beside the camera, on the oppiste side to the viewfinder, no way to get my eye close enough to the viewfinder to really judge focus. I blew a few shots as a result. I really should have put witness marks on the focus ring :(

Bob.

I've been using the DSLR exclusively for months now because of my Z7 being in for repair. With the kit lens on the DSLR, the Z7 is actually quite a bit nicer in low light in spite of the 1/3" sensor size. With a 1.8 prime on the DSLR that totally changes. I get an image in low light that is just incredible. No zoom, tripod only...but wow! I've only played with the 2.8 Tamron but I have a shoot next week. It should be very good. These local ads that I do are so low budget that I really can't justify spending time setting up lights so the low light capability is essential. You need to be able to walk in with just a camera and a tripod and get everything you need in an hour or two. No setup, just available light. Here's the latest:

https://vimeo.com/46064085

Isnt it true though that with decent glass, the FS100 is *way* ahead of the EX1 in terms of low light and with its extremely low noise figures. Categorising the FS100 as the same as the EX1 is not really accurate unless you use the stock kit zoom lens - which is frankly reducing the camera to a level that its not even worth it. (sorry megabit, i know its working well for you, no offense mate).
I have the V1, its tripple chip, 1/3 inch. Goes down to f1.6 And its not even close to the sensitivity / clean look from the FS100 with say a 1.8 lens on it.
But, because of the practical ability to zoom from 35mm to 720mm in one go, and the ergonomics of the V1, I do still use it and did so the other day for a shop opening video. The image is simply not as clean as the FS100. But its speed of use, size, weight etc did make it the right choice for that job.
I think you need to look at the whole deal, not just how dim can my lights be. That's an important factor for sure, but not everything. The job dictates the camera to use. Would i use the V1 for a nature shoot, feature or music video - absolutely not. I would have time to change lenses.
Paul.

I agree with Paul in 100%.

Also used to have the V1, now have the EX1 and the FS100. Both cameras have their areas where they are just better tools to use - but the low-light and noise characteristics of the FS100 is a legue of its own.

And Paul - I do use various glass with mine, too. I have a nice collection of vintage Canon FD glass, which is absolutely amazing (all F1.4 primes, plus the F3.5 35-105 zoom). If I was talking about the kit lens was because this thread is about something similar :)

Piotr

I have a Nikon 18-105mm which is the kit lens for the Nikon D7000. Like other Nikon kit lenses, it ranges from 3.5 to 5 depending upon the zoom. I do like the extra throw outdoors and for the most part don't care about narrow slices of depth of field outdoors. I'm thinking about getting the new 18-300mm and just using that outdoors with an variable ND and using the Tamron 2.8 indoors where I need to gather every scrap of light, and where you are never zooming in more than 30 feet or so. For ads, I really like going in with one camera for both stills and video. You could never do something on the DSLR like a kids soccer game. It would just fall apart on so many levels.

"You could never do something on the DSLR like a kids soccer game. It would just fall apart on so many levels. "

Indeed. Trying to use what really is a digital film camera for ENG/EFG is just not going to work.
The sweet spot for events etc is the 3 chip 2/3" cameras and I have to say the PMW 350 is an extremely capable camera and the kit lens is again pretty darn good. Of course with better optic, wow. That camera is incredibly cheap for what it is but once you add the top shelf glass the cost of the camera just isn't such a big thing anyway.

We picked up an Arri 11-110mm T2 zoom, barely used, for $2,000. Lovely piece of glass and it is T2 right though the zoom range. New they're about $12K. Only problem and reason it was so cheap is it only covers S16. Arri's 16.5-110mm T2.6 S35 Master Zoom is around $65K, cough, cough. Of course lenses made for DLSRs are considerably cheaper however they bring their own issues and you need to be careful with older glass especially wide lenses as you can run into problems with sensor shading. Many cameras today can compensate for the vignetting but at the cost of edge noise.

Bob.

As I play with this lens more, all is not perfect. It's heavy, big enough that it shades the buil in flash enough to make it useless unless I Use my Alan Wong diffuser. The lens also shades the focus assist light which I've grown to like. The VC stabilization works very well but it is loud and picked up by the mic. Autofocus is useless in low light which surprises me because the Nikon lens autofocuses in the same light much better even though it is slower and less well exposed on video or stills. The lens is way heavier than my Nikon lens.

I really am looking forward to getting my camcorder back from repair. There are so many things about it that I took for granted: smooth 60i fluid motion. More fluid 30p motion due to the motion blur. Selectable areas of the screen for auto-irising, slow response auto-irising. Useable video autofocus. Zebras, peaking. Decent audio preamps with limiters. Easy white balance setting. Built-in ND filters. Top handle. Motorized touch sensitive zoom. Lanc.

Just another quick update. This lens not only does a larger f-stop across the zoom range, but it also does a smaller f-stop: f-32. I started reading about very small f-stops and how they reduce resolution. I saw one reference to using this to get rid of moiré. After trying it out last night and more in depth this morning I must say that it works quite well. On this new lens, if I set it for infinite focus with an f-stop of somewhere between f-22 and f-32, the moiré and aliasing all but disappear. This is because the prism effect of the small aperture is blurring the video slightly. On a sixteen megapixel image this would be too soft I'm sure, but on a 1920 x 1080 image it looks great. No visible softness at all. This is another advantage of this lens. The original kit 18-55 still had quite a bit of moiré at f-22 (I still had some tests on file), but on this lens f-22 is sufficient. From a photography point of view I guess you could look at this as a detriment of this particular lens: that it is already soft at f-22, and it would be for still photos. For video, this detriment is a feature though, and one that I will use regularly at least on wide architectural shots.

There's a profound discussion about diffraction limit and helpful calculators here.

Bob.

Thanks for this link Bob. What is a 1920x1080 picture in megapixels? I want to feed that number into the calculator.

Edit: OK, if I multiply 1920x1080 I get that 1080p is just a hair over 2 megapixels. If I put 2 megapixels into the calculator it tells me that The range of onset for mt 1.6 crop Nikon camera is between f/19.2 and f/28.7. What that tells me is that choosing an f-stop number in this range is going to reduce the quality of the image coming through the lens to something near the equivalent of 2 megapixels, which is exactly what I want to do to reduce effects of moiré on my HD video image. Thus a lens that can do f/32 wouldn't be of much use in photography where your effective resolution would be reduced to 2 megapixels, but it would be very useful for eliminating moiré artifacts on a brick wall. My tests this morning would back this up. Moiré seemed to be gone in the f/22 to f/32 range, which is almost exactly what you would expect from this article.

So how will I use this? When I have to shoot wide shot of a brick wall/siding/shingles etc, I will just dial in an f-stop somewhere between f/22 and f/29 knowing that the reduced resolution will blur the image to the point where moiré won't be an issue, but there will still be plenty of resolution for a sharp 2 megapixel HD video image. With the DSLR, the shots that really drive me nuts are the wide architectural ones. They are outside where there is plenty of light and I actually want everything to be in focus, so this is a good trick to use for these shots.

1920 x 1080 / 1000000 = 2.0736

2.073600 according to my calculator.

I *think* what you should aim for is the point where you are just at the diffraction limit for 1920x1080.

Bob.

Well it's a gradual curve and it hits the reds befor the blues. This morning was overcast and the range from about f/22 to f/32 looked both moiré free and very sharp. I'm tempted just touse f/32 just to be really safe. I also did some quick camera moves from very close to very far and focus was very good at both extremes. The movement also looked very smooth which would make sense because stopped down the shutter speed would be slower and give more motion blur. I'm not sure about how much that is the case though.

It seems a bit strange to buy a fast lens and then stop it down to f32.

Perhaps all you need is a pin-hole :)