Haha thanks! But my intention was to help Sony improve it 😇

I hope so too! Thanks for watching 👍🏻

Thank you! I also love watching long-term reviews from real users.

Agreed, thanks for watching!

Sony is too egotistical and arrogant to even take one iota of advice from This incredible review. Was planning on getting the fx6 but now staying far away.

Honestly, I’d still recommend this camera, if you were planning to get it. It’s by no means perfect but in my opinion it’s still the most versatile camera with the least amount of compromises if you do a variety of different jobs. I agree with everything mentioned in this review but after all there’s probably no camera in that price range I’d buy over the fx6.

☝🏻️ this. I find it odd how some people choose to hear only the negatives and gloss over the parts where I say this is probably the best camera on the market today and I wouldn't trade it for anything under $20k+. No regrets buying it whatsoever and love using it.

Hey glad you liked it, thanks for watching!

haha yeah but I would bet a $100 that it went something like this: "Take this A7SIII and shove it into an FS5. You have three months".

@@shagral shame they gave them the version of A7SIII without the 3.5mm Jack lol

Correction. How can we make this cheaply and make a profit. While putting some awesome functionality on paper

Sony's track record isn't encouraging. Did the FS7 MKII or the FS5 MKII fix all of the horrible things on the V1s of those cameras? A few little things but overall, no. I'm counting on an FX6 MKII that will add a 3.5mm jack to the body, 6K sensor and probably not much else that addresses these very real limitations Greg ranted about. I doubt they will noticeably improve the menus, make the body larger, open gate, improve the horrible monitor or monitor arm, etc. That's just not Sony's style.

Yes, the image and the fundamentals like practicality and reliability make FX6 a great camera. It could be the GOAT if Sony put more time and effort into it. BTW never heard of that Godox thing, will check it out, thx

Awesome, thank you!

Yep, they tend to gloss over these issues to protect their relationship with the manufacturer

Glad you liked it! Thx for watching

Thanks! Glad to hear

Agreed! Plus the E-mount ecosystem is very developed and there are a lot of choices for every price point. No other mount is even close

Thanks!

Very interesting to see what's next from Sony!

Glad to hear that! Thx for watching 👍🏻

Yeah 65% seems about right 😂 Thanks for watching!

SNL is waiting for me 🤣

Yes and the card door opens much wider on the FX9. But the XQD cards are a no-go for me. I'm allergic to proprietary media 😅

Like I said in the conclusion, I would still get an FX6! I love it and no regrets, just wish it was perfect. Canon C70 also wouldn't be a bad choice, but if you have A7iii then you prob have some E-mount lenses so it makes sense to go with an FX6. Thanks for watching, you're probably that 1% female demographic that KZfaq analytics say I have 🤣

Honestly dude, take a look at the Ronin 4D. Sure it's heavy and a little funky, but it's putting out performance on par with Red V-Raptor sensors and you can get the internal raw upgrade. It'll take all your E-Mount lenses with an adapter and the lidar is BEYOND cool for manual focus pulling

Haha thanks!

There's a three letter camera brand that makes just the camera you're describing 😂 personally the last thing I want to deal with is 6k raw files

@@shagral I get you, but amazing for punching in, maybe allow for SSD recording or make the CF express cards more affordable by having more players in the marketplace. I’m not big into RED, but some ppl love them.

@@shagral Sony has yet to unlock the full potential of that 24MP stacked CMOS used on A9. In fact, Sony are still selling/milking the old IMX410 sensors to other camera manufacturers who know they can't get away with 4K60p crop due to its slow readout.

Where there's a will there's a way 😅

Glad it helped you decide. Thx for watching!

Yep, makes no sense. And only for VF (lol?) and HDMI (most pros will probably use SDI). Besides a 2x anamorphic on a 16x9 sensor gives something like 3.5:1 aspect ratio which is ridiculous.... Sony is fixing a problem that doesn't exist (everyone uses an external monitor anyway) while ignoring glaring problems that do exist 🤷‍♂️

Thanks for watching!

Hey, thanks for watching! IBIS is really a photo/hybrid camera feature, you won't find it on any cinema camera from ARRI, RED, Sony etc. There are two good reasons for it. 1) The most important thing for best noise performance is to keep the sensor at a stable temperature, that is why most volume of a cinema camera is occupied by the cooling system (FX6 is the same). The heatsinks must be firmly married to the sensor board, so it cannot move. 2) In professional shooting you want to have complete control of the movement of the sensor. IBIS, even when off, can move when forces are allied to the camera (e.g. it shakes on a moving vehicle), producing unwanted movement and artefacts. Stabilization should be done by proper external equipment. Edit: Sony Burano was just announced and has IBIS, so who knows! Maybe they've solved these issues. I myself would stay away from IBIS anyway. As far as 6K, price and K's are not related, lol. Alexa mini is a 3.2K camera that still goes for $35000 used. FX6 being a full frame 4K camera has big photosites and that's why it's so sensitive to light. I would rather have that than some extra K's that don't translate to better image quality anyway. If you want more K's, buy a RED! They have K's in spades. P.S. it's none of my business of course, but I wouldn't go into debt for a camera unless I had a steady stream of work to make that money back with it.

Thanks! Had fun making this one

I only have the Tilta rig, it is ok but not perfect. I would recommend Wooden Camera or Bright Tangerine rigs if you can afford them.

@shagral oh, actually I used the tilta,but it has some problem to use.. lt is uncomfortable. So, do you recommend bright blabla yeah?

I can't recommend something I haven't used personally, so watch this kzfaq.info/get/bejne/sNqIncSj18iRmJs.html

Glad you think so! Thanks for watching!

Glad to hear it! Thx for watching

Hey thanks for watching & comment! Yeah but Panny will be forever stuck with inferior sensors, buying Sony's last gen leftovers with bad rolling shutter etc. And they too have abandoned a lot of their cameras. Eva-1 has come and gone, there haven't been a Varicam in years... Frankly I don't think they will be around in 10 years. But their firmware game was always strong, that much is true.

@@shagral I had no idea Panasonic's cinema line had degraded so far. Seems weird as they just seem to be finally getting it together in their prosumer offerings. I did have a question for you being such a techy video guy. Just wondering if you knew if there was a technical reason for why sensors with larger pixels seem to perform less bad in extreme low light / high gain scenarios than sensors of the same format with small pixels? Still images it seems higher MP is an advantage to reduce the size of the noise, however for video it appears the footage from higher MP sensors fall apart a lot quicker when gain is applied. Is this just a byproduct of thermal noise, or is there something else in here I'm missing? I watched your great video on this, so get that adding gain is just raising the noise floor and reducing DR. Just been something I haven't seen explained clearly anywhere.

That's a very interesting topic, and a very deep rabbit hole. I read some stuff that made my brain boil. But in oversimplified terms, think of it as gathering rain with buckets. With the caveat that it's super windy and the rain doesn't just fall down, it flies all over the place. In that situation, bigger buckets collect more rain drops in the same span of time. Now each bucket lights up if it collected over a certain amount of water. That is signal. If a bucket caught so little rain it isn't even sure it has any, it produces noise. So a field of bigger buckets has more signal and less noise than the same field of smaller buckets. Back in the camera world, buckets are photosites (pixels) and bigger photosites mean higher SNR. So you want to make them as big as possible within the constraints of sensor size and resolution target you're trying to hit. Studies show that perceptual resolution peaks around 3.2-3.5K That is why the OG Alexa had a 3.4K sensor and still looks sharp and amazing. Enough to say, Alexa mini still goes for $35K used with 8000hours. Name any other digital cinema camera that holds value like that, I'll wait. Now, ARRI budged to Netflix and made a 4.6K sensor to accommodate the 4K mandate in almost every sensor mode. But the physics remain the same. Bigger photosites gather more light and that is why the best camera in the world has like 14 MP. On top of that Alexa has dual gain readout and Peltier element, but that's a whole another rabbit hole. As for high MP sensors, it is true, the noise is smaller and thus less perceptible, but the per pixel SNR is still worse and that is why higher MP sensor produce exponentially more noise when amplified. And then it's the usual downward spiral: higher noise => more NR => reduced image detail with worse color rendition => extra sharpening and saturation => crappy video look. So it may look the same at normal exposure (almost every modern camera does, even an iPhone), but the DR and latitude are worse compared to low MP sensors. Hence the 8K Venice II with about 12 stops of DR, 2 stops less than ARRI's 10 year old sensor and a whooping 5 stops less than their new one. So rest assured, you made the right purchasing decision with A7sIII. Usual disclaimer: it's all much more nuanced than that, bunch of caveats, resolution has its uses, DR isn't everything, yada yada yada... But case in point: K's are for chumps :D

@@shagral thanks heaps for the response. So basically saying the larger pixel sensor has a lower noise floor due to the higher per pixel SNR? Crank the gain, more latitude at the bottom end before you're just amplifying noise? So would this indicate a limitation of relying on downsampling to get you out of trouble when dealing with detail close to the noise floor too? From what I've seen the a7 IV for instance with 7k downsampling at 24fps falls apart well before that of my a7s III at high gain in extreme low light.

First part yes, second part - not exactly. When using digital gain (in camera or in post), you are always amplifying both signal and noise, they are never apart in the digital signal chain. So of course, sensors with higher noise floor have even higher noise when the signal is amplified (and it goes exponentially up with every stop). And latitude decreases as you lose detail & color to noise.

Me too! They claim to listen to the community but by that they usually mean paid ambassadors. Thanks for watching!

Thanks! glad you liked it

That takes like two seconds in post. Annoying, but hardly worth mentioning

Haha thanks Dan, for the sub and the comment! For a good rant the stars must align 😂 I'm usually pretty zen.

Yes I've seen people with that problem on the FB group. Something about contact pins coming out of contact because of mount flex freezes the camera. But I only use native or manual lenses, never had a single issue.

Welcome! Thank you for watching

Right, forgot about that! Everything about playback (or "thumbnail" ugh) is so uncomfortable! But TBH that applies to most cameras out there. The only truly better way is to also record externally on like BM assist and playback there with great UI. But that's not really a fix.

I hate this the most by far

I get what you're saying but I don't really see it as a line up. The "cinema line" is pure marketing, these cameras share very little DNA. FX3, 30 - are pure Alpha cameras. FX9 is PXW line which Sony calls an "interchangeable lens digital camcoder". FX6 is a weird mish-mash of PXW and Alpha. And Venice is the evolution of F5, F55 - the CineAlta line which is the only true cinema camera line they have. These are three separate lines. Also I don't think that "that's how they've always done it" is a good reason to do anything. There is no reason why FX6 should inherit PXW's decrepit UI and wonky accessories. It was a chance to innovate, to update and they were too lazy/cheap to do it. For a lot of people, me included, FX6 was not only their first Sony camera, but first real made-for-video camera. It was an upgrade from mirrorless and a step up from videography into the world of big boy video production. I guess I just expected more from Sony, more quality and attention to detail. And from a Japanese brand to boot. Where is their famed perfectionism? Not in the FX6 for dame sure.

Glad you think so! Thanks for watching

Agree about the menus! Re: shoulder rig, I would say FX6 requires about as much extra add-ons and rigging as an FX3 to get a decent shoulder rig. Out of the box only FX9 is shoulder-ready.

@@shagral but the fx3 doesn't have a ND internally and no side buttons

It's more than 2x bigger, but don't quote me on that. I considered it heavily but the fx9 is an inferior camera in a lot of ways and has a lot of the same issues, making the considerable price jump not worth it.

Yeah sometimes cameras take two steps forward and one step back

That would probably quadruple its cost though

@@shagral downsize it less ports only one screen etc

Proof link? I had zero issues with XAVC-I, nor have I ever seen anyone complain about it. It's the best codec in the business, as far as I'm concerned.

@@shagral Having had access to the white paper (which is not public sadly) I can confirm it is objectively not the best codec in the business. Not even close actually. It’s essentially based on H.264 forced All-I with some modifications. It’s very old and inefficient at this point. This would be fine if it wasn’t for Sony hampering it with a low data rate on the FX6. On the old F55 you used to be able to shoot XAVC-I at about 600Mb/s UHD24/5P IIRC and it worked great for that. XAVC-I from the FX6 is only 250Mb/s at 25P. There’s a reason almost every other manufacturer uses 400Mb/s minimum for their All-I formats in UHD 24/25P in their video-focused prosumer mirrorless cameras and cinema cameras. For context 250Mb/s is considerably less data than ProRes 422LT whilst using a very comparable compression system. FX6 XAVC-I footage shot in a foliage dense environment will very easily demonstrate macro-blocking artefacts even when not pixel peeping at all. Bushes and dense grasses break the codec quite obviously. I’ve also found detail can look muddy even in typical controlled interior shooting scenarios. I actually ran into this on one of my first shoots with the camera. In that situation it was obvious even to people with lesser eyesight on a normal sized computer monitor. The footage looks mushy. I don’t have an uploaded example but it’s very easy to test this yourself if you have a Ninja V. Simply set your camera to XAVC-I and HDMI record trigger to ‘on’ and you can simultaneously record ProRes and XAVC-I and see huge the difference. Many forget you can record regular ProRes instead of ProResRAW using the Ninja V with the FX6 as the video output is 10 bit 422 when set to normal recording modes. I’ve always found XAVC-I looks noisier but that’s actually also a product of the macro blocking I believe. Test it for yourself in a bushy or grassy area and tell me you can’t easily see the difference. The problem is exacerbated with slightly underexposed footage you bring back I’ve found. It’s why I never use XAVC-I on anything that’s getting a proper grade or where IQ is top priority. I was actually talking to an assistant editor from one of the UK’s biggest broadcasters about this as he’d been complaining about it. People raise it in the FB group from time to time but there are a lot of shills and fanboys in there who claim it’s not a problem at all because all they ever film is talking heads as if the camera wasn’t intended to be capable of more than that.

I have the white paper that you're referring to, and indeed the data rates you're listing are accurate. But calling it "crippling" because of "strong artefacting" is just a plain exaggeration. Besides, comparing the FX6 to the F55 is unfair, these cameras are in vastly different leagues, not to mention price points. At that level of pixel peeping, you should be looking at Venice or Alexa, not the FX6. 99% of stuff shot on the FX6 ends up on the Internet compressed to hell, so of course the vast majority of users genuinely don't care (doesn't make them shills or fanboys, it's just practicality). And nobody in their right mind would say that you can't produce beautiful imagery with an FX6. As far as codecs, personally I never want to deal with ProRes or RAW, because I'm the one who'd be paying for the whole pipeline overhead (media, storage, upload etc.) and my clients would never notice the difference. That is why for me, like many others, XAVC is the best bang-for-buck codec. I get 95% of the quality I need, the data rates are manageable and it edits like butter.

@@shagral my point with the F55 was just to illustrate that the codec has been available in stronger variations for almost a decade and as such there’s zero excuse not to implement it as processors have gotten much faster and cheaper in that time. Even if it added $500 of cost to the camera I would have been happy to pay that. In the context of most corporate work I agree that XAVC-I is fine but the situations it’s not good enough do effect everything from documentary to green screen. It also affects your ability to reframe in post, push footage exposure in post etc. due to the macro blocking issue so I’d say it can come up on any kind of work. I am fine with XAVC-SI in the A6700, FX30 etc as those cameras are priced appropriately. It’s the context of the current market that makes XAVC-I in the FX6 such a standout disappointment. No other cameras in its target market or price point suffer with a weak codec. It’s even less acceptable with the FX9. That has zero excuse to not have a better option given it’s cost. In fact I’d expect to see a better codec in any camera over about $2000 dollars from any other manufacturer if you’re keeping up with releases from the past few years. 10 bit 422 400+Mb/s is now the standard and anything less is a serious compromise on the part of the user. Market dominance has allowed Sony to get lazy with their firmware and some of their design work. They could have implemented a higher data rate XAVC-I option. They could implement a 10 bit long GOP codec if they wanted to help people save on data. They could improve the menu design. They just can’t be bothered because they’re too popular at the moment and don’t think they need to try. Look at what Canon has been doing with their cameras via firmware, it is a night and day difference.

Depends on what you need it for. If its for personal use on your own projects then you can save a lot of money buying a great camera towards the end of its cycle. If you want the latests and greatest and rent out your cameras (which makes it an investment) then yeah, it makes sense buying on day 1, otherwise you're not maximising ROI. There are different approaches. But at any rate, just because there's a newer model out, it doesn't make your camera suddenly worse.

Haha, thanks! Both can be true at the same time

Are you looking for group?😂

of what? The frustrated Sony users club? 🤣

@@shagral Dude I have dealt with everything you said haha but same here loved it more than a Komodo, BMPCC, and c70

it's a great little camera!

C300iii and C500ii definitely don't include the AC adapter in the box, which is what I was cross-shopping with. But you're right, I should have been more specific.

Me too! thanks for watching!

Knowing Sony, and how many people wait for basic firmware updates for years without any response.. I fear your hope is pointless. Only thing they will do is sell you a Mark 2 with those updates.

Good point! Panny always provided great video feature set. They had open gate and shutter angle and waveform on the GH line ages ago! Too bad they lost most of their market share.

@@shagral Their market strategy to not have PDAF accelerates their downfall. More importantly they rely on sensors from Sony.

That's exactly what Canon does. They intentionally scatter their best features across like 3-5 cameras, that's why I left Canon. That, and because the RF mount is going nowhere. But in FX6's case I think it was much simpler than that - rushed development and poor internal communication.

You can make it work but Sony definitely didn't make it an easy choice!

Harsh, but I would have to agree!

Not sure how you've arrived at that. Considering FX9 (the $10K camera) has the same crappy handle, monitor and terrible UI and same audio situation.

The easiest way to learn is just take a couple hours with the camera and the manual (download the latest version on Sony's website) and do a complete walkthrough of all the settings. Read what it does in the manual and change accordingly. All the paid guides (like Doug Jensens) are basically reading out the manual to you. And they are outdated now because a lot of stuff has been fixed and added through firmware. 80% of settings are "set it and forget it". The rest 20% you should put on your user menu that goes first in the menu list. And assign custom buttons for the most used stuff - AF controls, slo-mo controls etc. The camera is actually pretty easy to use in the field, a lot of that comes down to built-in VND, shutter angle and user buttons. The only thing that can confuse new people is CineEI. But unless you are using the camera for serious cinematography, you don't need to bother with that, just shoot in custom mode in S-Cinetone.