Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K review

Table Of Content

• Built for video from the ground up
• New Photoshop beta adds advanced generative AI features
• Video quality
• Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K review: value, flaws and 4K RAW
• Image quality and audio
• A highly portable, semi-pro 4K video camera that's significantly less expensive than its rivals – what's not to like?

A director can just as easily view footage from the side as the rear. And there will often be a larger display on the camera or on set anyway. It’s not a run-and-gun kind of camera but a tool for carefully prepared shots from a tripod, gimbal, or drone.

Built for video from the ground up

In addition, and probably the most unforgivable thing about the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K - it can die without warning. You can be on a shoot, happily filming with what looks like a quarter of the battery meter full, only to have the camera power down and take the footage you were capturing with it. This should be addressable in a software update, and we really hope Blackmagic is able to do something about it.

New Photoshop beta adds advanced generative AI features

The Pocket Cinema Camera 4K is the second camera in the Pocket Cinema line. The original Pocket Cinema Camera shoots resolutions up to HD in RAW or ProRes and did actually fit in some larger pockets, though not with a lens attached. This new camera, on the other hand, wouldn’t fit in a giant’s pocket. It’s a big, clunky camera.The Pocket Cinema Camera 4K has a 5-inch touchscreen and the industry-leading menu and operating system, the Blackmagic OS.

Video quality

This Pyxis will certainly record to SSDs plugged into the USB port. A lot of people will use it like that and then plug the drive into a computer to edit directly off the same drive. Yes, and the BS1H has almost none of the pros you mentioned earlier.

Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K review: value, flaws and 4K RAW

Its bulbous shape also ensures it is comfortable to hold and not too angular, with easy to access buttons, a dial, some bold air vents and a huge, huge screen on the back vying for your attention. If you want a compact camera that produces great quality photos without the hassle of changing lenses, there are plenty of choices available for every budget. Read on to find out which portable enthusiast compacts are our favorites. The latest Lumix puts a Four Thirds sensor in a full-frame body with boosted AF and a wealth of stills and video capabilities to create a Swiss Army Knife of a Micro Four Thirds camera.

Buttons

Blackmagic PYXIS features a massive full frame sensor with a native resolution of 6048 x 4032. That's almost three times larger than a Super 35 sensor and allows customers to shoot with a shallow depth of field or to use anamorphic lenses uncropped for a true cinematic look. Whether users are shooting in bright sunlight or in almost no light at all, the 13 stops of dynamic range with dual native ISO up to 25,600 provide stunning low noise images in all lighting conditions. At the heart of the Pocket Cinema 4K is a Micro Four Thirds sensor. There's also enough processing power to shoot in 4K at 60fps, and Blackmagic claims the sensor is capable of capturing up to 13 stops of dynamic range. Being very much a video camera first and foremost, there are pro-spec recording formats available, including various compression options of CinemaDNG RAW and Apple's ProRes 422 codec.

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Image quality and audio

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When you consider that the camera also ships with a full licence for Davinci Resolve, an excellent bit of pro video-editing software that costs £239, the Pocket Cinema 4K is quite a bargain. If you want to get serious about video and have a film-making tool that can grow with your skill, this is the new benchmark. Rigging options aplenty, the Pocket Cinema Camera 4K has a standard tripod thread mount at the base with an additional mount where the hot shoe might be on a stills camera, perfect for an external monitor or LED light. Blackmagic has been making cameras for about six years, ranging from small form-factor film cameras through to pro-grade studio cameras, all with a focus on video.

For our twenty-fifth anniversary, we asked camera and lens makers what they believe to be the most significant products of the past quarter century. Above $2500 cameras tend to become increasingly specialized, making it difficult to select a 'best' option. We case our eye over the options costing more than $2500 but less than $4000, to find the best all-rounder.

Ports

But with high-end smartphone cameras getting so good, can they still up your photo game? 7Artisans has revealed a full-frame autofocus 50mm F1.8 lens for Nikon's Z mount. Certainly it won’t flawlessly follow a moving person the way a Sony can. With regards to Braw, there's an increasing number of smaller production units that use a Braw/DaVinci Resolve workflow, many of them users of one or more of the BM Pocket Cinema cameras. The Pyxis is to a large degree a result of a demand from existing Pocket users for a camera with this form factor.

Despite this, the screen doesn’t look washed out per se and its touch interface is comprehensive and responsive. Sounds good so far, but there is one major drawback - it doesn’t articulate, not even a little. Clocking in at 5-inches and with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, the LCD display is about as sharp as an iPhone X’s screen and thankfully, it bright too, helping out in sunny conditions. The two final ports are 3.5mm jacks, one being a mic in and one an audio out, so you can easily monitor levels. The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera should be available globally now, and will set you back around £1,034 in the UK, $1,295 and AU$1,815 in Australia. Stock issues are rearing their heads though, so if you’re unable to pick one up right now, availability should improve throughout the rest of 2018 and the first few months of 2019.

Trying to get your hands on the Fujifilm X100VI Limited Edition? The Conservation Alliance is auctioning one as a fundraiser, bundled with products and services from Peak Design, SmugMug and Flickr. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time camera recently completed by the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory risks making your camera setup seem inadequate.