
Flexicams? Flexible, sure, but not all are re flex. Hybrids? Could be, if you don’t confuse ’em with Priuses or mules. RED Digital Cinema likes the term DSMC-Digital Stills & Motion Camera-perhaps due to its similarity to USMC (United States Marine Corps) and the militaristic connotations thereof. HDSLR? EVIL? Is there a term that describes both? Some call ’em DILCs: Digital, Interchangeable Lens Cameras. What they are is EVIL: Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens cameras. No mirror, no reflex: these aren’t HDSLRs. Cameras like the GH1 do without the mirror their viewfinding is always “live” from the sensor, just like on most compact digital cameras.
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Add video capability, and you get VDSLR, which sounds like an unfortunate social disease (indeed, some professional imaging pros would argue that this moniker is perfectly appropriate) HDSLR-high-definition SLR-is less pejorative, and thus preferred by aficionados.Īll fine and well… as long as the camera is an SLR. When a solid-state sensor is put in the film plane instead of, erm, film, the result is the digital SLR: DSLR. In The Beginning… there was the SLR: the single-lens reflex camera: “reflex” meaning that a mirror is employed to divert the light through the lens to a viewfinder “single lens” because the taking lens is the same as the viewing lens (as opposed to twin-lens reflex cameras like the Rolleiflex). Terminology: there’s no single, commonly-used, entirely-accurate name for this whole class of cameras: large-sensor, interchangeable-lens still cameras with video-recording capability. The GH1 steers around some of the pitfalls of its competitors, falls into some new pits all its own, and points to the future of the versacam category. The 5D and 7D are the “industry standards” of HDSLR video as it stands today. The D90 pioneered the field, for which kudos are due Nikon, but this primitive pioneer serves as a warning to the unwary about most of the things that can go wrong when a still camera is repurposed for video.

Others reject them out of hand for their technical shortcomings and unsuitable ergonomics. Some proclaim them the revolutionary future, doing to RED what RED did to the industry before it: bring large-format, shallow depth-of-field motion imagery to the masses at a price point previously inconceivable. Hybrids, HDSLRs, VDSLRs, EVILs, DSMCs, DILCs? There’s as much confusion about what to call these highly-affordable, large-sensor, interchangeable-lens, video-capable still cameras as there is about their actual usefulness. Art Adams wrestles a fully kitted-out Canon 5D Mk II with 85mm f/1.2 Canon prime.
