Blackmagic 6K Professional assessment: The funds digicam filmmakers have been ready for

By now, you’ve seen cameras—even these hooked up to smartphones—with specs boasting the flexibility to shoot 8K footage. It’s a formidable quantity and it seems to be nice on advertising materials, and it does turns out to be useful for some particular functions. However for a lot of professional and high-end shooters, it’s nonetheless overkill. Right here is our Blackmagic 6K Professional assessment.

This week, Blackmagic Design launched a brand new mannequin in its Pocket Cinema Digital camera, the 6K Professional. Like the remainder of its siblings, the 6K Professional makes use of Black Magic’s barely odd-looking physique design with a Tremendous 35mm sensor inside and a Canon EF mount (its autofocus DSLR lenses) on the entrance.

The again of the digicam, nevertheless, is the place you’ll discover the largest improve, at the least from a usability standpoint. The brand new 6K Professional now has a five-inch tilting HDR touchscreen show with a 1920 x 1080 decision. It additionally places out 1,500 nits of brightness, which is sufficient illumination that it must be simple to see even in vivid environment. For reference, the iPhone 12 Professional maxes out round 1,200 nits on its brightest HDR setting.

Inside, Blackmagic has outfitted the 6K Professional with the identical shade processing tech present in its IMAX-worthy (and 2020 Better of What’s New award-winning) URSA Mini Professional 12K. The additional decision permits for oversampled 4K footage, which pulls in additional particulars than native 4K. That may turn out to be useful later for enhancing and shade grading.

Along with the sensor itself, the 6K Professional consists of motorized impartial density filters that may block two, 4, or six stops of sunshine coming into the digicam. In the event you’re a nonetheless shooter, this will likely not sound very helpful, nevertheless it’s extraordinarily helpful for video. Capturing with shutter speeds which might be too brief could make video look jittery, which could be cool for John Wick-style motion sequences, however doesn’t actually work in lots of different situations. By decreasing the quantity of sunshine hitting the sensor, impartial density filters permit shooters to shoot at slower shutter speeds and wider apertures, even in vivid settings.

For energy, the 6K Professional attracts on Sony’s NP-F570 batteries, that are extraordinarily frequent and transportable between completely different units within the cinema world. Including the non-obligatory grip ups the capability to 2 batteries for extra-long recording periods. The earlier fashions utilized the frequent Canon EP-L6 cells, which aren’t as versatile and don’t present the identical type of battery life.

Whereas the 6K Professional’s physique is constructed to suit simply right into a cinema rig, Blackmagic additionally sells a detachable digital viewfinder that sits on prime of the digicam to present it a extra DSLR-like kind issue. It comes with 4 interchangeable eye-pieces relying on what the shooter feels most snug with. The finder tilts upward, which makes it appear and feel much like the modular EVF discovered on the unique Fujifilm GFX medium format digicam.

Blackmagic 6K Professional assessment: Remaining ideas

For all that firepower, Blackmagic is asking $2,495 for the digicam physique, plus $495 in order for you the extra viewfinder. The grip will price $145.