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Dragon vs Epic-W and the sensor cropping

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Viktor Sloth

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Hello out there,

So I was 1 cm away from ordering my upgrade from the Epic Dragon, to the Epic-W Helium camera, when I realised something with sensor cropping.

I use slow motion a lot in my work, and my Dragon can do slow motion at it's maximum resolution. 6K 75fps. It's great! I understand the Helium is not capable of doing slow motion at 8K, so i'll have to go down to 6K in order to shoot slow motion. Which is fine, but will it then crop the sensor? Because that would be a major issue for me.

Now I can clearly see how the quality changes when I step it down from 6K to 4K, so i'm wondering if I would have the same feeling when I go from 8K to 6K?

headache!
 
Viktor,
It is probably not so obvious as it looks. Helium is a new sensor tech and different (cleaner) than dragon. While you definitely loose some physical area I´m not sure the Dragon 6K high speed images would be superior to the 6k Helium. Epic-Ws pop up at many places these days, why don´t you just rent and test for yourself?
Cheers

Ulf
 
Viktor Sloth said:
Hello out there,

Now I can clearly see how the quality changes when I step it down from 6K to 4K, so i'm wondering if I would have the same feeling when I go from 8K to 6K?

headache!
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat,
it's the only thing stopping me from upgrading to Epic-W 8K,
Only thing stopping me from Helium 8K is that extra $ vs paying for itself in a small windowed world of updates required for every piece of kit these days.
 
Viktor Sloth said:
Hello out there,

So I was 1 cm away from ordering my upgrade from the Epic Dragon, to the Epic-W Helium camera, when I realised something with sensor cropping.

I use slow motion a lot in my work, and my Dragon can do slow motion at it's maximum resolution. 6K 75fps. It's great! I understand the Helium is not capable of doing slow motion at 8K, so i'll have to go down to 6K in order to shoot slow motion. Which is fine, but will it then crop the sensor? Because that would be a major issue for me.

Now I can clearly see how the quality changes when I step it down from 6K to 4K, so i'm wondering if I would have the same feeling when I go from 8K to 6K?

headache!
Click to expand...
I don't know what you do and do not know, so I apologize if I say something you already know. :) You can get some level of higher frame rate at full resolution and then you must lower the resolution to increase the frame rate. It is the vertical height / resolution that is the limitation. All of the Red cameras / sensors have done this. With each sensor, the resolution has gone up and the pixel size has gone down.

EPIC-W and Weapon Helium are similar cameras. The difference, and price, comes at processing power. This includes things like higher frame rate and / or lower compression to name a couple. For some, they can use the EPIC-W day-to-day and then rent when they need higher frame rates.

I think, just pulling this out of my fourth point of contact, that they knew 8K was important and so was S35 coverage, so they had to go smaller pixels to achieve both.

Just a side note. When the UHD spec was created, it covered not only 3840x2160, but also 7680x4320. I think these numbers are here to stay. 8K (easier to write than QUHD) is a lot of data to move. For the new Dell 8K display you need to not only use dual DP 1.4, but they also use Display Stream Compression. Just goes to show the sheer amount of data that is 8K.

I mention all of the above to provide some background on frame rates and 8K. The Weapon VV and Weapon Helium are limited to 60p at full height and 75p if you shoot at 2.40:1, which is reducing the height as I previously mentioned.

Astro was showing (not actually running) an 8K camera that had a 16K sensor for oversampling last NAB (2016). 8K is the maximum output resolution. Not sure if that is 8192 or 7680. I suspect 7680 They said it was around $1,000,000 for the camera. A million dollars for an 8K camera. When you think about that, EPIC-W is a steal!
 
Viktor Sloth said:
Hello out there,

So I was 1 cm away from ordering my upgrade from the Epic Dragon, to the Epic-W Helium camera, when I realised something with sensor cropping.

I use slow motion a lot in my work, and my Dragon can do slow motion at it's maximum resolution. 6K 75fps. It's great! I understand the Helium is not capable of doing slow motion at 8K, so i'll have to go down to 6K in order to shoot slow motion. Which is fine, but will it then crop the sensor? Because that would be a major issue for me.

Now I can clearly see how the quality changes when I step it down from 6K to 4K, so i'm wondering if I would have the same feeling when I go from 8K to 6K?

headache!
Click to expand...

I actually find that my Epic-W Helium at 6K 75 fps compared to my old Dragon at 6K 75fps is hard to tell apart quality wise (even though the Epic-W is "windowing in on the sensor" with that framrate.)
I had the same worries before pulling the trigger on the upgrade but now I'm happy I did. The Epic-W is so much better in many aspects.
The only problem I had was finding wide glass for high framerate shots in 6K because of the changed FOV. Using good S35 or APS-C glass with 6K Helium works like a charm.
 
Last edited:
Matt Hardy said:
What lenses do you use when you speak of wide angles?
Click to expand...

Canon 11-24mm f/4 or Sigma 12-24mm f/4 are pretty good non-cine options to start. You might want to use lower ISO and compression when dropping the resolution to 6K or less to avoid noise/grain. I use slowmotion also a lot and the 6K FOV is not as bad as I was thinking at the start.
 
Sigma makes the 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6 DC HSM FLD AF for about $700 which is rectilinear and a pretty good lens.
 
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