So what ever happened to the KineRAW s8 camera from that Chinese mob Kinefinity?
Glad you asked because Dan Hudgins who had a fair bit of technical assessment / input into the KineRAW s35 and KineRAW Mini cameras has been playing with the KineRAW s8p camera.
Want to see what he has been up to? Well here is one he prepared earlier.
The Super8 optical format KineRAW-S8p ™ prototype is still working after about a year of shooting tests with it. These tests were on the new KineCOLOR8 monitoring tables that use analog gain for white balance and range from EI ISO 100 to 800, although the shadows can be pulled up from the raw DNG data so that the effective ISO can be higher or lower depending on the actual grading curve used for each shot.
The main issue that came up was in the night shots the 3.5mm Kowa and 5mm Computar-Ganz lenses were not sharp enough wide open, and the 8mm Schneider 2/3″ video lens did not seem as sharp as some of the R16 movie lenses at its full opening. Development of better fast lenses that are wide angle for the Super8 optical format Digital Cinema Camera would be a goal to getting uniformly good results under poor lighting.
This is a collection of test shots processed during the development of DANCINEC.EXE ™ v0.09, changes made and adjustments might be able to reduce shadow noise visible in some of these tests, I plan on shooting under slightly better lighting conditions with additional lenses such as f/1.0 and f/1.2 zoom lenses to see if the improvements I have made since these shots were made work as well as expected on new footage.
Hit Dan up on CML or his website HERE.
See Kinefinity for when or if the s8p KineRAW camera comes out.
Last word goes to Dan:
I suggested to Jihua (Kinefinity) to change the sensor in the S8 to a faster one and add a mechanical shutter so the results would look like a film camera, not a “strobe like” electronic global shutter, a movie camera shutter gives a soft on/off edge and that softness varies with f/ stop used, so using a mechanical shutter with CMOS sensor gives the best dynamic range, lowest noise, and no jell-o or skew from the rolling shutter which is covered up during readout by the machanical shutter.