Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by mano price offering you high quality cables at everyday low prices all with a lifetime warranty monoprice also has adapters keyboards headphones and even gaming monitors click the link in the description for more information or visit monoprice comm excellent about five months ago I got this new little 4k camera the panasonic lumix lx7 to review it ASAP at the time you can't really review a camera like this without using it for a while so I held off at the time being and the holidays rolled around and that was a blur then there was CES right after that where I actually used this camera pretty extensively for my CES coverage but those were other videos not a review on this camera then there was February and March where I'd Emily recall focusing my efforts on the ongoing arctic panther epic water-cooled build as well as setting up a website for myself so I could have a home base and a store so people could support me by picking up a high-quality shirt like this one link in the description but what now well let's be honest here I am a self-taught camera person for the most part especially when it comes to still photography so if you want the full treatment I will direct you to some real reviews of this camera that I found very helpful in my personal research so in the description there are also links to lx100 videos by dave dugdale the camera store TV and digital revenue all very good videos today's video is going to focus on why I chose the LX 100 how I use the LX 100 specifically for video and I'm also going to be covering some of the accessories that I've gathered together to kind of aid me in my one-man mobile video production tasks but let's start with a quick lx100 overview I think of this as kind of a prosumer pointed shoot with full manual capabilities for about 800 bucks US street price right now it is small but it is still larger than most pointed shoots it's got a producer lens and it's got quite a bit of heft this thing just feels really really solid they've actually wedged a lot of stuff into this pretty small housing and it shares a lot with the gh4 it's kind of big brother in the DSLR space vital stats include a large 16 megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor the same one from the gh4 although the LX 100 doesn't make quite as much use of it it only goes up to about 12 point 7 megapixels there's an aspect ratio Oh switch right up here that will crop the sensor to your desired aspect ratio but since I primarily shoot in sixteen by nine I really haven't used that a whole lot the lens is fixed which is to be expected in a camera the small but you'll find a lot of praise and the reviews for this configuration many of the reviewers have compared this lens to DSLR lenses that cost upwards of a thousand dollars focal range is 24 to 75 millimetres main it can do pretty wide angle with a little bit of telephoto it's not going to do like a super zoom but it can zoom in a little bit the aperture can go super wide F 1.7 at 24 millimeters and it only goes onto F 2.8 when you're all the way zoomed into 75 it's really really easy to get a DSLR comparable image with this camera and that wide aperture and large sensor gives you great thin depth of field when you want it macro capabilities are also amazing this camera can get in really close for some nice detailed shots the Alex 100 as previously mentioned shares lots of similarities with the gh4 as well including the Venus engine 4k video recording at 30 frames per second and a host of software features like the live edge detection while recording which makes focusing on the kind of smallish 3-inch 1024 by 768 LCD display a lot easier it's also great for shooting 1080 at 60 fps now that YouTube supports that and I have done at least one video and people said whoo it's nice the motion looks really nice anyway I need to move on here but there's just so many features to mention the aperture dial on the lens feels great it allows for manual control of your aperture the focus ring which actually works well and you can adjust it while one handing the camera in fact one-handed use of this camera is surprisingly easy thanks to the well-placed grips that are on the right side thumb grip here as well as fingers grip up in the front you have control of the shutter speed up at the top here as well as an exposure compensation dial and then other controls which you might not immediately find intuitive if you're a DSLR user but they're not too tough to figure out for ISO and all that other stuff let's see what am I forgetting it's got a viewfinder right here which is okay there's are some reprogrammable buttons here at the back but you can't reprogram everything that's what a lot of reviews also mentioned that we're hoping for a firmware update to this cam which maybe allows you to reprogram some of the easy to hit buttons up here on the top the camera does also have Wi-Fi built-in with NFC for pairing this with a tablet or smartphone just hold it up to the side right here then you can use your tablet or smartphone with the Panasonic camera app to control the camera and you can also do a live view so if your cell feeing yourself you can actually see yourself in that live view since the LCD on the camera doesn't articulate or swing up or anything like that up to twenty-five thousand six hundred ISO range for low-light shooting built in time-lapse function okay I'm going to stop now about the camera overview because the list really goes on and on so considering this range of features answering the question of why I bought this camera sounds pretty straightforward right first of all I wanted a portable camera because I'm always too paranoid to take my Canon 5d Mark to out on trips lx100 isn't exactly a pocket camera but it's way way more compact than a DSLR especially the 5d mark ii next up I wanted the largest sensor possible there's really no substitution for the image quality you get with a large sensor Micro Four Thirds it's about as good as you can get in this size range third the built-in lens solution on this camera is absolutely beautiful it has a wide range of configurations and since I mainly shoot videos about hardware I don't really need the telephoto 24 275 is just fine for me so add in the manual controls and video mode another feature that's really hard to come by in compact point shoot cameras and the 4k shooting mode which has allowed me to dabble in higher res stuff and I knew the LX 100 was my camera as mentioned I got this camera to take on trips and for on-the-go video but I found it pretty useful for some other situations as well the size and the macro capabilities make it great for grabbing quick close-ups without having to pull my mark too off the tripod and I know that I will be using the time-lapse feature built in here very very soon I did want to cover some of the accessories that I picked up for this camera as well starting with my awesome 64 gig micro SDXC cards from Kingston this is model SD CA 3/6 4 GB 64 gigabytes means I can pretty much shoot all day at 1080 or at least be way less concerned about space if I'm shooting in 4k I have a new one here because you know one wasn't enough these are also great for taking on the go because they're waterproof shockproof x-ray proof and temperature proof they have 80 megabytes per second rates which means that they can handle up to 4k by 2k recording 19 megabytes per second reads means fast transfer times when you're copying from this back to your computer and the Kingston brand which means these aren't budget knock-offs so I can actually trust them with my data and of course they do come with an adapter here so if you're using a standard SD camera you can pop them right in if anyone has a GoPro our action camera is similar to it made for rough-and-tumble type work these are absolutely perfect for that also at Kingston's mobile light g4 USB 3.0 card reader which is very portable and small and it handles just about any SD card format the USB 3.0 transfer speeds that means night and day difference from USB 2.0 for transferring with video files if you have a laptop with only a USB 2.0 card reader get one of these if you do video right you you will thank me I also wanted to show you guys version 2.0 of my mobile rig which I first kind of used at CES I still have the large flexible tripod from monoprice down here on the bottom but I've removed those ghetto zip ties in favor of this cheese bar which I'm using kind of as an offset for the camera the connection to the camera and the tripod at the top and then my zoom h1 mic fits at the bottom down here off to the side I've added a little tiny ball head so that I can articulate the mic hanging off there to point at me if I'm narrating or to point at my subject if I'm shooting someone in front of the camera and then there's also a shock mount to reduce handling noise of course I could have put the mic on top here using the camera's flash shoe but I felt that that made it pretty top-heavy and having it lower down on the mic allows me to be able to look at the screen while I'm rambling about whatever I'm shooting into the mics right there so it picks me up pretty well worked or great at CES when my voice was gone and you could actually hear me even though there's lots of ambient noise I find this to be a pretty fun and unique setup and I really like it when I'm walking around at events and I see people with these crazy big camera rigs and tripods and everything I'm like oh I just got this I feel like this has been a very positive video so far and I'm cool with that honestly but there are a few disappointments I've discovered in my time with the lx100 thus far first off there's no discrete mic input meaning you're limited to the in-camera mic which is passable but it picks up a lot of camera hardware noise if you do anything while you're recording like zooming in or out or Juston aperture via the aperture adjustment ring it's going to pick that up internally like an eighth inch input or something would be really nice to have here this is why record sounds separately with my zoom h1 and I sync it up and post I already noted the lack of an articulating or flip up screen on the back like Sony's rx100 mark 3 which would be great for vlogging on the fly shooting anytime you need to like frame yourself up and I can't see the screen the Wi-Fi enabled phone app works around this but it's just a little bit more cumbersome and time-consuming to setup finally since I couldn't find this information anywhere prior to buying the camera I was really sad to learn that there's actually no live HDMI out there is a micro HDMI port yes but it's only use right now is for playback of recorded clips that are saved in the camera because that's something lots of people do right you connect your camera to your TV and watch video straight from the camera I don't know maybe some people do that but I sure don't I really wanted to hook this camera up to a capture card for live-streaming or direct to computer video capture but unless Panasonic or some third-party develop some new firmware it's just not currently possible that makes me sad overall though I am immensely satisfied with the LX 100 despite some of its limitations for me it's about the image quality the fantastic lens the portability and the next-gen features like 4k recording now I will be continuing to use this on my trip to Computex at the beginning of June so stay tuned for that coverage let me know in the comments what you think of this camera and if you have at all been considering the jump to 4k as products like the LX 100 make their way into the consumer space don't forget that that like button as well links to all of this stuff accessories included are in the video description down below subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and as always thanks for watching