I am just curious why there are so many refurbished Phase backs out there, compared to the Leaf....
Are they more susceptible to breaking down, or have I just not come across any reurb Leaf deals?
The P30 for 12,999 seems like a good deal however.
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I think before you spend money and most importantly time, the first thing to ask yourself is "will a new camera allow me to do what I'm doing now?".
That's a big one because when sales people demo stuff, they normally show you what it does, but usually don't get too deep in what you do.
So, will 13, 14 or 20 grand more allow you to continue doing what you do?
The next question is will it work? I know this sounds silly and all the reps and dealers will answer with of course it works, but does it work on a 800 to 1000 frame day in 100F weather. Does the color look good or need a bazillion corrections in different processors and is the system reliable and stable. Does the system run hands free or do you have to always lug the 16' string, cart o' rocks and the special cart o' rocks assistant behind you.
Most of all is it stable and intuitive.
Nothing will make your heart stop like a software or hardware crash. Nothing will eat more time, than working around some workflow glitch and something as simple as just processing a few files to send to a retoucher can go from automatic to a 4 hour ordeal if something goes wrong.
When you test a camera, hook it to the computer, fire it to the buffer and yank the firewire cord.
How long does it take to reconnect . . . will it reconnect?
Can you shoot directo to multiple drives, does it backup, are the file sizes manageable?
Shoot 300 files and in the middle of all of this and try to process 4 random selects.
Shoot 200 files with the wrong name and try to rename them.
Go to 4 seperate sessions and apply a new white balnce or tone correction. Do this on 2,000 files.
Now unplug all of your computers and pretend they just broke. Can you still shoot?
In other words build your own worse case scenario and then see if everything works as planned.
The final question is, will it do it better.
Forget pixels, bit depth, because as important as all of that can be if a camera doesn't offer more possiblities of what you can do, then your a lot better off putting those resources in front of the lens instead of behind it.
Now in regards to pixel and bit depth, go work a file hard in post. You know, one of those 45 layered things with masks that allow you to build a unique look.
Does the file hold up?
Once you've made this unique look, ask yourself if there is a way that you could show a client on set how the final is going to look.
Heck, forget showing it to a client, can you just show this final look to yourself?
You may never run into these situations but the moment you think none of the above will apply to you . . . it will.
IMO.
JR