Yup, I'm calling you out

BEFORE WE BEGIN:

I have nothing but respect for the manufacturers. Researching, developing and launching new products in such a changeable and unpredictable market is far harder than most of us can probably imagine. They rely on our word of mouth to generate interest and of course sales. Play that game wrong and you will generate a hackload of bad blog wordcounts which will hurt sales. This is exactly what has happened with Zacuto’s somewhat bewildering EVF announcement. I’ve been tracking Steve Weiss from Zacuto patiently trawling the blogs countering assertions from perplexed bloggerati fighting a rearguard action I bet they’ve never had to fight before. It’s hard to have much sympathy for a company which can charge £299 for a glorified magnifying glass but, you know what, that’s an example of where being first to market in a new industry paid dividends and that’s just sound business. Right now though, it’s all a little different. And so to this episode of ‘El Skid Shoots his fat mouth off.’

What am I? I am expensive.

Were you to wander around the rain-soaked streets of Kilburn last night you’d have heard the bone-chilling sound of a British blogger chewing his fingers off in a desperate bid not to write this post. I don’t want to write it, I don’t want to give it the time, I ought to just let it go but that prickly itchy charity mugger behind my retina is the newly announced Zacuto EVF and it’s been niggling me for a full 24 hours now. I have a policy of not simply jumping on the latest news bandwagon announcing stuff that you’ll find on every other site because… well what’s the point, seriously? This is different though. I was there when Brian Valente broke out the Redrock EVF for the first time. Not in public, but behind closed doors in the media room, at the PhotoCine Expo. Then I watched in disbelief as Zacuto’s terrifying social media machine ground into life to repair what I can only presume they thought of as damage: Redrock got there first… I’m not going to name any names but if I read ‘Twitter hugs’ one more time I’m going to shoot myself. That’s the kind of shit you grow out of seconds after gulping down your first breath of placenta free-air. It’s not the language you use to engage a community of smart, self-empowered imaging pro-ams with your premium product range. Zacuto is pitched as the top marque on the block. I wouldn’t expect it from Aston Martin. Would you? What is impressive is how quickly Zacuto mobilised the troops to get their product video shot and up online, it’s just a shame it came across as such a scrambled rearguard marketing wet fart. Listen, I don’t dislike Zacuto, not at all, I just find them infinitely lampoonable, and, as a blogger, well that’s my stock in trade.

Twitter hug Mr. Bond?

Anyway, enough of the communication critique, what about the product? Well, first of all, there actually isn’t a product yet, so there’s nothing to write about. Brian Valente at least had the good grace to bring a working prototype to the table, and not just an empty box where the monitor will go. To be fair to Zacuto, they do at least own up to this in the video. The thing is, until there actually is a product, it’s not news. Right guys, I’m going to make a 5D with 1080 RAW output and a built-in flamethrower and here’s a picture of me with an old 5D which should be all you need to guarantee that it’s going to be on the shelves before you know it. Oh wait, that’s actually worth as much as yesterday’s soiled under-garments (actually in Japan they… um, no let’s not go there).

Redrock EVF - believe it when we see it, but they were first.

Oh, what the hell, let’s let them have their day and assume they can get this thing into production, what are we looking at? Well first off – ‘Zacuto is changing the game again!’ whatever that means. Hurlbut talks a lot about DSLRs being a game changer. Well, he’s right. The Zacuto Z-Finder was a genuinely innovative product, first in class. This EVF is not. The marketing department is getting a little excited again. This product is designed to get the camera rig as close as possible to a traditional ENG style unit, with the weight in line with the rods, over the shoulder so the unit is balanced. They make a big play about this in the video, and we’ve all struggled with unstable rigs due to the need to offset the camera for work with a viewfinder. I’ve been banging on and on about this for a year now, and within ten minutes of owning my own shoulder rig I discovered that mounting the follow focus on the right hand side, with the weight taken by your left hand gave you not only much more stability, but meant you weren’t constantly swapping hands to operate the major controls of the camera, all of which live on the right hand side of the unit. That took me ten minutes to work out, and yet, not once have I ever seen Zacuto propose that as a potential solution to instability. Hey ho, they’re the experts, right?

We just got Photoshop

Let’s look at the specs:

• Actual 16×9 screen
• 800×480 resolution
• .087 dot pitch
• Focus Assist
• Iris Assist
• HDMI loop through
• Operates off Canon LP-E6 Camera battery (1/2 day power)
• Includes a hot shoe mount or optional articulating arm kit.
• Can mount to other manufacturer’s rig (RedRock, Cinevate, Letus, etc.) via 1/4 20 screw, 15mm rod or articulating arm
• All Z-Finder models snap on and off the EVF and can be used interchangeably between the camera screen or EVF screen
• Includes mini HDMI cable
• Professional grade construction
• 12 volt external power

I’m a little confused by the ‘actual 16×9 screen’. In the product photo the screen shows the output from the camera, which isn’t 16×9, so are they squashing the image? The shape of the Z-Finder mount isn’t 16×9 either, designed, as it is, to fit round the camera’s screen. Which isn’t 16×9. So, what does ‘actual 16×9′ actually mean and how are we actually going to be able to view it.

This is a monitor, Marshall 5 inch. Fantastic product.

Focus assist – I believe that’s peaking, which is good. Iris assist – eh? What help do I need with my iris exactly? I think they mean ‘exposure’ assist, which, from the video is likely to be a false colour filter of some sort, which, again, is good. The HDMI loop-through is a great feature, and probably the best part of this unit, allowing you to loop to a second monitor, or a Teradek Cube for wireless monitoring. A real killer feature would have been an in-built HD-SDI converter but that would have added significantly to the cost of course! You get a mini-HDMI cable with the unit (I should bloody well hope so) and it’s ‘Professional’ grade construction (which should help to distinguish it from all those amateur grade products Zacuto keeps inflicting on us). It powers off Canon batteries – I’m kind of caught in two minds about this, those batteries are expensive and I have no idea what ‘half a day’ means in terms of performance – I work long days, surely better to just tell us how many hours guys? Plus, what about the growing army of Panasonic and soon to be Nikon shooters (note to self AA batteries are brand agnostic). They’re envisaging you mounting this thing with an articulating arm – better yet, the much vaunted Zamerican but having used those arms in the field I can tell you this, they always unwind on you. My bet is you’ll spend your whole time having to tighten up your mounting point to the monitor. That’s the inevitable fact of life with articulating arms, and it seems a slightly sketchy solution to a viewfinder mount (compare the Redrock which clamps via a rod). I would hope that the monitor can flip the image too, though there’s no indication that it can, only because, according to the video the cable attaches on the left giving you a nice loop out beyond your shoulder, ideal for hooking onto stuff as you pass, surely it would have been better to attach the cable on the right hand side?

I have nothing to write here, it's pretty self-explanatory

But the real kicker with the Zacuto EVF is that ‘it works with your existing Z-finder’ [P. Bloom] as they share the same mounting platform. Ergo the monitor screen must necessarily be the same size (or very close to) the size of the screen on the back of your DSLR. Hang on a second, rewind, rewind, rewind. My existing Z-Finder? But I don’t own one. Oh right, I need to buy one of those as well? Got it. So, your EVF is not an EVF at all, it’s a monitor, one with a very small screen, which can be used to form part of ‘an EVF system’. Might have to look up the trade descriptions act here but a monitor is a monitor, not an EVF. Moreover, this monitor is essentially a beefed up, devolved version of the camera’s own screen and a particularly bulky one at that. I’ve had a chance to use the 5″ Marshall monitor last week and there’s no doubt, a lightweight low-profile monitor for DSLRs is fantastic, but would you ever really use the Zacuto as a monitor on its own? After all, the whole point about the Z-Finder was that it blew up that tiny screen and gave you a great big image to judge focus with. It’s all a little confusing team Z.

Did anyone ever actually think this was a good idea? How do you see the monitor when you're pulling focus?

The price: estimated at $775 for the monitor and you’ll need another $395 for a Z-finder pro 2.5. Total $1,170. The Redrock offering will come in at an estimated $595. Neither of these companies are ready to ship these products so it’s going to be interesting to see how that one turns out and, with this industry moving so fast it’s got to be hard designing products and getting them to market when the market appears to be gearing up to jump ship to the large-chip camcorders. This Zacuto spec list, and the accompanying video smack of a knee-jerk reaction to gazump a competitor’s glory at being first to the punch. None of it quite adds up to a well  thought-out product and it’s pretty easy to pick holes in the proposition. If I were Zacuto I’d put my hands up and say, you know what, we were trying to piss on Redrock’s parade, but can you blame us? Oh, and by the way, we’re going to stop throwing Twitter hugs around and start treating you like grownups for a change. Oh, and we understand that you’re not made of money and we’re going to work harder to bring you products you can afford.

f*&%ing Twitter Hugs

I will probably get a ton of shit for writing this article, but I’m not attacking the product so much as the idiotic way it’s been brought to our attention. It’s all been just a little, well, childish. I genuinely believe that Zacuto wants to make brilliant products, but I just never get the sense that they go out in the field and use them for hours and hours at a time, understanding the crap we have to put up with, they’re just too obsessed with their image, their videos, their glossy photos and they’re status as leader of the pack. If they did I think they might derive insights that would enable them to create those killer products that we really do all want. The DSLR community exists because of a value proposition – DSLRs represent incredible bang for your buck, that’s the biggest single reason (not the shallow DOF) why we’ve all invested so much effort in them. While Zacuto continue to ignore this fact the only people we’ll be seeing using their gear are the people who got it for free. Now that actually is value for money – Twitter hugs my tweeps. Shizzle my Zizzle, Steve Wizzle – you know where to find me.

Technorati Tags: Brian Valente, Canon, DSLR, el skid, EVF, Nikon, Redrock Micro, Teradek, Zacuto