I'd never consider ordering anything from a group until after they ship all the initial units sold from their Kickstarter funding.

I think it's probably more common than you may realize for startups to dig into the founders' pockets to recapitalize. Their only obligation to the KS is to deliver the cameras, right? (And to deliver whatever preorders they're taking money for.) I see your concern about borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, but in fact, it's not a closed system. They are likely making a profit on the new orders that would help them catch up and beyond that is the possibility of additional funding once they bootstrap themselves into a position where they're actually delivering product...especially if the camera turns out to be any good.

Anyway, I've already talked about it more than I care about it for some reason. I'm impressed that they're shipping units. Good for them. Who knows what the future will bring.

But if the big complaints about them now are that the product took too long to come out, they're short on money, and now they're trying to cash-flow themselves by taking new orders...well, you just described 99.9% of all startups. (At least the ones that actually deliver a product.)

In fact, it is not true. Startups make it clear that they run on some investment money. Here original statement was that backer money will be fully enough (as many thing were already done and design is almost finished, see initial marketing madness in the backing stage). Backers money ended and now they claim that they are running on their own money, that looks true as they are highly desperate to have some funding via preorders to ship backers cameras. And this is dangerous approach.

I hope that they can get through all this and somehow will bump their sales and solve problems. But I am still pessimist concerning their survival.

Hipsters unite :-)

however, I'd pitch into a fund so Vitaly can have a D16 to review and test.

I definitely won't be making camera reviews in any near future :-)

If they were really serious - how about sending PV a camera for 'review' seems only politically correct 'bloggers' like NFS and PB...

This discussion thread always struck me as kind of odd. This is a forum of -mostly- camera enthusiasts who've banded together to -mostly- reverse engineer consumer cameras to expand their potential and make very cost-effective cinematic machines. So when another group of filmmakers get together to actually create a -mostly- from scratch camera to do something similar, it seems funny that there's a lot of suspicion from this group. I could understand it when it looked like the DB might never deliver on their cameras, but at the moment it looks like they are in fact shipping them out. They might not be as revolutionary as promised and not really my own cup of tea, and they certainly have suffered from a lot of classic startup growing pains, but they have actually built a camera from scratch without the backing of a major company, which is pretty amazing in this day and age.

I'd love to see them get some more cameras out the door and look at some real-world footage. Frankly, PV seems like an ideal community to look at the camera's firmware (open source, right @elle?) and find ways to improve the camera.

Let me guess, the horrible color can be fixed in post, the clumpy grain can be removed with Neat Video, and the blown out highlights add a vintage look :) OK, OK, I will read it. tum tee dum tick tick

OK, worse than I thought... " The noise "issue" is just a normal part of electronic imaging." Classic

"Grain is your friend" Not this grain. I do have some grainy friends.

"CCD grain looks more organic to my eye." Looks organic alright. And you know what that means.

"The D16 seems to handle clipping pretty gracefully." This quote appeared over a frame grab, directly over an image of a window that was completely overexposed and appeared as a blotch of white.

We will see more samples real soon, but two things jump out.

1. If they shipped all the cams three weeks ago, why aren't there thousands of samples?
2. Can no one measure phantom power with a voltmeter? That is such a strange idea.....buying a 2K camera and unable to use a voltmeter and an XLR "Y" cable. I guess no one needs "Pro audio" after all.

Hoping for better samples.

Clumpy grain, blown highlights, curious what PB will say.

real sample from PB, looks average in all respects http://t.co/XYwfnVXFtz

@cantsin Thank you for the link to this wonderfully updated version of the 1976 article linked at the bottom.

I have been amazed how many people use c mounts on cameras w/out a prism (ex: digital cameras) and don't know this and aren't concern about the swirly bokeh they get. Just that it's a cool lens. For stills, IMHO.

I had always known this info from the article linked in Dennis Couzin, 1976, THE TRUTH ABOUT THE BOLEX PRISM http://www.city-net.com/~fodder/bolex/truth.html

Since a digital cameras has no prism, the reverse RX rule theoretically applies:

"The RX RULE is reversible. RX-mount lenses will work well on C-mount cameras provided that they are stopped-down past f/3.2. There are also implications for macrophotography. For example, at 1:1 magnification the effective f-stop of a lens is twice the indicated f-stop. So at 1:1 an f/1.6 C-mount lens will work about as well on an H16 RX camera as on a C-mount camera, and similarly for an f/1.6 RX-mount lens."

The update spells it out clearly for today, but, doesn't mention the reverse of the RX Rule.

I own a lot of nice Switar RX glass from my days of shooting film. To me this means if I want to shoot on the D16 with my Switar RX 10mm I had better stop it down to at least f3.2. If I need to shoot more wide open or If I want swirly bokeh, I had better use a good monitor for focus confirmation and shoot some tests before trying it on a real job.

The best negative stocks like Kodak Vision3 have about 14 stops DR. The Alexa has 14 stops, too, BMD's cinema cameras (including pocket but excluding the 4k production camera) 13 stops. 13-14 stops dynamic range have become the modern-day standard DSLR/mirrorless camera sensors (13 stops for the NEX 5-N, for example, 14 stops for the Nikon D800).

My bet is that the D16 has a usable dynamic range of 10 stops. This would be perfectly normal for CCD/global shutter sensor technology.