Ian Campbell

Hello,

I just got back from a shoot and noticed someone strange with the Z7U "smooth gain" featrure. I used smooth gain with the "slow" setting today for the first time. One (but maybe both) my Z7U’s seem to have a flaw or problem with gain. I was changing the gain settings (while shooting in full manual) and noticed that 3db, 6db and 9db all looked the same. The conference room we were shooting in was was dark -- the iris was at f2, the gain was 6db and the shutter speed 1/60th. I couldn’t figure it out, so I changed the high position to 15db just to run a test to see if this would make a change obvious. And the difference in the image was identical at 3db or 15db!!! The histogram didn’t indicate any change had been made via upping the gain. I took the camera off of “smooth gain” and then gain started to behave like I’d expect it would. You could then see the jump in gain in both overall image brightness -- and the histogram proved it too when you switch it up. At first I thought, “wow, smooth gain REALLY works, since you can’t see any differences as you change settings”. Has anyone also had a problem changing gain values while using smooth gain? I will test tonight with both cameras. It seems like enabling smooth gain disables the gain select switch – even though you do get a proper readout on the LCD of the gain setting selected.

Thanks . . .

Ian