My grumbles about it are few, but Ikegami could cure them if they had a mind to! The volume control for channel one is not on the front of the viewfinder as it is on the Sony - it's tucked away near your right cheek and has a recessed knob so it's very fiddly and next to impossible to find and subsequently use while filming. I always have to take my eye away from the viewfinder to locate it. The microphone input controls (i.e. the switches for the selection of mike or line level or 48 volt phantom) are not under the side door where all the other microphone controls are - they are at the rear above the input plugs and are operated by almost impossibly small toggle switches. On occasion I've moved them out of position when in a hurry to de-rig.
My biggest grumble though, is with reference to the filters: there is only one neutral density filter now (on the number 2 setting), number 4 is given over to a star filter! Very nice for some occasions, but NOT at the expense of a neutral density filter, especially as it's the heavier density one - even the number 2 filter is barely enough on a sunny day and I am not talking Africa here! I've had to purchase screw-on filters to compensate and in news that is a serious pain in the ass. But this is not the worst thing about the filters!........I like to preset my white balances to the same value across the range of daylight filters so that I can switch between them without having to reset; of course, in this case there are only two daylight filters to worry about. However, if I subsequently do a white balance on the tungsten filter the values on the daylight filters will have changed, and similarly a white balance performed on a daylight filter will change the settings on the tungsten one. What's going on?! I was on a shoot in Malawi last month and a lot of the material was shot "on the hoof" so-to-speak. I was keen to get some serious African color and my host had assured me that oxen and carts were a common sight. After two weeks I hadn't seen an ox let alone an accompanying cart, but with time running out we finally came upon a pair pulling a cart across a field. Wonderful!! The driver pulled up and I sprinted across the grass turning the camera on and setting the filter to number 2 as I went - I had just come out from a long indoor interview shot on tungsten. It never crossed my mind that my carefully chosen presets of 7100K and 6400K had been tampered with, but...... I was only with the cart for maybe two minutes getting all the angles and it was wonderful stuff, just as I had hoped. I was maybe another ten miles down the road when I thought of it and it filled me with dread. Sure enough, I had some lovely pictures, but a quick examination of my daylight settings showed me I'd captured them all on 2400K! I was spared the following day when I found another ox and cart, but please, Mr. Ikegami, why should I have to deal with "phantom" white balances?
