COLORS
In the past we’ve tested quite a few camera’s, and asides from form factor and features, a thing that’s always a deal breaker to us is color separation and detail rendering, a camera that shows aliasing artefacts, fpn, extreme chroma noise, etc, is always dismissed because you can’t really fix these things in post.
Not gonna name drop cameras that perform shit but cameras that do perform good in this league are the Arri Alexa, Sony Venice, Sony F35, Sony F65 and Red Monstro.
One thing that’s very important to understand is that a camera is by nature a black and white camera and by adding a CFA (color array) on top, and doing some calculations it can show colors. I’ve went in detail when it comes to oversampling, which is basically quantization instead of extrapolation, but I’ve kind of left CFA’s unspoken.
These color array filters are so enormous important because if they don’t do good discrimination and rejection of unwanted spectra a color matrix will be shit , whatever effort you put into it.
Unlike most CFAs, the CFA’s in the MAVO Edge are high quality filters that do not exhibit much cross-talk between primaries and magenta and are therefor extremely clean with virtually no contaminations from near-UV, or near-IR. This means deeper saturated colors, and more precise reproduction of subtle hues and gradations, such as skin tones. For accurate cooler reproduction this is crucial because, if CFA doesn’t discriminate colors properly (say two different hues end up with same or very similar RGB values), there is no magic in the color matrix that can possibly make those colors appear different or accurate downstream.
The MAVO LF is a very fun camera but I don’t consider it to be in the league of cameras that do have very good color separation, however with the OLPF ff3 most ir and uv contamination is gone and the camera shows very little aliasing artefacts. But have to confess that the MAVO Edge is really something regarding the color department. It’s very important to understand that we dont talk about the base look of the camera instead the amount of good filtered data it will capture, if your a good colorist or at last understand what’s going on (gafpa will help you with this !) you can convert your edge colors into about any color matrix, and with the help of extremely good separation, you can make any look without any pollution, like in these cute examples I have attached here!
