The Drawbacks

All sounds too good to be true? ..well it is a bit. As good a these cameras are they are very far from perfect.

Handling

These cameras were designed for taking pictures, for this they are very good. You hold them to your eye, focus and click. When shooting video you find yourself holding it out at arms length, trying to wrestle with a focus ring not designed for following focus, trying to see whats going on on a screen far to small to get critical focus. You’re going to need some support whether is be tripod, monopod, shoulder rig or whatever your footage is going to be very jittery without it. Also the majority of the cameras currently don’t have flip out screens, meaning if you want to shoot low you lie on the ground, if you want to shoot high you start climbing on stuff.

Sound

A lot of these cameras don’t give you manual control of you sound, and those that do still have pretty poor preamps. If you want the sound quality to match the picture quality you’ll have to record it separately and sync it in post. There are good devices to do this and software that will sync it for you, but it adds price to your setup and time to your post production workflow. Small bonus is your sound person isn’t tied your camera anymore.

Rolling shutter

I won’t go too much into the science of it but because of the way these cameras record video they are prone to the ‘jello’ effect. When the camera is recording your video it scans top to bottom, meaning if you quickly pan you camera around the bottom of the frame will lag behind the top. This can be seen in another thing what I stole off the internet.

Aliasing and Moire

The reason the sensors are so big in DSLRs is because they have to support resolutions of up to and beyond 20 million pixels. HD 1080p video is only around 2 million pixels however so the camera has to find a way to process all this information. In short what it does it throws away a lot of the information and guesses it. Now we’ve all seen cameras do this, everybody has seen somebody on TV wearing a stripy shirt that seems to shimmer, thats what is happening here. Basically every camera does it, but the DSLRs are particularly guilty of it. Watch out of fine patterns like stripy shirts or brick walls from a distance. This short video shows how bad it can get (best to watch in HD on Vimeo for the full effect).

Canon 550 D - Moire/Aliasing from Bruno Peter Hennek on Vimeo.

I think those are the biggest problems that trouble these DSLRs, although each model has its own unique foibles. While these problems are a real pain, each can be overcome with a either accessories or clever camerawork. For many these drawbacks are too many, but if you are prepared to deal with them the rewards can be pretty amazing.