The Samurai came neatly packed as a kit and assembly seemed to go OK until I found out that the Samurai wouldn't power on! Reading the manual surely would have helped (didn't have time in this case), but the bottom line is that you need to know to install battery #1 first. Installing a battery in slot #2 didn't allow the unit to boot. I would have guessed that the batteries would be auto-sensing, but that wasn't the case. Powering down the unit requires you to press the "on" button for a few seconds similar to Red cameras and iPods.
The kit includes two batteries, two SSDs, an SSD reader, battery charger, and all the connection cables. It's only missing one thing, and I'll get to that later.
In the pictures below you can see that the Samurai has connections for SDI in/out, time code in/out, and audio in/headphone out. Audio comes in from the camera via SDI, so you don't need to connect any extra cables to get the footage to have audio from the camera. There are 1/4"-20 screw threads for mounting the recorder unit to your camera via a standard cine-arm.
You can only install one SSD at a time, so when the SSD is full, it's full. In practice, I found with both days of shooting I was averaging about 55 Gigabytes/day. I didn't even fill up one 128GB SSD, much less get to the second one! So for an average non-continuous event day I wouldn't worry too much about storage, personally speaking.
You can format the SSDs while they are installed in the Samurai, but I found it was non-obvious to do (which is probably a good thing) and didn't have time to run through the manual to find the answer! So I formatted the SSD on my PC instead using the supplied SSD reader over USB.
OK, so how did it really do? Wow! What a HUGE difference over the FS-700's built in AVCHD codec. It's amazing what a good Prores HQ codec can do for a modern CMOS sensor, like the FS-700. It took the detail from being on par with a DSLR solution to looking like a professional video camera. Mind you, it's still not 10-bit, but you do get 4:2:2 chroma sampling and a ~100Mb/s codec. On my monitor at home I could easily see detail when shown at full HD. Except for some very minor white balance tweaks to the opening of the video embedded below and one luma curve adjustment midway through, I didn't really do any color correction or grading. The footage didn't need it. It looked beautiful straight out of the camera. I even turned off sharpening (i.e. "detail") in the camera and didn't apply any sharpening in post...not needed.
Now I don't want to use the FS-700 without the Samurai. Salvador is sneaky. It was his secret plan to turn me into a Samurai addict!
Once booted, operating the Samurai is all via touchscreen. When you go into Monitor mode you can start the recording from there. Playback is just as simple. When in the playback menu you select the clip you want to view and tap it. It starts playing. Operating is that simple. I didn't need the user manual - as it should be.
Now comes the downsides, which are minor, however may be significant in some circumstances. In the second picture above you can see the display in action at the Saturday night concert I filmed. The first problem I noticed is that the monitor is not color accurate, at all. In fact, it's quite far off from being accurate. Don't trust it for white balance or as a preview monitor for lighting.
The second problem is that the monitor is quite dim when outdoors. The third photo above has the monitor on in full daylight. I have to say that the photo actually shows the image about the same as your eye would see it in the field. Click on the picture and you'll see that the image IS actually of the actor, but with the reflection of me taking a photo dominating the display. It was very difficult to use the Samurai outdoors because of this. It would be great if Atomos included some type of EVF loop or extended hood so the monitor was usable outdoors. That's the only item the kit is missing.
The good part about the the dim display is that the Samurai has great battery life. I was outdoors filming a narrative short all day Sunday and I only had to switch out the little battery once!
At the concert I did briefly try out the peaking to see how it compared with the FS-700's built in peaking. This is just my opinion, but I found that the FS-700's built in peaking was a bit more sensitive and worked better for me. That's not to say it's unusable or bad on the Samurai, just that *I* prefer the Sony peaking filter. The Samurai also has false color, zebras, and blue only, if you want to use those instead of the camera's assisting tools.
Obviously any time you add a piece of gear to a camera it adds weight and complexity. You can see in the photo above that the Samurai was easily suspended by my Noga cine-arm. However, the cable routing was a bit of a bugger. The Samurai uses a proprietary mini-BNC at its end of the SDI cable. I was stuck with this length and no clear way to strap the cable down. The cable was protected the old fashioned way, I watched out for it closely both days.
Overall, I believe the Samurai is a mature product that I would take into just about any shooting situation and feel comfortable with it's reliability and high quality recording capability. Below is a short documentary produced about four hours after picking up the camera setup from Video Gear on Saturday night. Some of the BTS photos are shown above. Enjoy.
Oh, and if you have questions about renting the Samurai just call Salvador at the shop. We're here to
What is really ironic about the recent attention to video is that the original still digital cameras were created around video technology. We have video camera image sensors to thank for our current crop of compact cameras. Ever wonder why your compact camera chops heads off when you print a 4X6? These cameras were originally developed using video image sensors created around the proportions of a standard definition TV or computer monitor, not the longer ratio of a 35mm 4X6 print.
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