- If you're looking for an affordable video camera,
well, then you've probably heard of Blackmagic.
And today they might have
one of the best-value cameras they've ever released,
and I'm about to unbox it, the Blackmagic 6K Pro.
So let's see.
Whoa.
The "Pocket" is also still in the name,
but I have a feeling that this camera
isn't actually going to be very small.
Okay, so in the top of the box,
we get a nicely arranged bunch of international adapters.
We got a little quick start guide with the manual,
which is online, you can get it on the QR code here.
A wall adaptor for the camera,
so if you ever need to plug it in for live streaming
or just a long shoot or an interview
or something like that, you have this included.
And this camera, which is awesome,
uses the Sony NP-550 battery,
so if you've ever used one of those onboard LED lights
or, honestly, a lot of camera accessories in general,
most of them will use a battery like this,
like monitors and that kind of thing,
so it's nice that you can probably just reuse
your small versions of these batteries in this camera.
And a camera strap. Okay.
Whoa, this is thick. Wow.
You know what? I will hand it to you, Blackmagic.
Your packing material is always very good.
Wow.
Okay.
Holy crap!
This thing is huge!
- [Jono] But it's "pocket"!
- Okay. Notice on the box, it says...
"Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro".
I understand the naming.
I understand that this version,
this tier of the camera, has always been called the pocket.
- [Andy] No! It should be a backpack!
- For some context,
I have here the original Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.
Notice that, if I took this lens adapter off,
and I have a jacket pocket right here,
it actually fits in my pocket.
This is the Blackmagic Pocket 4K.
Now again, not a small camera. Like, it's packable.
It still sort of deserves the Pocket name.
It's not pocketable.
But this is another level.
Like, this is the original Blackmagic.
I swear this camera's bigger. Yeah, it is.
Blackmagic, what are you doing?
You could've named it slightly differently.
Okay, let's look at the rest of this camera and see
what actually makes it different
from the Pocket 4K that I just showed.
First thing, right off the bat you can see
that the display is now tiltable,
which, honestly, even though the motion range
doesn't seem to be that significant,
it's gonna be very useful for a lot of you out there,
especially if you're shooting from the hip
and you just need to see downward.
Instead of having to have any sort of external monitor,
the display itself can actually just flip down for you,
and now you can shoot from the hip quite comfortably.
But on top of that, this display is actually 1,500 nits,
so you get HDR daylight viewability on the camera itself,
which is something that Blackmagic cameras
haven't done before because all the displays
on all the other cameras kind of suck to use outside
and you sort of have to use an external monitor.
This one, though, you're not forced to.
On the top of the camera, it feels fairly familiar.
It's the three mappable function buttons, an on/off switch,
a little tab where you can actually unlock it
and put an EVF in, and I'll show you that in a second,
the ISO button, a shutter button, white balance,
a stills button, and then the record button.
On the right of the camera, pretty straightforward.
We have the memory slots, which are CFast and an SD card.
And then, of course, you can also use
Samsung T5 drives on this camera.
It has, on the front,
the amazing Blackmagic 6K sensor
that I've actually yet to try
'cause I've never used the Pocket 6K,
the standard Pocket 6K, and this is the Pro,
so I'm excited to give that a shot in a second.
You clearly have much larger intakes of air
on the right and left here of the camera's sensor.
The front of the top of the camera has a 1/4-20,
which is fairly standard.
And on the left of the camera, we've got microphone,
headphone, a full-size HDMI Type C for charging,
as well as the Samsung T5 drives and two mini XLR ports.
Now, the Pocket actually only had one,
and the 6K, that was also the case.
But on this camera, you get two mini XLR ports,
which is a big deal, because often,
if you need audio built into your camera
and you need to feed it through,
you will probably find yourself in situations
where you need more than one XLR port.
And this camera has two.
And you also have the 12-volt power in
when you want to power the camera off the wall.
Finishing off the back of the camera,
we've got two new buttons, the plus and minus ND filter,
which this camera has a two-, four-, and six-stop ND,
which is very nice to have.
We've got the iris button, the focus button
high frame rate, punch in to check your focus,
menu, and play.
And lastly, and I'm very glad Blackmagic added this
because the other pocket cameras do not have this,
but on the bottom of the camera, there are two 1/4-20s,
with two points on the bottom built into the body.
You are not required to have a cage
in order to prevent the annoying twist
that can happen when the camera loosens off on the tripod.
And that just makes every operator happier.
So thank you, Blackmagic, for adding that.
Before I turn the camera on I actually want to unbox
a couple of the accessories that Blackmagic sent over.
They sent over their Battery Pro Grip,
which is basically just a battery grip.
And then this is their Pro EVF,
which I'm very interested to try.
I mean, first impressions,
the grip feels a little bit cheap,
but I guess functionally, it doesn't necessarily matter.
It doesn't feel like it's going to break or anything.
It's just not the nicest kind of plastic.
It still also has the two 1/4-20 points on the bottom,
which I appreciate.
Let's put it on the camera and see how it feels.
Let's line this up.
Um, so we put the grip on. (crew laugh)
This camera was already not that light for the size,
and it is now very not light for the size.
In theory, you can have three
full-charged batteries in this camera,
and the Pockets have always been fairly power-efficient,
but I don't know if it's worth the weight trade-off
because the fact that you also have to have
the camera about an inch taller
could be hugely impractical for a lot of camera accessories.
And because it's not a stills camera,
holding it like this, which is what you would usually do
with a battery grip on a camera,
it feels sort of dumb.
Let's see if the EVF is any better.
It's actually bigger than I expected.
You got a couple eyecups.
Different styles.
I guess it's for, like, if you want to use it
with your left eye or your right eye.
Okay, I'm just gonna use it with my right eye.
This is a cinema camera, so let's put a cinema lens on it.
(crew laugh)
This, my friends, is why,
when you add vertical height to your camera, it's not ideal.
You don't really want it to lean the weight
of the camera on the lens.
I just hope this illustrates the point
that this feels very stupid.
I just took off that little cover.
This thing is just a screw,
and a very quite large piece of plastic.
If you look here, so there's quite a bit of depth.
The entire front of my fingernail fits within this space,
which is actually a lot bigger than I expected.
Alright, let's put this guy on.
Oh, and there's also a hand-tighten screw.
And it's a plastic top handle for the screw,
which I am not a fan of.
How much is this EVF?
$500?
Blackmagic.
Let's see how good it is.
Well, it works quite instantaneously. That's nice.
It's not the worst EVF I've ever used.
$500 seems all a little bit steep to charge for it.
It also doesn't fully go vertical,
which isn't, I guess, a huge deal.
The last thing, though, is the color
doesn't actually match the back of the LCD on the camera.
So without looking at it on a computer,
I'm actually not sure which one of them
is more accurate than the other.
I would guess that the LCD on the actual body
is better and more accurate than this
because the EVF seems a little bit on the shallow side.
Andy is back there shaking his head
because he has no faith in the Blackmagic displays,
because there are so many 12Ks have proved
to be quite horrible on the onboard camera display.
Now that we've looked at the grip and the EVF,
only a couple things left to test,
the new NDs and this new display.
Let's go outside.
So now we're outside and you guys will probably start to see
what I meant by, when you add vertical height to a camera,
it's less than ideal.
This is the battery grip with it mounted properly,
with the two screws in the bottom on the tripod,
and it's tall. (laughs)
Also because the camera doesn't have
a cold shoe or hot shoe mount on the body itself,
we've had to actually add this cold shoe mount
in order to add our lav receiver.
And if you didn't have a cage,
this might be what you have to do
in order to get a place
to mount your lav receiver and audio.
And then this is what it might look like
to use an XLR adapter cable to this port.
So cable management is a little annoying.
I mean, and that's kind of one of the things
that these Pocket cameras have never been amazing at
despite all their features,
is there's not really a great way to route all this stuff
with the camera by itself.
You will have to add a cage
or some sort of cable management
to just tidy up the rigs so that these things
kind of don't get into your way when you're shooting.
But if you were just on a tripod
doing a long interview with a shot like this,
you'd probably be totally fine, it's not a big deal.
I will admit, though, that the back of the camera,
when I actually have the brightness 100%,
it's kind of a cloudy day today,
but the sun is coming in and out
and I can see everything on the camera.
There is no issues. I don't have to squint and look.
I don't have to cover that. 1,500 nits.
It's impressive.
This is definitely daylight-viewable,
and that's pretty awesome.
So just to give you guys an idea
of what it's like to use the NDs outside,
here's the camera with zero ND,
and this is the two-stop,
this is the four-stop, and the six-stop.
And in this case and in this shooting condition,
I think the six-stop makes the most sense,
since we're at ISO 200 and f/2.8.
This camera does have a 6K sensor
and it's the same sensor that was in the Pocket 6K,
and so it can shoot up to 50 FPS at 6K
or up to 120 FPS at 2.8K.
Now, at 2.8 K at 120 FPS,
you do have to crop in on the sensors.
You will lose some field of view on your image.
But other than that, those specs are,
still today, fairly respectable.
So while we actually test the image on the Pocket 6K Pro
and we're actually feeding audio
from this lav that I'm wearing directly into the camera,
forgive the wind noise 'cause we are outside
and is a little bit windy right now,
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So this is what the image looks like when we're outside
with the ND filters on.
This is about as bare-bones as a setup would actually get.
It's just the camera, a lens,
the built-in NDs on a tripod.
So let me know what you guys think
in the comments down below.
And let's show you a couple of other shots
while we're out here.
So I hope those examples give you guys an idea
of what this camera is like to use.
At the end of the day, it's still the same 6K sensor
that they used in the Pocket 6K, the model previous,
and it just adds the built-in NDs,
the 1,500-nit display, the extra XLR port,
and a couple of the other body changes
that just make it a more pro experience.
And they deliver all of that at $2,500.
To give you guys context, Canon C70 is $5,500,
the A7S III is $3,500,
the Sony FX6 is $6,000.
The Canon C200,
which is a couple of years old at this point, $5,500.
A used FS5 Mark II is $3,500.
Now, I told you all that to put in perspective
that this camera is $2,500 cheaper than all of those,
and it has very similar functionality.
There are features that it doesn't have
compared to those cameras,
but considering Blackmagic always has been
at the bottom of good value...
Now, you pay for QC and form factors like this
when it comes to those features,
but if you're the type of person looking for those things
all in one camera at a price point that is under $3,500,
well, then this is your only option.
So good job, Blackmagic, sort of.
I'm sure there's going to be many people out there
who use this camera.
And if you are the type of person who would buy this camera,
let me know if you think the battery grip or the EVF
would be useful to you, because the EVF
I can see being useful in certain situations,
though sort of an expensive addition.
The battery grip...
I think that's just kind of stupid.
There are better ways to invest 150 U.S. dollars.
But let me know.
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