Alister Chapman
May 2nd, 2008, 06:55 AM
I know much has already been said about the rolling CMOS shutter. It's a fact of life that CMOS cameras will under certain rapidly changing lighting conditions exhibit banding caused by the way the shutter scans the CMOS sensor. I just spent some time in the USA tornado chasing. As well as storms and tornadoes I also filmed a lot of lightning with my EX1. I didn't really expect it to do that well with the lightning, but in reality in most cases it did a reasonable job. Bolts of forked lightning with bright scenes didn't cause any noticeable problems. At night some lightning strikes suffered from banding especially if inside a cloud and the cloud filled large parts of the screen. However when shooting with a CCD camera at night I would often get smear which I don't get with the EX1. Overall the EX1 performed very well dealing with some very challenging lighting conditions such as dark skies with bright horizons and the timelapse functions are excellent. For night lightning I found that if I used a 2 frame or slower shutter then there was almost never any banding, this also help bring out the details in the darkness without having to use gain. You can see some of my footage on the end of this clip:
http://www.vimeo.com/963436
http://www.vimeo.com/963436