I rented a AF back in December and played with it for a few days. LOVED it. Now I have one on order. Coming from a JVC HM700/750 this camera has a whole new feel to it. I am mating it to some Zeiss Cp.2 24 and 50 lenses, Hotrod tuner kit and not sure on which matte box.

I hear about the camera not handling highlights well, being bad out of the box etc. Any advice ?

I am buying mine from Abel in NY so I am sure I am getting some decent scene files etc.

Here is my test from December. The rental had a Olympic 14-35 on it, rails and matte box.

Panasonic AF100 Holidays Test on Vimeo

Myles

General advice on the highlight handling are to tone down chroma level in your scene file, make sure your white balance is dead on, and avoid overexposure. the stock "F5" scene is what I generally built upon, but most of the scenes have their uses in certain situations.

I can't really recommend a camera loadout unless I know what sort of shooting you do. Panasonic and Olympus has a great line-up of lenses with good autofocus and OIS, Voigtlander makes a few delightful fast primes, and of course you can use anything else from anybody else.

For what it's worth, this forum's AF section is rather sparse since some argumentive types got the whole thing shut down on this site for a few months (I couldn't tell you exactly why); AF users just went elsewhere for their info sharing and for the most part haven't returned.

+1 on Kevin's advice regarding chroma and white balance. I also tend to go with a gamma like HD norm that lets me choose a LOW, MID or HIGH knee based on the scene. I'll usually opt to lose a stop or two of dynamic range and go for LOW knee rather than have the highlights blow out a channel.

Thanks guys ! I am using the Abel Cine scene files and so far so good.

Myles