Canon R5 C or Canon C70?

It’s easy to get bogged down when comparing all the features offered by Canon’s cameras but the task becomes much simpler when approaching the question purely from the perspective of HDR, for which the camera must meet a minimum of three criteria: low noise, thirteen stops of dynamic range and offer raw recording (either internally or externally). If our budget is six grand, surprisingly, only a couple of cameras currently on the market meet that bar. Not a must, but preferable, is 120p recording, as that is what will be necessary to lessen the motion artifacts that plague high dynamic range video. Incidentally, TCL (the second largest TV manufacturer by market share) just became the very first TV manufacturer to incorporate TrueCut Motion by PixelWorks, a Silicon Valley company teaming up with studios and streaming network providers to offer a solution to 24p judder (which is where shooting at 120 fps comes in). Anyhow, those two cameras are the RED Komodo and the Blackmagic Ursa 12K, each of which shoots raw and both of which boast a dynamic range of around 12-1/2 stops as calculated by Imatest. The Canon C70 has the desired dynamic range and noise handling (courtesy of its DGO architecture) as well as built-in ND filters but confusingly, lacks raw capability. As we’ve repeated many times in the past, 10-bit 4:2:2 Y′CbCr is to be avoided as it can introduce hue shifts, saturation problems, contouring and banding. The maximum color deviation in 10-bit Y′CbCr exceeds commercial cinema theater white point tolerance specifications at every luminance level. The Canon R5 C has mediocre dynamic range if it is at all similar to the Canon R5 and 8K Canon RAW Lite files are said to be all but impossible to work with in post. Because of the form factor of the Ursa 12K and the fact that in order to get those 12-1/2 stops of dynamic range, you’ve got to shoot 12K and downsample to 4K in post, we’d choose the RED Komodo: REDCODE RAW, 12-1/2 stops of dynamic range, film-like noise, excellent color accuracy along with a global shutter, seven stops of exposure latitude and an RF mount make it the most compelling if not the sexiest option at the moment as far as we’re concerned.