OLED Bomb EVF Black Level of menu good, image its self NOT good!

[christiansprenger]

We just received our new OLED Bomb EVF in the mail and hooked it up to our epic. The colors and black levels are incredibly accurate as promised, however we did noticed one very peculiar and disappointing thing...

When the camera boots up and the chip-chart flashes, it is breathtaking! The most perfect color accurate chip-chart I've ever seen represented as a digital image. The black levels of the menus are black as black, the menu text is all a perfect crisp white. Incredible clarity. However the actual image its self looks quite odd. When properly exposed I suppose it looks pretty good, but the shadows look truly awful. They appear as though they are being artificially raised maybe 10-20IRE.

When we first saw this, we figured it was probably just our eyes adjusting to this new contrast. So we put lens cap on the lens and noticed that the whole image then just turned an odd solid grey (similar to this text box that I am writing this post in right now.) I then thought that this was probably caused by RedColor2 and so I changed to RedColor3. Doing so did indeed change the black levels of the image, but now they look weirdly artificially posterized and had a lot of weird blue grain in the shadows. Still, the image did not look acceptable to me or any of the other guys who were at the rental house that I was testing at.

I should also note that I tried adjusting the LED/EVF Brightness in the system menu and this had no effect on the image whatsoever. All the way down looked exactly the same as all the way up.

There was definitely no pattern or groundglass effect as other have reported, it all looked pretty damn clean; I just dont understand what is happening here. Is it possible that I just got a bad EVF? Or is this just something that will be corrected with a build upgrade? Have any other OLED owners experienced this problem? Because of how fantastic that chip chart, looks during startup, I can't help but think maybe its a software problem. I've thousands of hours shooting in RedColor2 and looking at it on dozens of different types of monitors, and never have I seen anything that looks like this.

I've attached a few images below. Unfortuantely I used my iPhone4s to snap them and they are zoomed in, so take them with a grain of salt. I can honestly say that they are pretty accurate in displaying what I'm talking about though. Note where the histogram is living in these images as well as how incredibly black the backgrounds of the menus are.

Would love to know your thoughts.

[Johnny Friday]

Christian, images are just too small to really evaluate....maybe better to link to a photo hosting site...as these are small and just too low compression.

[Paul Ellington]

Did you do a blackshade?

[Harrison Diamond]

What firmware version are you running?

[Rodrigo Prata]

I May be completely off here, but it is not the case that the image metadata itself is contrast-less? RED gamma2 is very low contrast for instance... i feel this way with the touch monitor also, so i just raise the contrast for better monitoring...

[Paul Kalbach]

I should also note that I tried adjusting the LED/EVF Brightness in the system menu and this had no effect on the image whatsoever. All the way down looked exactly the same as all the way up.

This isn't right at all. It should definitely change the brightness of your OLED EVF. It does on mine. You should file a ticket with support.

[Mark Toia]

When the camera boots up and the chip-chart flashes, it is breathtaking! The most perfect color accurate chip-chart I've ever seen represented as a digital image. The black levels of the menus are black as black, the menu text is all a perfect crisp white. Incredible clarity. However the actual image its self looks quite odd. When properly exposed I suppose it looks pretty good, but the shadows look truly awful. They appear as though they are being artificially raised maybe 10-20IRE.

This is exactly what is was like with the EVF.. Menus perfect... Color chart perfect... Picture crap (in the evf)

So the OLED has way better black levels.. not so washed out.. but the image is still GREY.. ?!?!

I looked through this OLED EVF at NAB and it was 100x better then the LCD version, and to be honest.. It look very good. but what your saying really worries me, Really really does.

I have 3 OLED EVF's coming in hopefully very soon (it's been a wait) ... I so hope I don't have the same problem.

[Simon N]

We had exactly the same issue and I agree with all the points you make re chip chart etc... so our OLED EVF has gone back to Red. I demonstrated the issue to tech support and yesterday they told me that they had a new batch of them in today so would compare ours against a new one. I am not sure if it is a camera build issue or not, but when we tested in normal daylight it was very good, however in warm low light situations - lots of candles - it was awful.

[Paul J Steinberg]

I believe you need the latest beta firmware to enable the brightness controls. When I received my OLED the buttons wouldn't work at all. With the reports of users side handles getting fried with one of the last beta builds I'm waiting as I always do for the 'official' release.

With that said, in general the image is a little better than the LCD, the flicker I used to see when I blinked is no longer there, but I've never had anyone put their eye to it and been amazed, or even notice it wasn't the LCD. The diopter is still brutal IMHO. You need to stick your eyeball about 1mm from the diopter or you lose the edges of the image, not a ton of fun when you wear glasses.

[Shane Kelly]

That sounds like the original bomb evf. Are you sure that you bought the OLED version? The original is still in the store.