Time is a flat circle. Little did you know that “Coming Soon” actually meant nearly a full Earth year later. Silly human.

I’ll justify this enormous gap between blog posts by saying that I have a full year of experience with the BMPCC4K now under my belt and thus can provide a definitive opinion on it. The short version is that there is a ton to love about this camera.

Beautiful colors
4K up to 60p, HD up to 120p
Blackmagic Raw and ProRes
Fantastic low light performance with dual native ISO
Multiple recording media - CFast, SD cards, external SSD
Multiple audio inputs - 3.5mm and mini XLR with phantom power
Wonderful 5” touchscreen with a super intuitive menu system
Bluetooth functionality for wireless control
Comes bundled with DaVinci Resolve Studio

Make no mistake - this is an absolute powerhouse of a camera for the $1295 pricetag. I’d say it’s the single greatest value in a camera that’s ever existed. There are features here that cameras ten times the price don’t offer from companies with far greater resources than Blackmagic. This is the type of camera that generations of filmmakers and videographers have dreamed of having - something that completely gets out of the way and punches well above its weight class.

There are some minor things I don’t love about the camera, though. No product is perfect no matter how low the price or how great the value.

Battery life isn’t great - up to one hour for the internal battery
The LCD does not articulate at all - low/high shots are difficult
Odd build - polycarbonate body doesn’t inspire confidence
Wide design makes it difficult to mount to gimbals

I’ve solved most of these issues by rigging my camera up and adding accessories where necessary. Check out the detailed parts list.

I don’t fail to see the irony - I’ve built up my Pocket 4K in basically the same way I complained about rigging the original Pocket. The difference here is the much better starting point the Pocket 4K has over the OG Pocket. If I wanted, I could use the Pocket 4K on vastly more shoots completely stripped down. Rigging it up turns it into a real cinema beast versus simply making it usable a la OG Pocket.

Corporate shoot with BMPCC4K and Panasonic GH5s

There’s so much nuance as to why I might grab the Pocket 4K versus my Panasonic GH5 for a shoot… except for one truly groundbreaking feature. One single bullet point from my list above - and I truly hate using this word - is a gamechanger. The feature is called Blackmagic Raw and it is a revolutionary video codec that gives you the flexibility and pure image quality of raw video with the compression, file sizes, and ease of editing like ProRes. I honestly cannot overstate how impactful this has been to my work.

So there it is - a year late and not detailed enough. The truth is that great things rarely need too much explanation. If you’re at all in the market for a new camera for your videography business or narrative work, be sure to give the Pocket 4K a serious look.

Maybe another post coming soon.

Probably not tho.

Blog

A Year-long Look: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K Review [PART 2]