Best Run and Gun Doc Camera

That's a bit of a catch-22. If you by run and gun you mean easy to fudge critical focus- no S35 sensor camera is ever going to work for you. That or you need to really practice with your manual focusing. So it kind of depends what you really mean when you say run and gun. In my mind that means small sensor cameras where the depth of field is massively forgiving. Of course the flipside is you don't get that more cinematic looking shallow DOF look you may want...

Noah

Call Box Training.
Featuring the Panasonic GH2 and Panasonic AC160/130.

Chris - it can be done. You can put 2/3" B4 lenses on the $3600 AF100, and with a power supply, you can use the servo zoom. Take a look at this video from Abel Cine: http://vimeo.com/19839954

I love the guys at Abel - but their approach was pretty expensive ($750 Hot Rod PL adapter plus a $5500 2/3 to PL adapter).

There's a better way. I would use a relatively inexpensive $300 B4 to m4/3 adapter, a $55 power supply and a $60 cable to power the zoom. If you already have Anton Bauer batts, you can skip the power supply and get this cable instead.

Darren, over at AF100 User Central, chose the less expensive option:

http://af100central.com/?p=226

And here is a field report with ungraded SOOC sample video:

http://af100central.com/?p=240

You won't have camera-controlled autofocus with this approach. If you absolutely need autofocus, Panasonic does make a couple of autofocusing power zooms for the AF (a 14-42 and a 45-175), but they have consumer-style controls and are relatively slow at f3.5 and f4.0, respectively.

Hope this is helpful,

Bill
Hybrid Camera Revolution

Thank you for the info