Cinematographer Ranks Cameras in a Tier List From Best to Worst

One cinematographer takes the majority of commonly used, video-centric or cinema cameras, and assembles them in a tier list from "God Mode" (of which there is only one), to "The group that shall not be named". Do you agree with the rankings?

Whilst I love cinematography, I haven't had much time with any cinema cameras, and certainly not enough to rank them all. However, wolfcrow, a cinematographer and YouTuber, releases regular content on the topic and has decided to follow a tier list trend, creating his own rankings.

There were a few surprises for me. Firstly, I did not expect the Panasonic S1H to be ranked as low as it is. The S1H is widely revered as a brilliant cinematography camera on a budget, with a decent selection of great cinema lenses available for it. The second surprise for me was the Fujifilm GFX 100S featuring at all, let alone reasonably high. Perhaps I am completely out of the loop or just naive when it comes to the 100S, but I didn't realize it was considered by videographers. It does have a limited but decent video spec, and it does provide the (close to) medium format look, but it's fairly inflexible with settings.

What do you make of this tier list? Were there any cameras you think are too high or too low? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Rob Baggs's picture

Robert K Baggs is a professional portrait and commercial photographer, educator, and consultant from England. Robert has a First-Class degree in Philosophy and a Master's by Research. In 2015 Robert's work on plagiarism in photography was published as part of several universities' photography degree syllabuses.

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8 Comments

Super cool video! It was long, but I really appreciated the entire breakdown, this guy seems to know what he's talking about.

For those that are just curious about the final ranking - screenclip attached here

Wow, the tiers make no sense. We go from "God" to "Legend" to "World" to "Good Value"? And where each camera falls also makes no sense. The A7C ranks below the A7, which gets grouped with (I assume) Sony's APS-C cameras. The R5, which is notoriously unusable for sustained amounts of time ranks higher than cameras with similar capabilities that DON'T overheat. The Z9 gets a spot on the list, but doesn't exist in the real world yet (same with the R3, Ronin 4D, and Red Raptor). DSMC2 gets "meh" along side the Amira?

Not sure I get the point of this video. Strange rankings and personal opinions based on some kind of difficult to understand criteria. Different cameras will mean different things to different people and I don't mean amateur vloggers but serious filmmakers, whatever their budget.

For me it makes alot of sense. Apart from maybe the A7Siii which offer evf (unlike fx3) and C70 which is jack of all trades (now with Raw and proven reliability) - from what I hear its still very popular.

This guy has a successful blog (wolfcrow) about cine gear, and he can write books on cameras and lenses for video.

Wish there were more vids such as this.

For those who only shoot still images: Would you be interested if there was such a list of video cameras and listed which one is the best for photography?

YES!!!!

Why? Please tell. I'd buy a Z9 even without video.