ARRI Alexa Goes Head To Head With BMPC. Winner Is Obvious, But There Is Still A Valuable Lesson

How you would you rate a shoot-off between a  £3,000 Black Magic Cinema Camera and a  £150,000 ARRI Alexa? Actually, to make this a better budget vs. high end Cinematographer Olan Collardy included matching lenses in the price: A Samyang 50mm T1.5 for the BMPC and an Angenieux 24-290mm Optimo T2.8 Cine lens for the Alexa.

Fair play, right? £150,000 camera/lens combo vs. £3,000 lens combo. While results may not surprise you, Olan has a lesson he wants to share.

OK, so the Alexa footage clearly looks better. But hey! the BMPCC is not too shabby too. Here is how Olan concludes:

Question: “How bad is my BMPC4K with my stills lens compared to an ALEXA with £60k lens?”
Answer: “Well, the difference between the two is as clear as day. However, not enough to stop you from creating beautiful work. The ALEXA is darn beautiful but the BMPC is no ugly duckling”

Olan plans on “sending these to producers who keep snubbing BMD cameras – the difference isn’t that bad if you have controlled lighting conditions.”

[A Tale Of Two Cameras (BMPC vs ARRI ALEXA) | Olan Collardy]