DSLR RIG REVIEW

by Sebastian WöberJanuary 23^rd, 2010

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What we like about the Genus matte box, is that it is very lightweight. The design is very similar to the Vocas matte box. We wonder who came first, but leave you to figure it out, and post it in the comments.
The matte boxes by both brands, are useful for people who look for a lightweight rig. At about 400 grams the Genus is slightly heavier than the Vocas weighing about 300 grams.

The overall quality, is one thing we have to criticize about this unit. Usually, when you shake a matte box, the filters will rattle a little, but on this one, the rest of the construction seems to rattle as well. We don’t like that. There are some screws that don’t sit tightly on our item. Maybe it is a production error, but looking at the workmanship on this one, led us to believe, that such production errors would happen frequently. One screw at the French Flag mount is loose, and can’t be tightened, and the part that holds the filter stages, is a little too plyable for our tastes. It all doesn’t feel very sturdy. That’s usually still, OK for low budget, but at this price tag it’s not.

When the French flag is attached you can lock it down with the blue screw at the side but as soon as you move this flag a little, it will either fall, or be locked so hard, you’ll have to fight with it to get it open again. Also, the flag can’t be moved in front of the whole matte box (“closed”), a nice function, that protects the lens.

The biggest problem, is the blue reflecting frame of the second filter stage. The whole idea of a matte box is to keep light away from the lens. If you use this matte box in bright daylight, and shoot at an angle that let’s sunshine come in, you may get blue reflections right into your lens even before the sun actually hits the lens. Then it would be better to shoot without this matte box. This is an issue that we suggest Genus addresses immediately.

Although this is an effect that might only appear when sunlight goes deep into the mattebox we still feel that this shouldn’t happen. In many sitautions you will be able to shoot without a matte box to get a flare-less image, but in those situations, the Genus matte box may not be as safe as others.

Steven Rushworth from Genus says:

“We are aware that the blue filter tray can on occasion cause issues in direct sunlight at certain angles. In the past on the few occasions a customer has had an issue we have exchanged it for a black tray.
Our new shortly to be released $395 sunshade actually has black trays not blue”

That 395$ matte box looks a lot better than the one we reviewed. The stages have more points of fixation which could make this one more stable.

We think the price for the matte box we reviewed is too high and quality too low. The very high-grade, lightweight, Vocas matte box, costs less.

In summary, we cannot recommend the Genus matte box. The blue reflecting filter stage, breaks apart the whole concept of a matte box. The screw for the French Flag, will make you mad when you want to use it, and the price versus overall quality ratio isn’t right.

Until the price has been corrected and the previously mentioned issue been addressed, we don’t recommend getting this matte box.

Steven Rushworth from Genus also commented on our quality concerns:
“We at Genus believe our products are good value for money and pride ourselves on the quality of them. We have many happy customers and the feedback we get back from them is they like the quality and the price of our products.”

We at cinema5D try to be as objective as possible and try to take into account what we think might be important for most of our readers. Still there might be customers that do feel differently about the products than we do.