I just ordered my copy of the Atomos Ninja V. It is a great tool if you want to get serious about video recording, but prepare to pay! The Atomos has a few surprises up its sleeve that you might want to know about before buying!
You can find lots of reviews praising the Atomos Ninja V and rightly so – it will unleash a lot of potential from your camera doing internal recording. But buying the Atomos is like buying a german car: the price for the base model looks reasonable, but when you add needed extras, the price suddenly changes in upward direction.
The Atomos Ninja V comes with no memory. You have to install a SSD drive for it to store information, and if you don’t want the SSD drive to stick out from the side of the Atomos Ninja, you have to buy a dedicated drive. I went for the Angelbird AtomX SSDmini with 500 GB.
Further, there is not mount to make the Atomos sit comfortably on the camera – you can make a DYI version, but I decided to go for the Atomos monitor mount. The total of the mount and the SSD drive was around 66% of the price for the Atomos Ninja itself!
Then I learned that I did not have a cable to go between the Ninja and my camera -I needed a HDMI-A to HDMI-D cable for my Lumix camera (your camera may need a different cable). Maybe you are so lucky that you have one on stock, but I did not, so I had to invest once more. Notice that it is useful with a relative short cable if you intend to have the Ninja mounted right on top of your cable.
Add to this that the Atomos Ninja V comes with not batteries at all! You can get a Atomos Accessory Kit with batteries and a sun visor and a battery charger, but that kit will set you back another 40% of what the Atomos itself costs, so if you want both batteries, sun visor, memory and a monitor mount, you have to pay a bit more than double the price of what the Atomos Ninja V itself will cost you.
Then there is the question of getting data out of your Ninja! Here there is no USB-C or USB-A connector to “talk” to your Ninja, so I had to get a docking station for the SSD drive.
The final stab that Ninja Atomos V made at me was when I created a profile on the Atamos homepage and downloaded the latest software. There I learned that a one-time fee of 99 USD for the giving me access to the H.265 codex was required.
So, as I said in the beginning of this blog, the Atomos Ninja V is a great tool, but just like cars from Germany: be prepared to cough up some extra of you hard earned cash to make the package complete.
Related reading
Review: SmallRig RM75 Video Light
Review: COLBOR CL100 Video light
