The Atomos Ninja 2 costs $1000 and comes with everything you need, and also provides a very useful 2nd monitor with peaking, false color etc. It's small and the batteries and media are cheap as chips. Six hours of recording ProRes HQ onto a bog standard 500GB 2.5" laptop drive. SSD optional. Pressing record on the C100 starts and stops recording automatically on the Ninja. Your laptop is going to be a complete pain in comparison, plus you will need some form of HDMI capture ability for it.
The only minor annoyance with the Ninja 2 is it needs to analyze a moving image to properly deinterlace to 23.98fps 1080p. The HDMI standard is 1080i60, and the C100 (and 5D3) are going to have to send that format out regardless. You can record that directly but deinterlacing in post is a pain. So instead with the Ninja 2, you can have it deinterlace and record 23.98 fps directly, which is wonderful, but every time you power both the camera and the recorder on, you will have to wave your hand in front of the lens a bit for it to figure out how to do the 3:2 pulldown.
A nuisance but that is the only nuisance...everything else is beautifully optimized and integrated. You can name the project, camera, scene and shot directly on the Ninja and the take number will auto-increment. Timecode is fully supported. It's a professional solution. The Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 is actually bigger and far less featured, and while it's half the price (with the needed mount plate) it mandates the use of SSDs which make up for the difference. Also, for the 5D3, they may continue to insist on turning off the internal LCD when using HDMI, so with the Hyperdeck you won't be able to see what you're shooting. Get the Ninja.
But if you don't care at all about ergonomics and workflow, why are you caring so much about image quality? Do you just shoot product shots or something in one studio?
No, right now, I'm just a hobbyist learning all the tools, but hoping to move into doing some stuff to make some $$.
I come from the IT world, and I was thinking this is all just about basically computer signal capturing...hence my questions on just plugging it into a laptop.
I am quite puzzled about one of your statements...where you went on about deinterlacing...etc.
I was under the assumption (yes, I know what you get for assuming

)....that this was shot at full HD, which to me means 1080p....progressive, not interlaced...? Your mentioning of having to deinterlace stuff shot with my 5D3 if coming directly out of HDMI port confused me..?
Can you give a bit more detail on this aspect of your post?
Anyway..I'll look into the ninja. But I just pulled the trigger on the 70-200 L f/2.8...and once that is paid off, I was going for the 50L next. So, during all this lens buying, the Canon update with the clean HDMI out (or maybe ML will get it right first)...I was wanting to think about capturing this which equipment I had on hand...
If it would do for going straight to say, my laptop, I was thinking that maybe I could hook the HDMI out of the camera to a device to stream video wirelessly to my laptop, and could use that as a nice monitor, and not have too much hanging on my tripod...?
Thoughts? Comments?
TIA,
cayenne