The resulting image appears washed out, requiring color grading in post-production, but retains shadow and highlight detail that would otherwise be lost if a regular linear profile had been used that clipped shadow and highlight detail.
Log profile initially derived from Cineon film scanner, developed by Kodak in early 1990s, which uses logarithmic gamma encoding to utilize higher color bit depth (i.e. 16-bit) linear image sensor, to reproduce characteristics of negative film image.
In early times of digital cinematography, professional video cameras were only capable to capture linear sensor image up to 10-bit color depth even in HDCAM-SR format, but resulted in "video-look" compared with film stock cinematography even in the same 24 frames per second and shutter speeds.
The log gamma profile began gaining industrial popularity since 2005, when Arri released Arriflex D-20 which provided original Log-C gamma through HD-SDI video output, and further in 2008, when Sony released CineAlta F35 camera (and its 2005 Panavision Genesis sibling) with S-Log video recording on HDCAM-SR tape.
For consumer and prosumer cameras, Canon released Cinema EOS C300, which provided Canon Log video recording function, while Sony released S-Log2 profile on its Alpha 7II digital still camera, allowing low budget filmmakers to produce film-like motion pictures.