Can different lenses help/hurt with the GH13 Hack?

P

P. Harrill

Member
I've been following the testing of the GH13 hack and while everyone has (rightly) discussed the impact of using faster or slower SDHC cards, one thing that I've not seen discussed is what lenses people are using during these tests.

Illya Friedman offered a theory on the Hot Rod Cameras blog, in which he states that the Panasonic 14-140 kit lens does not do well when shooting motion pictures. Specifically, he suggests that the camera is sending metadata that interferers too much with the GH1's ability to write to the card.

Read this post, as well as the 6th comment:

http://www.hotrodcameras.com/2009/09/quickstart-gh1/

I don't know if this is truly an issue or not, but in future testing threads it might be interesting/helpful for people to write what lens(es) they're using along with the card they're using.
 
I think a couple of people have noted that when they were shooting with a lens that had no electronic connections to the camera they were getting more stable results. But that also was very early in the development stages of the hack. I haven't seen any recent postings bringing up the issue.
 
Ive used the panny 20mm,14-45mm...some c mounts and fd lenses and can say it dont make any difference for me. Only that FHD in c setting is too sharp with the 20mm and I have to reduce the in cam sharpness...but in terms of write errors no issue.
 
I hadn't thought about the in-camera sharpness, too. That would be another thing that would be helpful to list in these tests.
 
I have been doing extensive testing with all of the lenses in the video below. I have definitely seen a difference in number of errors with the m4/3s lenses vs. the legacy manual focus lenses. However, the errors that occur with the 20mm and 14-45mm only occurred when I was pushing the camera to its limits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FPbqhFt_oY

I had several instances where I could record a high detailed MJPEG scene at 1920x1080 with some of my legacy lenses. That same scene would fail almost instantly with the m4/3s lenses.

I think the theory behind it is that the m4/3s lenses apply lens corrections and that pushes the cameras processor past its limits. I don’t think it causes the camera to write data at a higher bit rate even though that is what the camera’s error message suggests.

I also set the contrast to -2 and the sharpness to -2 to make sure those settings are not affecting the processing. I like to correct those things in post processing anyway.

I think it is just a case where the camera reports that it cannot write fast enough to the memory card for any error it has with processing the video.

I actually carry a spare memory card with me that has the 1920x1080 firmware on it. I load that firmware when I know I will be shooting with my legacy lenses only. Right now that occurs whenever I shoot past the 20mm pancake range since I sold the 14-45mm yesterday. That lens was just terrible for video. It is just way too slow.
 
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