Finally saw GH2 footage first hand.. I am not upgrading. Staying with GH1.3

Status
Not open for further replies.
Blackout

Blackout

Veteran
I finally got to toy with a GH2 here in NYC. I am not allowed to say by who or how... and perhaps there will be improvements before actual release date, but as of now, I am not satisfied and am not upgrading. There is still mud, noise, streaking and issues with 24 mbit, and I shot some complex monitors and patterns and saw mud. The same old mud.. just less of it than with original unhacked GH1.

So I am sticking with my gh1.3s for now... next look will be at the af-100. The GH2 is a pos as I have seen it and a downgrade as far as I am concerned from hacked GH1.3s.
 
Last edited:
Wow. That's unfortunate. Especially since the AF100 also has 24Mbps output. Hopefully, it's codec is tweaked better somehow. I know everyone is raving about how it looks, so maybe it's somehow different than the GH2 stuff you saw. I'll look foward to your comments.
 
Blackout said:
I finally got to toy with a GH2 here in NYC. I am not allowed to say by who or how... and perhaps there will be improvements before actual release date, but as of now, I am not satisfied and am not upgrading. There is still mud, noise, streaking and issues with 24 mbit, and I shot some complex monitors and patters and saw mud. The same old mud.. just less.
So I am sticking with my gh1.3s for now... next look will be at the af-100. The GH2 is a pos and a downgrade as far as I am concerned.
Click to expand...

Did you see any extra telephoto footage? I think you are being a little pessimistic with your statements. Did you shoot the footage yourself? I can make any footage look bad if it is not shot right.
 
That's indeed unfortuanate. But the GH2 is a consumer camera, and wouldn't want to encroach on the AF100 territory so that seems right to me.
 
Not sure which built that place got but some people's sample GH2's are extremely buggy such as the one Philip Bloom received. I remember than even with the production GH1's their was a few people who reported a lot of banding ISO's of under 320 while most people don't have banding until an ISO of around 400 and up. There were the first shipping models.

I still say that it's too early to tell until testing is done on shipping models.
 
I shot the footage myself and purposely shot very difficult footage and compared it to similar footage shot on GH1.3 jobless D settings which is what my 3 cams are set at.
I shot monitors, grass, breezy foliage, ugly ugly checkered shirts.... I was not allowed to take the footage with me or post it. Again I can't go into details as to why or who or how, and this COULD be a pre release version and something is going to be improved but I clearly saw the GH1.3 footage was better. I hear a lot of tech talk about I frames and blah blah but I am telling you what my picky eyes saw and I have the money to buy the GH2 and I will not be doing so unless there is some change. I will check again when it is actually released and I can keep the footage. This is my opinion and I am NOT just saying it cause I have GH1.3s already.. if GH2 turns out to be better I will go with it but as far as I see as of now, it was not. Use your own eyes.... there are GH2 cameras floating around in all the major cities if you have the right contacts. Perhaps if Vitalli hacks the GH2... but from what I was told, he will not be able to. Hopefully though that is a wrong assumption. Everyone thought blu-ray was secure format and time and time again we see that people WILL not deal with encrypted bullshite.
 
Camera Expert said:
Not sure which built that place got but some people's sample GH2's are extremely buggy such as the one Philip Bloom received. I remember than even with the production GH1's their was a few people who reported a lot of banding ISO's of under 320 while most people don't have banding until an ISO of around 400 and up. There were the first shipping models.

I still say that it's too early to tell until testing is done on shipping models.
Click to expand...

Again.. I do acknowledge this is a possibility. I hope so. I live near B&H so when the actual release ones are in store I can prob get another look.. just reporting on what I saw as of now.
 
Blackout said:
... this COULD be a pre release version and something is going to be improved but I clearly saw the GH1.3 footage was better.
Click to expand...

Come on man, you know all the cameras out there are pre-production models unless someone brought something back from Japan. But since you are being so coy about the whole affair, I'm betting it was a pre-production camera. In which case your comments are unfair and honestly quite pointless. Not sure of your intention, and given that you cannot provide any footage, I for one will not accept your opinion. There is enough footage out there made with other pre-production units that to me proves you wrong. Of course, we all need to wait until there is finished product in the US to come to a final judgement, but even some of the more dubious footage from Japan shows great promise.
 
I can't believe I was writing that poorly.
I even can't believe that DXO decided to do testing on a preproduction model GH2. DP review is waiting until they get a finished unit before they do their testing.
 
is it really that suprising? I mean the gh13's bitrate is up 4x faster than the gh2's. I believe his test is legitament. and im not the least bit suprised it has mudd. Most comsumers will not know the difference either way. remember it is a consumer camera. not pro.
 
My thoughts are anyone lucky enough to have a GH13 with little to no banding should not upgrade right now. My GH13 on the other hand is pretty bad at ISO 1600 which makes it a tough call for me. I ordered a GH2 and will see for myself how it does. If it is bad, I can always return it.
 
maranfilms said:
is it really that suprising? I mean the gh13's bitrate is up 4x faster than the gh2's. I believe his test is legitament. and im not the least bit suprised it has mudd. Most comsumers will not know the difference either way. remember it is a consumer camera. not pro.
Click to expand...

GH2 also has B-frames and a more efficient GOP, not to mention 24pn which should result in higher quality. Bitrate is not everything.
 
Well the camera IS officially released in Japan now, and if you don't mind having a Japanese model they are available and out there if you want one. I have one and can say that the 24Mbps cinema mode is excellent, certainly comparable to a hacked GH1 but will smoother edges and less obvious sharpening artifacts. Now the FHD mode does have artifacting and after playing with it a little quickly turned it OFF. The teleconversion mode holds a lot of promise and works really well, with the kit lens it is does not resolve as well as what you get in regular mode since you have the AA filter to contend with, the footage kind of reminds me of the "1080 mjpeg" mode on the GH13, but a sharper lens may give better results if the AA filter is weak enough.
 
richtrav said:
Well the camera IS officially released in Japan now, and if you don't mind having a Japanese model they are available and out there if you want one. I have one and can say that the 24Mbps cinema mode is excellent, certainly comparable to a hacked GH1 but will smoother edges and less obvious sharpening artifacts. Now the FHD mode does have artifacting and after playing with it a little quickly turned it OFF. The teleconversion mode holds a lot of promise and works really well, with the kit lens it is does not resolve as well as what you get in regular mode since you have the AA filter to contend with, the footage kind of reminds me of the "1080 mjpeg" mode on the GH13, but a sharper lens may give better results if the AA filter is weak enough.
Click to expand...
Rich, could you please post a RAW sample of 720/60p footage?
 
stoneinapond said:
As any credible source should do.
Click to expand...


On the other hand if the DXO review is 'read' by folks in the engineering dept... perhaps it would benefit whatever is released...

I've not gone the GH-1.3 route, mainly because I don't want to listen to the Wife if the camera fails... hell hath no rage like a Wife thought such a purchase was 'stupid' in the first place... but I digress...

What I may do is if the GH-2 does perform reasonably well, I can perhaps pick up a second GH-1 body, and since my GH-1 is 'hackable', I I could hack that, and use the used GH-1 for occasions
were failure is not allowed...
 
Again guys - I'm just telling you what I saw. I don't know what would be different between pre-production models and final models. I would assume the chip, and the codec, are pretty much done and manufacturing is far far under way if this thing is to be in stores for Christmas. All I am saying is, the aliasing was no better... at least not that I could see... but I don't get much aliasing issues on my hacked footage to begin with. There was still mud....definitely worse than in my gh1.3 that doesn't get any mud since I installed the hacks. Also, and there was a slightly different quality to the image that I can't absolutely articulate.... I viewed it on a 24 inch LG lcd monitor at 24p 1080p. Shooting checkered shirts and foliage - the GH1.3 was definitely better to my eyes without question. I only was allowed to toy with it for a little bit - and I have no 'motive' here other than I have been a forum member for a long time and report on things both good and bad in both audio and video as I find them to this community because this place has been extremely helpful to me. That's it. Just telling you my views.. I have been silent until now cause all I have seen was very poor poor vimeo or youtube stuff and not native /mts files. Now I have seen native on both, and again, GH1.3 clearly trumped it in my eyes - yet I would say the GH2 would trump the regular unhacked GH1. I have no idea what panasonic is trying to do with the GH2... I'm really clueless as to their positioning of it when they obviously are aware of the hack.. and then we have the AF-100 coming out... I find it odd they are even making a GH2... but anyway - this is what I saw and no, I was not allowed to put in my own SD card and take footage away with me or I absolutely would have done that.
 
richtrav said:
Well the camera IS officially released in Japan now, and if you don't mind having a Japanese model they are available and out there if you want one. I have one and can say that the 24Mbps cinema mode is excellent, certainly comparable to a hacked GH1 but will smoother edges and less obvious sharpening artifacts. Now the FHD mode does have artifacting and after playing with it a little quickly turned it OFF. The teleconversion mode holds a lot of promise and works really well, with the kit lens it is does not resolve as well as what you get in regular mode since you have the AA filter to contend with, the footage kind of reminds me of the "1080 mjpeg" mode on the GH13, but a sharper lens may give better results if the AA filter is weak enough.
Click to expand...

See - I'm not crazy. Here is another poster - someone who OWNS the Japanese release version of the camera and says, "Now the FHD mode does have artifacting and after playing with it a little quickly turned it OFF."

Well.. there you have it! That's exactly what I saw - artifacting... I just used the term 'mud'. Now I need to state that I am COMPLETELY uninterested in 720p mode - it is blurry to me and I don't understand why anyone uses it other than for slow motion purposes or for live close up interviews that need that 'video' look. Maybe it looks nice on a 720p monitor on an older computer but on todays HUGE displays it looks BLURRY in wide compared to 1080p FHD on the GH1.3 hack or the 24mbit cinema mode on the GH2 that I got to play with.

I am using the cameras to make films to be played on BIG 1080p tvs and also projected at festivals. 720p is 1 million pixels (ok well 921600 to be exact) ... 1080p is more than twice the info - twice the detail.. 2 million pixels (2,073,600 to be exact) with the REAL motion cadence of 24p, where as shooting 60p and converting via any method to 24p NEVER looks right to me, so if the GH2 is only really usable in 720p 60p - it is useless to me. I didn't even test that mode because I have very little use or interest in it.. the ONLY time I use it is to shoot slowmo and then upscale that slomo into a 1080p 24p timeline. As I said, I shot highly detailed scenes in wide with the kit lens..... some daylight, some interior bright lights... all 1080p, manually set everything. The GH1.3 was clearly - without a doubt, superior to my eyes in 1080p and to the few friends I had with me... and that's all she wrote.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top