GH1 has ETC? Sort of?
- Thread starter bumkicho
- Start date
Barry_Green
Moderator
Digital Zoom is horrible. It's just a cheap digital stretching of the image. It's no different than if you took the footage in PhotoShop and scaled it up -- except that PhotoShop would do a much better job.
ETC is optical. It's infinitely better. You can see the difference yourself with your GH1 -- take a photo using Extended Optical Zoom, and then take a photo using Digital Zoom. The Extended Optical Zoom on the GH1 is the same kind of feature as ETC on the GH2, except on the GH1 it only works for stills, whereas on the GH2 it works for stills and video.
On the scale of quality, GH1 Digital Zoom = cell phone camera video, GH2 ETC = Sony EX1 video. (not exactly, of course, but that's about the quality gulf between them).
ETC is optical. It's infinitely better. You can see the difference yourself with your GH1 -- take a photo using Extended Optical Zoom, and then take a photo using Digital Zoom. The Extended Optical Zoom on the GH1 is the same kind of feature as ETC on the GH2, except on the GH1 it only works for stills, whereas on the GH2 it works for stills and video.
On the scale of quality, GH1 Digital Zoom = cell phone camera video, GH2 ETC = Sony EX1 video. (not exactly, of course, but that's about the quality gulf between them).
It's not the end of the world in quality loss, but it's something you might as well do in your NLE if you need to crop....no reason to do it in-camera on the GH1. You can crop/zoom quite a bit on 1080 footage, and still be better than 720 footage. Cropping/zooming in your NLE still looks fine on 1080 Blu-Ray for "videographer" work as needed. I can't imagine why film-makers would need to crop (except to correct crappy camera work), however, but likewise can't imagine why a film-maker would use ETC on the GH2. ETC on the GH2 otherwise seems like a pretty good deal for videographers, IMHO, to use lenses like the 20mm f1.7 in low light run-n-gun situations. I'd probably use it for wedding work.
The actual resolvable resolution for the GH2 is no more than 900 lines of horizontal or vertical resolution. So what makes you think that using a 2x digital zoom is going to be better than the 720p mode that acheives about 600-650 lines. Everyone forgets that just because the video is 1920x1080 doesn't mean that it contains that much resolution.
