GH13 GH1 taking better stills than my GH2?

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dishan

Well-known member
Ok this is weird, guys.

I've always kind of been disappointed in the stills from my GH2 coming from a Canon DSLR. The video was amazing, but the stills always seemed to have poor jpeg quality and a slight blurriness to it.
The jpeg quality could be gotten around by shooting RAW, but the bluriness was still there. Almost as if I were shooting with too slow of a shutter, but I was keeping it at around 80 which is enough to photograph something on my Canon.

I just dismissed it as "not as good for stills" and went on with my life. Then I picked up a GH1 a couple of days ago as a B cam. And for some odd reason, I feel like the stills aren't so bad from it. I filmed a musician last night and he asked for a couple of still shots for his facebook page while I was at it. At 1/80 and even 1/60, I got some very clear shots without the blur I recall getting with the GH2.

Does this make any sense at all? Is my GH2 defective, or is there some kind of setting I missed that overrides the manual shutter?

I'm usually taking pictures on M.

Oh, also I applied a Hack prior to shooting with the GH1 (to remove the 60i wrapper for 24p)- but as far as I know, it shouldn't have effected still quality, right? I think it was ipowell's stability presets.
 
There are some tests, I think DXO, which imply the sensor in the GH1 is slightly better than the sensor in the GH2. So your findings may be correct... Al
 
Could you show us some stills with EXIF-data? A shutter speed of 1/80 is too little information to help you. What lens do you use (focal length), what aperture, ISO, etc...
 
I think I may have also noticed that a still frame from a video looks sharper than a still taken as a photo. I might be doing something wrong, honestly, as I never really played with the photography functions of this camera before.
 
Hi dishan - I have found that my GH1 produces softer images than my GH2 with the same lens (but maybe, like my video tests, I'm an outlier :-)).

Both of these pictures were taken with the same lens (14-140), same ISO (3200), same white balance (flash setting). P mode gave me 1/15 sec on the GH1 and 1/60 sec on the GH2. Outdoors with lots of light, the story might have been different - but indoors, at high ISO, the GH1 struggled a little.

GH1
6B3B7F372C3E4A79A67CE1C56049C4F8.jpg

GH2
00E230CC2BC649278357C3FDFF873D74.jpg

Cheers,

Bill
 
Oh, also I applied a Hack prior to shooting with the GH1 (to remove the 60i wrapper for 24p)- but as far as I know, it shouldn't have effected still quality, right? I think it was ipowell's stability presets.[/QUOTE]

The best stills I get from my patched GH1 are grabbed from video clips. Here are some stills taken in MPEG video mode:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...tings-(very-low-compression-class-10-required!)
 

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ipanaya said:
The best stills I get from my patched GH1 are grabbed from video clips. Here are some stills taken in MPEG video mode:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthrea...tings-(very-low-compression-class-10-required!)
Click to expand...

I've noticed this as well- I thought I was crazy for thinking that frozen video frames looked better than jpegs taken with this camera. Glad I'm not alone!

Pietro Impagliazzo said:
Shoot RAW?
Click to expand...

I've heard that the jpeg compression Panasonic uses just isn't very good, and everyone recommends shooting RAW. I've tried that (I'm a fan of RAW anyway), and I will admit that it helped the color rendition quite a bit. But there was something about the stills that don't sit right with me, and I can't exactly put my finger on what that is...
 
M. Gilden said:
I've noticed this as well- I thought I was crazy for thinking that frozen video frames looked better than jpegs taken with this camera. Glad I'm not alone!



- Shooting raw is normally the way to go in all circumstances. But the crazy thing about patched video codecs is that they perform terribly well, even in MJPEG mode . So, in some circumstances, when you manage to get video clips of slow moving subjects and/or shoot at high shutter speeds using a good lens (fd 50mm 1.4 for instance), and a good lighting, then you will notice that your frozen frames will benefit from the codecs ability to push the details up. Pro photographers will not look into this but I have definitely decided not to buy another camera that might be more suitable for stills. I'll go GH1 all the way...:smile:
Click to expand...
 
M. Gilden said:
I've noticed this as well- I thought I was crazy for thinking that frozen video frames looked better than jpegs taken with this camera. Glad I'm not alone!

I've heard that the jpeg compression Panasonic uses just isn't very good, and everyone recommends shooting RAW. I've tried that (I'm a fan of RAW anyway), and I will admit that it helped the color rendition quite a bit. But there was something about the stills that don't sit right with me, and I can't exactly put my finger on what that is...
Click to expand...

Gilden, I think in the digital world sensors are like stocks. The bad stock from yore might not be so flashy and forgiving as the new one, but it sure had character.

I see the GH1 vs GH2 in the same light: GH1 for me has a great color rendition, it has a picture that looks right, at the cost of less resolution, more noise and FPN. The GH2 is cleaner, has more resolution but less character. Pick your poison.
 
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Well, I decided to do some test shots to upload here for others to see what I'm talking about... and I found some interesting things out!
I set the shutter to 80, took a couple of photos of the fine print on a spray can. When I hit the focus assist to zoom in with the LCD, I was able to get a clear shot of the letters in focus. However as soon as I hit the shutter, the resulting image on the LCD is blurry when you zoom in, and the same letters that were relatively sharp are now difficult if not impossible to read.

However, when importing the RAW image into photoshop I can suddenly see it in all its clarity and sharpness. On the camera, the image appears blurry and zooming with the scroll wheel only reinforces the blur. On my Canon, when shooting with manual lenses I always view the still after taking it at 100% on the display to check for focus mistakes or motion blur. On the GH2, for some reason, I can't do that. The image appears extremely blurry when I zoom in past 4x, not sharp like it is on my computer screen or Canon camera. So I have no way to tell if the picture was sharp or not, which is why I just assumed it was not a good camera for stills. When I played with a GH1, I didn't check the stills until I put the memory card into my computer, so I naturally though the GH1 was managing to take sharp photos while my GH2 kept spitting out images that were blurry when I moved it.

I'm not sure if any of this makes sense, but I think its just a bug in the playback mode of the GH cameras. Unless someone is familiar with this and nows a workaround?
 
You can’t tell anything unless the cameras take the exact same picture with the exact same settings. Put both cameras in “M” manual stills mode. Use the same fixed white balance value. Set them to the same actual ISO. For instance ISO 100 on the GH1 will give you the same exposure as ISO 160 on the GH2(ISO 200 on GH1 = ISO 320 on GH2…So on and So on). Turn all automatic features like Intelligent dynamic range and Intelligent resolution off.

Then take the pictures. You won’t be able to tell much of a difference except the GH2 produces and image with a lot more pixels. Actual resolvable resolution does not vary much.

If you were in P mode then it is likely that you had the Auto ISO or Intelligent ISO on for one or both of the cameras. That would explain the difference in metering. Oh and they fixed the Auto ISO bug on the GH2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfY2am3NYC8

 
Interesting, but the OP appears to be talking about sharpness, not metering and exposure.

I've noticed the same thing- text on a sign that was clearly legible in the viewfinder is suddenly blurring after taking a picture. Bring it to your computer and you'll see the picture came out fine, but you can't zoom in and judge on camera because the view becomes very soft.
And the GH1 doesn't seem to have this "bug", so that would explain why it would appear that the GH1 pictures look better, until you take them out and compare on a computer.

It appears that we aren't the first to recognize this:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?253058-Soft-preview

Guess its a known issue that most people just don't talk about around here- most of us aren't looking at the stills side of these cameras much. :)
 
So its a software bug in the camera? Will upgrading to the new 1.1 firmware help (camera is still stock over here)?

If not, that's very irritating for anyone looking to use this for photography- no wonder this camera never caught on in the consumer world!

On the subject of v1.1, is the new HBR mode available in 24p mode, or would we need to hack it for that?
 
Recently I've taken quite a lot of images in RAW using Lumix GF1. I've loaded them into Silkypix program, which is meant for the Lumix cameras. Even if you think you had all "intelligent features" turned off, there are still switches in Silkypix that are needed to see the actual untouched sensor data. The RAW images are terrific and blow the video out of the water even when scaled down to HD size.

I can zoom and zoom in and nothing unpleasant shows up and this is with 30 year old Minolta, Yashica ML and Tokina vintage lenses. I'm willing to bet they are the sharpest of the economy old timers. Unfortunately the RAW images are so good and cinematic, that it's almost depressing to shoot video now.

Having said that, I have some experience with Olympus still cameras with the same lenses, and they produced great jpeg images right out of the box. I was unable to get similar still image jpeg quality from Lumix GF1 and GH1 cameras. The sensor is supposedly the same, so clearly the Olympus knows more about encoding great jpeg images. I have samples that I can link to if needed.
 
So this is simply speculation, but you know how when you take raw images, a smaller jpeg is created with it on the card? I'm guessing that it tis this little jpeg that is being used to show on the camera display. I wondered what they were for, and figured that they were so that you could preview them on a computer, but this thread made me think that maybe that's why we see a blurry image the we zoom in.
 
I think you can specify whether to have a separate jpeg image when taking RAW images. At least I don't see a separate jpeg image when taking RAW images on the GF1. In any case the RAW images hold a jpeg thumbnail internally, so perhaps that is being used to view the image in camera.
 
That would be an interesting theory, however this problem exists when shooting jpeg alone as well. So it has nothing to do with RAW preview files.
Also, it appears to not suffer from this on the GH1.

That's fascinating about the silkypix thing, Aki- would love to see those examples!
 
I would speculate that it is the product of the GH2's lousy jpeg compression. Having switched to only RAW shooting, I'm no longer concerned with how the in-camera preview looks, although to my eye, the previews from RAW can look great in camera. But perhaps that's just my imagination.

Have to say though that final jpeg output in Aperture from the RAW data can sometimes miss the mark. Don't know what that is, but that is the exception.
 
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