GH5 Announced

These days camera manufacturers don't offer full set of features and want to nickel and dime customers. They are behaving like pizza sellers and log profile as one of the toppings to be paid extra.

Supporters often come out with ridiculous arguments to support their manufacturer. At one point of time I used to hear the argument in RED camp that the customer should not have the facility to delete files in camera. The reasoning given was that if the file is deleted then the customer will blame the camera manufacturer. Manufacturers want to hide their weakness and try to show it as being customer friendly. Now I hear a similar argument that people won't know how to use log profile and will blame Panasonic. So V-log is a paid upgrade.

By that logic, Go Pro would have been inundated with millions of calls from angry customers as nearly 90% of people can't get the shots as shown in Go Pro advertisements. Same logic can go for many other cinema camera companies. So I can blame Panasonic for me failing to create as good a reel as Michael Cioni did for that Varicam 35 intro reel.

If Panasonic is not good at software and if their cost is high, then let them create engineering centres in India for the software development. If Sony can provide log profiles for free why can't Panasonic?

The GH5 press release seems to be a purely marketing team initiated thing to counter the launch of other cameras. So the words DSLM, 6K photo etc. Nevertheless, with already 10 pages of discussions here, the Panasonic marketing team would be happy with the buzz and wild speculations about everything.
 
DLD said:
But, if most of the owners shoot baked-in anyway, then what's the point?
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Lest we lose sight of the larger picture here, I'd dare say "most of the owners" are shooting stills. Which v-log wouldn't even be applicable to, and you can always just shoot raw for stills. I don't know the breakdown, but it would certainly be interesting to see what percentage of GH4 sales went to dedicated video shooters or primarily video shooters, and what percentage went to those who were going to use it primarily for stills.
 
Some historical perspective. The GH series started out as an enthusiast camera with decent photo quality, and for the time, some excellent video capabilities. It was very much a consumer camera aimed squarely at that market. Then Vitaliy Kiselev came along with his band of hackers and turned the GH1 and GH2 into film making monsters, much to everyone's surprise, including Panasonic. The company's initial reaction was to clamp down on that activity with the GH3, while still providing some of the functionality that the previous model had. Realizing that there was a large market for what the original GHs had done, the company turned to the film making community for advice and came out with the GH4, which by all accounts, is a run away hit. However, the consumer gene still run deep in the Panasonic division, making radical changes like upping the price point of the camera by including V-Log, a difficult decision. I for one feel blessed, that despite all the limitations that the form factor has, the Panasonic line of consumer cameras has opened vistas that many of us barely dreamed of a mere half decade ago. So bring on the GH5, with or without V-Log included, and I will celebrate by capturing images that make my, and my audience's heart sing.
 
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DLD said:
I think the separate V-log charge has a far more practical reasoning behind it. Panasonic knows how many GH4's it has shipped. They also know how many GH4 owners downloaded the V-Log feature. Then they looked at that ratio...
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Stop right there. I thought you were going in a different direction than you did.
Had you continued with:

...and figured out how many are using this camera for vlog-style video work versus everything else it can do.

Would be a valid explanation. Figuring how who is buying these cameras and why so they can steer future models in the right direction.

In my mind that's a good excuse. If you just gave it away with the camera it gives you no indication of who is using it. If you give it as a free download, people may download it just because it's a free add-on even if they never use it. If you charge $100 for it, you have a better indicator of the number of people who actually need it or at least highly desire it.
 
The GH were being hailed before Vitaily got a hold of them, they were better for film making in many ways than Canon, and far better than Nikon at the time. It's what caused the demand for him to hack the camera in the first place. The "If only it could do this" idea. Go look at the initial GH threads, they are pages and pages and pages long, well before the hack.
 
Guys you don't have the full story and complaining already, give Panasonic some slack. Waite till they release full specs and pricing. Having said that I know no matter what, as a canon user, I am getting at least one GH5 for shooting studio chromakey with it's 10 bit 4:2:2. Now if the ISO is great at 1600 and usable at 3200 and includes the 5 axis stabilization then I will get several for low light event shoots. Again lets be patient and see what they have in store. But let's also be truthful that Internal 10bit 4:2:2 including 4k up to 30fps at sub 2k was unheard of just a week ago. This is great for the market as it will force others to provide more features.
 
Ken1212 said:
Guys you don't have the full story and complaining already, give Panasonic some slack. Waite till they release full specs and pricing. Having said that I know no matter what, as a canon user, I am getting at least one GH5 for shooting studio chromakey with it's 10 bit 4:2:2. Now if the ISO is great at 1600 and usable at 3200 and includes the 5 axis stabilization then I will get several for low light event shoots. Again lets be patient and see what they have in store. But let's also be truthful that Internal 10bit 4:2:2 including 4k up to 30fps at sub 2k was unheard of just a week ago. This is great for the market as it will force others to provide more features.
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I'm not complaining at all, I'm amazed at all these new cameras. But, since it's in development....nothing wrong with people adding their 2 cents and see what unfolds. If a single feature is wanted enough, maybe the word will get out and Panny can add it. If not, it will surely be an awesome camera with just the additions they've already decided to include.
 
I will be buying one, but I wonder what the 10 bit internal is going to do the battery life. I know when I have my GH4 hooked up to output 10bit to my shogun it CRUSHES batteries. So, we shall see in the near future.
 
It's just a discussion. Nobody is wrong and I'm not trying to be right.

The bummer is it's going to be a long wait before the camera gets final specs and ships. I don't think Panasonic has actually confirmed the sensor is MFT yet and the codec is an unknown still too. It could be 6 months away!
 
roxics said:
In my mind that's a good excuse. If you just gave it away with the camera it gives you no indication of who is using it. If you give it as a free download, people may download it just because it's a free add-on even if they never use it. If you charge $100 for it, you have a better indicator of the number of people who actually need it or at least highly desire it.
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It only tells you who's interested in it and willing to risk $100 on it but may try it once and then abandon it. It doesn't tell you who's satisfied enough to keep using it. What would make more sense would be an fully functional, unsupported, free, time-limited trial. That way, Panasonic could gather useful data on how many actually wanted to pay for it because it was useful.
 
With my GH4, I am shooting v-log, 8-bit internally, and at iso 800 and 1600 without hesitation. I even shot at iso 3200 and with a bit of noise remove, I had no issue. There must be something wrong with my eyes.. ha ha!
 
Never used the 4/3 GH line before, hopefully it's reasonable. I have a canon 70d that I use with a canon power supply on tripod for studio and some indoor shoots, I would assume Panasonic has something similar too. For run and gun we can buy couple extra batteries.
 
Tzedekh said:
It only tells you who's interested in it and willing to risk $100 on it but may try it once and then abandon it. It doesn't tell you who's satisfied enough to keep using it. What would make more sense would be an fully functional, unsupported, free, time-limited trial. That way, Panasonic could gather useful data on how many actually wanted to pay for it because it was useful.
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Yeah. I'm sure there are better ways to figure this out. Just offering one excuse that makes some sense to me.
 
The Resolution, frame rate, and codec specs look phenomeanal.

Howevber, the concering part here for me is no announcements, news, or info on the sensor itself... which leads me to believe nothing has changed.

M43 is showing its age in comparison to what the A7SII and other cameras with S35/FF can put out... Lens adaptors are great, but what the GH5 needs more than anything is better lowlight and better dynamic range. I would love to see a 1-stop increase on both counts here, but I realize that may take some perhaps-not-yet-possible sensor magic...

As such, if the rest of the image specs haven't changed, I can't see myself investing here. Sony and Canon's answer, by the time this camera actually launches, sound far more appealing if they haven't been able to improve the actual sensor's IQ.
 
The noise issue I have been dealing with like this. Shoot in 4k and the noise is very noticeable in a 4k timeline. I generally don't deliver in 4k, but rather in 1080, so noise in 4k on a 1080 timeline is barely noticeable all the way up to 1,600. Works for me YMMV...
 
Erik Naso said:
I don't think Panasonic has actually confirmed the sensor is MFT yet ...
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Maybe the "t" is extra, so we're looking at the sub-$2,000 medium format 4K camera, kind of like Alexa65 but for $300,000 less.

Of course, people will then be complaining about the lenses - "My 14-140 is vignetting big time. And the MFT-to-MF adapter is like forty grand at B&H".
 
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