GH5 How interested are you in a GH6 anymore?

stoneinapond said:
A sage you are....
Click to expand...

I'm old enough to remember no self respecting professional would use 35mm camera (which are now called full frame) to a serious job. Medium format cameras were the tool of choice. We could see their return albeit for specialized work like landscape, studio etc. They are probably already the choice for studio work it's just a small segment that the public isn't aware of. This follows the trend of camera manufactures concentrating on high end market this just happens to be photo based. There will always be a demand for the best whether it is needed or not.

I'm actually curious whether more people use mirrorless cameras for video or photograph. No doubt video use has grown...
 
Last edited:
Peter C. said:
Sometimes photography cameras are designed to take pictures instead of video. I know it’s hard to believe
Click to expand...

Not sure what the comment is supposed to mean. Even for taking photos I don't see a point to 300 MP. 45 MP right now is massive. Some cameras that pull off a sensor shift manage 80 MP photos and those are insanely massive. Super resolution tools like Gigapixel do very well to fill in some missing gaps. Once printed I doubt anybody could honestly tell you there is a difference between a true 80MP image vs a 20MP upscaled 2x to 80MP with Gigapixel viewed side by side.

Cropping should only go so far. Plus cropping is not really a professional aspect of photography. I'm kind of surprised how that thinking has shifted. A pro should be nailing framing and composition as part of their craft. Not farting with it later. Thats sloppy and lazy. Sometimes small amounts of cropping can help but we can already do that. Having higher than 80MP suddenly means 2x, 4x or larger crops which to me is kind of ridiculous. How can one focus, or judge expressions, lighting and shadows that far away from a subject? How can we capture just the right emotion from that far? Its a crutch to get around a lack of skill and then some don't have to learn composition. They just snap the button, let the AF and auto exposure do the work for them, crop in post to fix poor framing and call themselves a pro.

I think thats a mistake to consider photos capable of cropping in that much. It just encourages sloppiness and laziness. It takes away the importance of the skills people should learn for photography. It distracts from what should be more important in photography. It also creates unnecessary size for images. Smartphones need larger because of the insane amount of image processing they do to make the crappy sensors look somewhat decent. Plus some smartphones think it will get customers feeling all tingly inside to have large photos when we all know 99.9% of those photos are posted on social media. If you capture a crappy 300 MP image eventually if you can scale it down enough it will look really good. Its a brute force method to compensate for a poor sensor and lens. Ok it works but its kind of silly. Its ordering an entire catered buffet to find just the right pickle to eat. Just because a smartphone can use 300 MP to make decent normal images doesn't mean a FF DSLR needs the same. At least it doesn't need it as much.

The reality is smartphones will always suck horribly for sensitivity and detail. The only solution they really have is grab as much image data they can to process the crap out of it to reduce noise, produce sharper details and scale down to a solid looking image. Sort of what I could do with Gigapixel by shooting a 20 MP photo with high noise, using NR, scaling up to 6x size to rebuild some details and then scale back down to a solid looking detailed and clean 20 MP image again. Or we can just use good sensors and lenses in the first place and not fart around.

Smartphones are about capture an image so people can do stuff with those photos quickly. Its more about just having the punchy cool looking image to play with instantly. A DSLR is more about an organic and natural looking image and having enough extra detail to adjust slightly as needed but not depend on it. Smart phones also typically don't have other lens options so people need higher detail to mess with because thats really their only option. There are add on lenses for smartphones but that industry is a hot mess with no standards in place and few know it even exists. Smartphones also don't really have a decent optical zoom option. Since the y need brute force digital zoom again it makes sense to have a super high dense sensor. That doesn't mean its a great solution. It means its really their only option. I just doin't see that having the same meaning on a DSLR. Sure a 45 MP sensor has a bit more usable digital zoom but I just find that disgusting to depend on a digital zoom that much.
 
Thomas Smet said:
Not sure what the comment is supposed to mean. Even for taking photos I don't see a point to 300 MP. 45 MP right now is massive...
Click to expand...
In studio photography medium format cameras with more resolution that we could see a use for is par for the course. You're mistakenly applying your beliefs of what is necessary and associated misuses of not properly framing with higher resolution cameras. This isn't the reason these type of cameras exist. They have a purpose whether you understand it or not otherwise no one would buy them and they wouldn't sell them. In general more resolution is needed for printing, in studio work there is no reason to cut corners in regards to resolution. They give the ability to photograph a model and use the same photo in a magazine and on a billboard or crop it to whatever purpose might be needed.
 
Last edited:
Peter C. said:
In studio photography medium format cameras with more resolution that we could see a use for is par for the course. You're mistakenly applying you're beliefs of what is necessary and associated misuse and laziness of not properly framing with higher resolution cameras. This isn't the reason these type of cameras exist. They have a purpose whether you understand it or not otherwise no one would buy them and they wouldn't sell them.
Click to expand...

Yeah but we are also not really talking about studio medium format photography. Thats kind of going way off on a tangent.

Plus medium format isn't just about more MP. Its about a larger sensor and larger lenses. Its the whole system that helps resolve more detail and not just more MP. Thats where I don't see the point of 300 MP on a m43 or FF sensor. Its kind of silly based on what the other parts of the technology can provide.

Are any pros really complaining about 20MP or 45 MP stills FF right now? Film was a very different medium and it resolved detail differently. We kind gif needed medium back then for high art magazines and larger prints. Today FF digital resolves a lot of detail, DR and low noise images where we don't need medium photography as much as we once did. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its place but I'm pretty none of us were thinking of medium in this massive discussion we are having.

Again I don't have a problem with more MP. I'm happy to have 20 MP over the 16 MP on the GH4. I really didn't want the 10 MP on the GH5S. I liked the 32 MP on the M6 mk2 but it was actually starting to be a bit too much for normal framed photos. Its cool to have more to work with when needed but we already have that and have had that for some time.

I realize some pros have special needs and medium will make sense and thats great for them but we are here talking about a m43 camera and MP that work for 99% of users. The reality is while Fuji has a medium format camera with over 100MP a lot of wedding photographers now choose cameras like the 20MP R6 long before they will choose medium again. Thats very different then it was decades ago when medium was the wedding format of choice. Thats proof of just how far FF digital has come.

None of my comments are to put down larger MP but that they have much less importance than they once did.

Smartphones need higher MP because they don't have other choices. A smartphone will likely never get a FF or medium sensor. Maybe a tablet could but I doubt it. I guess the entire backside of a smartphone could be a lens and sensor but lets be realistic here. A FF DSLR is great with 20MP or 45 MP. Pros of all shapes and sizes use both. Does it really need to be higher? I doubt it. I doubt a FF sensor or glass can resolve much more than 80 MP if it can even manage that. We get to a point where we just blob more pixels to a shape without adding any finer definition.

Now maybe someday we will have a FF sensor with each pixel as small as a smartphone sensor and glass as fine as a smartphone lens but a larger size to actually resolve that FF detail. Thats hearts away however and for now just raising MP is rather pointless. That is even more true for a m43 camera which we are talking about. While Olympus may be able to kind of fake 80 MP I don't think any one of us would really want a 80 MP sensor that would start to show noise at ISO 200. Methods liek upscaling work because its still a 20 MP sensor with the noise pattern of a 20 MP sensor. By shifting the sensor its still a 20 MP sensor. Same with tools like Gigapixel. The image is already clean with a smaller MP count and Gigapixel has the same AI work to reduce that noise. So you end up with a lot more clean detail than we would if we had a 80 MP m43 sensor. A 80 MP m43 sensor would have so much noise we would have to add a ton of NR which would destroy that fine detail anyway. Its more counter productive than providing any real advantages. If they could do it then go for it. I support a 24 MP m43 if they can do it right. I just don't want to see a 80 MP m43 sensor done poorly just to appease those that think MP are everything.

If you want to talk about medium then sure. Thats the way to go if you really need more. Not a 300 MP FF sensor. Get the larger sensor and overall system to help actually resolve the acuity of shot.
 
Peter C. said:
In studio photography medium format cameras with more resolution that we could see a use for is par for the course. You're mistakenly applying your beliefs of what is necessary and associated misuses of not properly framing with higher resolution cameras. This isn't the reason these type of cameras exist. They have a purpose whether you understand it or not otherwise no one would buy them and they wouldn't sell them. In general more resolution is needed for printing, in studio work there is no reason to cut corners in regards to resolution. They give the ability to photograph a model and use the same photo in a magazine and on a billboard or crop it to whatever purpose might be needed.
Click to expand...

You also cannot deny that laziness is not a use case for the higher MP. It is not true of everyone but it is without a doubt a common use case. At the same time lots of pros are using 20MP with exceptional results. For a decade DSLRs almost completely replaced medium cameras for landscape and architectural and they were hovering around 20 MP. Its nice to have 45 MP now but as an industry I don't think thats been a huge game changer either. I think if one truly needed more than what the FF DSLRs at the time could do then they did move to medium.
 
There will always be niche needs for 300mp cameras but we are talking about a $2000-$2500 m43 camera designed for motion video and prosumers looking for a small form factor camera. I want as few MP as possible to get me excellent 4K.

Beyond that there are so many vastly more important things than increased resolution that unless you’re working on big shows, VFX, or large format speciality content (at which point, I don’t see a m43 camera as being your choice) it’s really misdirected enthusiasm IMO. I get the reframing argument for safety and/or laziness or efficiency, whatever you want to call it. I am not coming down on that but rather pointing out that it has significant cost (at least at this juncture) to other image metrics if you’re not on a larger sensor. Right tool for the right job.

On a side note, AI upscaling technology is improving rapidly right now, and it does a stunningly good job. It’s the stuff of 80s sci fi in real life, and in the coming years it will only get better and better. NVIDIA just recently opened up its SDK to alllow developers to use its Tensor cores for this sort of thing so I suspect in the coming years we will be seeing plugins leveraging AI machine learning to create insanely impressive upscales. Which should work pretty well for one man band types and smaller scale jobs, when we’d want to save a shot by reframing or give a second option on a single camera interview.
 
Thomas Smet said:
You also cannot deny that laziness is not a use case for the higher MP. It is not true of everyone but it is without a doubt a common use case. At the same time lots of pros are using 20MP with exceptional results. For a decade DSLRs almost completely replaced medium cameras for landscape and architectural and they were hovering around 20 MP. Its nice to have 45 MP now but as an industry I don't think thats been a huge game changer either. I think if one truly needed more than what the FF DSLRs at the time could do then they did move to medium.
Click to expand...
Both are probably true people misuse or abuse high resolution and there is a legitimate use of or no harm in having high resolution cameras. Brings to mind many other types of products you could have a similar argument but with capitalism and modern society people are free to buy and misuse to their hearts content.
 
Peter C. said:
Both are probably true people misuse or abuse high resolution and there is a legitimate use of or no harm in having high resolution cameras. Brings to mind many other types of products you could have a similar argument but with capitalism and modern society people are free to buy and misuse to their hearts content.
Click to expand...

To be clear I'm not arguing against higher resolution. I'm arguing against higher resolution for a m43 camera or even a FF camera. In the case of FF its totally awesome to go to 45 MP or maybe even 80 MP. I just think at a certain point we need to accept the limitations of the sensor size. I personally don't know many photographers that use more than 45 MP I guess is the main point I'm trying to make. I don't know many that ever really had a serious issue with not having more than 20 MP. I can't remember the last time I knew of anybody shooting medium format. I am very aware there are needs for it out there. Even in art school in the late 90's early 2000's I don't recall a lot of my photo student friends using medium.

I think one needs to be realistic when it comes to target market for these tools. Just adding MP can hurt the image more than it can help which is why the cameras are not just going nuts adding MP. When the GH5 first came out some of us were concerned 20 MP was already going in the wrong direction. The better technology helped but imagine how much better it could have been in low light if it was still 16 MP like the GH4. We sort of got that with the GH5S and P4k where we could see just how good a m43 sensor could be in low light. Cramming 300 MP on even a FF sensor would have way more negatives than positives.
 
Peter C. said:
I'm old enough to remember no self respecting professional would use 35mm camera (which are now called full frame) to a serious job. Medium format cameras were the tool of choice. We could see their return albeit for specialized work like landscape, studio etc. They are probably already the choice for studio work it's just a small segment that the public isn't aware of. This follows the trend of camera manufactures concentrating on high end market this just happens to be photo based. There will always be a demand for the best whether it is needed or not.

I'm actually curious whether more people use mirrorless cameras for video or photograph. No doubt video use has grown...
Click to expand...

Video, but I do want a good photography camera too
 
Thomas Smet said:
I can't remember the last time I knew of anybody shooting medium format. I am very aware there are needs for it out there. Even in art school in the late 90's early 2000's I don't recall a lot of my photo student friends using medium.
Click to expand...

Probably 1 out of 8 or 10 lead wedding photographers I come across is using medium format, either a GFX or a film camera. If it's a GFX, it'll be their main camera. If it's film, they'll be shooting a selection of particular shots with it

Just adding MP can hurt the image more than it can help which is why the cameras are not just going nuts adding MP. When the GH5 first came out some of us were concerned 20 MP was already going in the wrong direction. The better technology helped but imagine how much better it could have been in low light if it was still 16 MP like the GH4. We sort of got that with the GH5S and P4k where we could see just how good a m43 sensor could be in low light. Cramming 300 MP on even a FF sensor would have way more negatives than positives.
Click to expand...

I remember reading about the photographer who shot all the promo stills for Breaking Bad, Mad Men, many other things. He got the newest Phase One back (which, at the time, was upped to about 100MP I think) and he ending up sending it back and renting the previous generation again instead (which was more in the 60-80MP range) because the extra resolution was causing so much extra work in post getting rid of details they didn't want to see. and these photos were going up on billboards and blown up big, seen close-range, on subways in NYC, etc

but also - I'll say it again - I don't think we can resolve 300MP with available optics. I remember John Brawley saying that his lens choices to resolve the detail on the Ursa 12K were limited. And that's an APS-C 100MP (equivalent, if it were 3:2 aspect ratio) sensor. Most photo systems (be they mirrorless or smartphones) are also relying on software correction, further deteriorating the detail achieved compared to the way John is shooting...
 
right. back to DLD's horsepower analogy...

which feels a bit like shooting RAW or having a camera that can shoot in RAW. except that RAW can actually be useful... just that often it might not be necessary or you might not use it frequently
 
I used to think it was one of RED's features but after my reacquaintance with REDCODE I see it more as a necessity and I don't really see any other way (meaning I understand why those guys/gals don't choose anything else after working with it for so long).

With that said, I am painfully trying to manage my own data on even the most simplest test shoots.

Never shot film, but I am counting the seconds in my head. [Also always using 'HQ'.]
 
ahalpert said:
right. back to DLD's horsepower analogy...

which feels a bit like shooting RAW or having a camera that can shoot in RAW. except that RAW can actually be useful... just that often it might not be necessary or you might not use it frequently
Click to expand...

A friend recently purchased Tesla Model 3 Performance, 471 lb/ft of torque, 0-60 in low 3's. He loves it. He says he has a long on-ramp near his house and he can get to the end of it at 90 mph.

It's like that quick exchange we had with James (aka the Guest) - high end audio amplifiers have a lot of power not because one wants to listen to them at high volumes but because that power aids in the transitions from soft to loud passages at any volume.

As to the crops - one can attain all sort of the in-frame adjustments on top of the ratio changes and often can only get there by editing because he can't necessarily get there during the original shot (due to a variety of factors). It's not different than adjusting contrast, brightness, colors, etc. Editing provides options. And that's for your own frames. Try to putz around with shots taken by others on their smartphones at 24mm.

PS. I was scanning some sensor/mobile phone sites (Image Sensor World is still tops) and came across the likely model for iPhone 14. The purchase orders for a 48 MPX part have apparently been already issued. That's a big step up from the current 12 MPX component in iPhone 13. Everyone wants high res.
 
The only use case i,m hearing from you is severe cropping. Ok. But find me the optics that resolv3e more than 100MP. And then make them 1oz $100

again, 45MP /=/ 300MP

i never drive 90mph. Highest zones aroind here are 65 snd fastest i go is 80. Compensating?
 
ahalpert said:
The only use case i,m hearing from you is severe cropping. Ok. But find me the optics that resolv3e more than 100MP. And then make them 1oz $100

again, 45MP /=/ 300MP
Click to expand...


PS. I might recommend against driving 90 MPH in a Tesla because it's not 911.
 
If i understand correctly, pixel shift can only pick up as much detail as the lens can resolve in a single lens position. Youre not going to capture more detail than the lens can resolve
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top