GH4 Why you should be excited about the Panasonic GH4

Sol M.

Veteran
I've owned all of Panasonic's GH-series cameras and while each one provided incremental updates to make it a better production tool, the GH4 is the first one that I'm excited about...and it's not even about the 4k.

If you're on the fence about the GH4, or don't even know what the big deal is, I wrote this for you: Why you should be excited about the Panasonic GH4

What are you most excited about?
 
Has it been verified the GH4 fixes the problem on the GH3 that the displays turn off? I know people assume it is because the GH4 has peeking but the GH3 left the tally light on so ..... is it fixed?
 
I own, and am very fond of the GH2 & GH3. Both have mild to serious issues. Currently the, yet to ship, GH4 is enjoying a percieved specification honeymoon. I'll be excited when it ships, and lives up to the hype.
 
Good post Jive,

Any hints on your 120p fix? My guess is that with the YAGH you could output 60p to an external recorder but since it has 2 or more outputs you could work with the cadence to output the camera signal at 120p by using a 120 shutter or more. who knows!
 
I own, and am very fond of the GH2 & GH3. Both have mild to serious issues. Currently the, yet to ship, GH4 is enjoying a percieved specification honeymoon. I'll be excited when it ships, and lives up to the hype.

Hear, hear. This is so true. The companies announce specs, except the cams never seem to live up to the specs. You assume that everything is being improved, instead of deteriorating, but that's simply not true. So often, it's two steps forward and one step back. The GH3 is much better on paper than the GH2, but in reality f.ex. the viewfinder is worse, and the Sony sensor doesn't have the mojo the GH2 had, and you no longer have the same sensor area coverage and so on.

On paper the GH4 looks great. Now we have to wait to see what reality brings - I expect quite a few gotchas. Cams rarely exceed expectations, mostly you have to adjust downward. Still, like a sucker, hoping for the best with GH4, so it's not like I learn anything from past experience.
 
...I wrote this for you: Why you should be excited about the Panasonic GH4
What are you most excited about?
A lot of things, but now I am especially excited about your 120fps trick (firmware hack?), especially if you can achieve it in full 1080p. If it is a firmware hack, I'd love to see the IU language hacked so I can buy a GH4 here in Japan and then have English menus (like I do on my Japan-purchased GF-1, which enabled English via firmware hack).
 
Any hints on your 120p fix? My guess is that with the YAGH you could output 60p to an external recorder but since it has 2 or more outputs you could work with the cadence to output the camera signal at 120p by using a 120 shutter or more. who knows!

On paper, the stock GH4 should be able to shoot 120fps using a pseudo in-camera approach (no external recorder or hack required). Still looking into this, but don't want to get hopes too high (yours or mine) just yet.

Hear, hear. This is so true. The companies announce specs, except the cams never seem to live up to the specs. You assume that everything is being improved, instead of deteriorating, but that's simply not true. So often, it's two steps forward and one step back. The GH3 is much better on paper than the GH2, but in reality f.ex. the viewfinder is worse, and the Sony sensor doesn't have the mojo the GH2 had, and you no longer have the same sensor area coverage and so on.

On paper the GH4 looks great. Now we have to wait to see what reality brings - I expect quite a few gotchas. Cams rarely exceed expectations, mostly you have to adjust downward. Still, like a sucker, hoping for the best with GH4, so it's not like I learn anything from past experience.

True, no camera is perfect. However, the GH3 was a much better production tool (video quality/bitrate, headphone monitoring, build quality, weather-proofing, etc.) than the GH2 ever was despite the shortcomings you mention, which were also very much present.

The GH4 looks to build directly upon the GH3 with specific mention to rectify some of those issues (such as EVF quality), so I'm hopeful that it'll be an even better production tool than the GH3.
 
I would love to see some one check if the tele ext mode has the 96fps. I wiuld think the tele extend mode would be a sensor crop at 1080, so that would mean better resolution
 
no, displays turns off after a while

Yes, the display info disappears after a while, just as on the GH3. I spoke to a Panasonic rep at NAB and he stated that the reason being was because they are using OLED panels for the flip-out screen now, instead of LCD, and OLED has a higher tendency to "burn-in" the the display info after a while, but it renders better motion characteristics than an LCD screen.

SB
 
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