Above: a Canon 85MM F1.8 sample on Flickr: [url]http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerbren/3764379755/ DXOMark have begun doing for lenses the great work they did with camera sensors. That is to say comprehensive scientific rankings of outright performance plus (deep breath!) a break-down of results into more detailed areas, and that, erm, makes for some fascinating discoveries.
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The latest news on cameras, from EOSHD
Canon have their lines, Panasonic have their lines. Usually we think of hardware as being the main differentiating factor between product ranges. But recently, we have had some unusual situations occur.
It now seems possible Panasonic have been responding to the excitement caused by the Panasonic GH1 custom firmware over the past few days. But in a quite subtle manner.
[vimeo]12718346[/vimeo] The new 44MBIT AVCHD is amazing in low light. It holds onto so much more detail at ISO 1600. The GH1 needs careful handling and a great lens to perform at ISO 1600. You need to expose well, maybe a little over.
One of the biggest ownership dilemmas I ever had was between these two cameras. I loved the silky smooth shallow depth of field image from the 5D Mark II and the fun factor of the very usable Panasonic GH1. The low light performance of the 5D Mark II was completely absent of banding and colours looked incredible on a big screen. The GH1 had a significant cost and handling advantage…
As the Panasonic GH1 Custom Firmware develops further, we now have quite a lot of options to choose from. We needed a really good test. So what’s even more fearsome than a camera chart? A lama. That’s what.
I was lucky a few months ago to find a rare Isco Centavision lens, which is a high quality 2x wide anamorphic lens. It has it’s own focus ring and it gives quite a Cinemascope-a-like 3:1 aspect ratio on the GH1 with it’s quirky native 16:9 sensor.
Above: Ichiro Kitao, product planner for Panasonic Lumix. Panasonic did a fantastic job on the GH1’s hardware, and it’s software is an impeccable creation, with really easy to use functionality. Now Tester13’s software PTools allows us to change a limited set of variables in the GH1’s firmware. It doesn’t recode anything complicated, create any new functionality or restructure anything. It’s simply doing this: