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In that case, I'll replace the video with something with more value to the DJI discussion 🙂

Or their father who has abandoned them inside the log cabin to keep the log fire stoke while he does an urgent emergency live rumour broadcast from the verandah. With only one day to go before this announcement, if this announcement is something as major as the v2 of the S1 cameras then I would have expected to see tweets from the usual suspects humble bragging about the strains of having to go overseas as they are wolfing down Takoyaki in Osaka with the rest of the bros. But there haven't been so maybe it isn't significant enough to take them all to Osaka. It doesn't rule out them having been sent them or there being localised events but my reading of this is that this is (white) smoke without a lot of fire.

I just remembered this from a while ago on the Sony a7s iii... https://www.eoshd.com/news/sony-a7s-iii-10bit-image-quality-vs-same-camera-in-8bit-with-surprising-results/ I think it's still relevant now. Can someone prove me wrong and actually show with some examples that are not TOO extreme in terms of a silly grade that you wouldn't use in real life?

It seems that your first one had some hw issue on top of the bugs. I tested IBIS with the old FW at 14mm (IS lens) and 16mm (no IS lens) handheld fast panning, slow panning, tilting and twisting and I could not see the same wobble issue that the R5 had. If is still there very much improved. Since updating to the new FW I have shot 2 more hockey matches and 1 additional show jumping competition, and I did not encounter any issue. I will be selling my R5c for a second R5 II as soon as I find one in stock that here in Switzerland seems impossible to find. I can confirm that the AF, battery life and the image quality vs R5c the R5 II is definitely better. Just now I was editing a video that I shot with both R5 II and R5c both in RAW and the image of R5 II is just better and can take more beating in post. One thing that is not super is the auto WB, the R5c is more consistent. Frame grab 8k 50, ISO 4000, no noise reduction, shot through a Plexiglas...

And that includes a lot of sub $800 m4/3 cameras.

What heresy - I can tell in both of those images that there are cupboards just a few feet behind him and he's in a kitchen! Any proper image with Toneh should be at f/0.95 and I shouldn't be able to tell if he's in a kitchen, at a lake, or mountaineering!

Where I live, the S5 II came out for 2450 EUR equivalent at today's exchange rate... and since a month, with the current discount, it sells new for 1299 EUR. To be honest, as a former Product Manager, you don't give nearly 50% discount because your product is doing amazing. So hard to say how much of a success it was. I still believe the weakness is the lens eco system of L mount for a lot of people.

I hope that they do announce that the S1H2 will be appearing in 2025 as well a strong hint about the specs, even if tomorrow is really to announce lesser stuff. The Panasonic line up has been the best bang for buck video kit for a number of years. It's versatile, reliable and enjoyable to use. It'd be a real shame if they don't follow up on the success of the S5mk2/X.

There is a rumoured Panasonic... i mean Leica SL3-S coming soon, and another sign things are not well. Panasonic have given Leica an S1R Mark II and an S1 Mark II, and it would be trivial to put the same thing in a Panasonic body with a Lumix badge... But they haven't. It's all very suspicious in my view.

Yeah, as per usual, he's serving up more half baked nonsense.

That's the thing, it's all become very insular. Self-congratulating technological achievement, and I don't really feel to grateful towards it, whereas an actual human artist you do feel a sense of awe and gratitude and good will when they do something brilliant, or anything that demonstrates talent. Now the danger is that the feedback loop of inauthentic procedurally generated content feeds into the AI and it becomes split off from human input to a factor of something like 9:1, which will unmoor it even more from the hand of an artist. What could save it is only if it concedes more control to us, not less, and becomes a proper in-depth tool, not a single button press or prompt. I recently watched the documentary about Hayao Miyazaki, A never ending man, where he retires and instantly regrets it because he's a total obsessive. He's aging and can't be fudged with a feature, so decides to delegate to a team of CGI experts and instantly regrets that too, so he ends up literally drawing it himself on top of the CGI frames. Even though the CGI experts were absolute top notch, almost all of his style got lost in the delegation process. It didn't matter if he sat next to them and micro managed, it just wasn't conveyed. The only way he could do it was to put his hands directly on the paper. It's the same with AI, unless your hands are directly on the paper and it stays in the background as an assist, it will never be authentic art!

To be honest looking at GH6 used prices now you could probably stretch to one of those for not much more?!

That would be my concern. Or rather, is my concern as in it sends a sign that at least at this time, they no longer wish to compete in the mid/upper end of the market and people like me then think, well I can’t invest any further and may just jump ship sooner rather than later whilst I can still get something out of it financially. So if there is not one single juicy thing announced, then yes, I’d have concerns over this and much as I find Sony somewhat boring, I don’t think there is any chance of them stopping.

Austerity measures and inflation (at least in France) have made the situation worse for many. The few who are profiting are probably making money hand-over-fist. I imagine a family wanting to have a videographer and a photographer for a wedding with the later being the priority. When push comes to shove, I'd bet both don't get hired and some just say *uck it and have people share their cellphone shots. Sadly and regrettably, that's practically what I did when I got married. I only had ONE decent photo from the whole thing, a jpeg from crap phone. :( Now, I use Topaz Photo AI to try and improve that ONE shot [insert affiliate link]! There's always a positive, you see!

I also think that Tim. I think there was a bit of a bounce back, “yay, war is over, let’s have a party” and then the reality kicked in that nothing was the same as it was and a lot more damage had occurred than most initially realised. But as has been mentioned, these things tend to go in circles, or at least have peaks & troughs. Where we are at the moment I am not entirely sure but not at any peak, nor in any trough, but are we trending up or down? I suspect down what with everything going on in the world right now…and I am no tin hat pessimist, but rather that’s my gut feeling. I would like an adapted Delorean take me back to the 1980’s please…

On the S5, the difference between 8 and 10 bit is very obvious. I shot a scene twice, once with 8 bit 100 Mbps (93 Mbps actual), and once with 10 bit 75 Mbps (66 Mbps actual). Both clips have a color space transformation to Rec709, but no other adjustments. The amount of color noise and weird color in 8 bit is very high, and is almost nonexistent in 10 bit. Viewed at 100% scale in motion in my normal viewing condition, it's apparent that "something is off" particularly in skin tones (I did tests facing the camera, too, which I'm not posting). To me, this is part of the "thick" color that people talk about: pure tones without posterized splotches of color noise, which gets worse with saturation. Now clearly this is something to do with the encoder, since the output images that I am posting here are both 8 bit PNGs. So I'm not going to make universal statements, but I will say that on every camera that I have ever used, I get nearly the same result. You can see the difference everywhere in the image, but particularly notice the evenness of the skin on my arm, the black on the t-shirt, the plain green wall, and the deepness of the brown on the wood on the darker parts of the piano. Is this enough of a difference for average audience members to notice, even subconsciously? Probably not. However, I do notice it consciously, and considering the 10 bit file looks better AND is 25% smaller file size, I would never choose 8 bit on this camera.

Lumix needs to work harder on their trickling then! (Unless there is nothing worth trickling…)

There's another devious slight of hand with Facebook and the socials, in that if they encouraged or even facilitated longer posts and content like a blog article with multiple photos and videos, their business model would suffer as the ads would get less time and attention, if everyone was to read long articles. So the reason they are making everyone ADHD dopamine addicts, killing livelihoods and long form content is purely for the ad $$$$ Cynical bastards or what?

I went there in my 20’s and even then felt out of place and out of time. The 1920’s was probably my era…