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Well, there's the gradual Sony-fication that has been happening in camera colour science. Hopefully this is a departure from that, more in the direction of manufacturers-that-cannot-be-named.

What a quirky and cool edit. Those people who make model profile videos have a lot to learn in terms of composition and posing! I love the variety of aspect ratios and cropping too 🙂

I'm not the biggest fan of the GH5 colour science either. Which makes me happy that Panasonic seem to be chasing a better image with the GH6 instead of just chasing endless resolution at the expense of everything else. The colour from the more recent Panasonic cameras has all been incremental improvements over the GH5, so I'm optimistic about what they'll do with a new sensor. The other aspect to making images pop is lenses, which there are more and more available all the time now with third-party manufacturers like 7artisans, TTartisans, Meike, Mikaton, etc making interesting offerings. To me they're interesting because they are a perfect-combination of features - they have simpler optical designs and simpler coatings that are reminiscent of vintage lenses that are now climbing radically in price, but due to cheap Chinese manufacturing are both low-cost and also relatively high-quality. Unlike modern high-resolution high-precision zero-distortion lenses which have a very dull and lifeless rendering, these third-party primes tend to exhibit the aberrations that make lenses like the "Zeiss 28mm f2 'Hollywood'" lens famous, plus with MFT or APS-C lenses you're seeing more of the edges of the image circle than you do from FF lenses and so you're getting more of those character-providing flaws. I'll be talking more about this in coming weeks, but there's a lot to talk about, let's just say that.

If you've built a FF glass collection then that's definitely a bridge to a mirrorless S35 or FF, so in a way you were always keeping your options open. In terms of low-light I'll be very interested in the GH6's low light as that's one of the aspects of the GH5 that I really push. For example, here's a shot I took with the Voigtlander 17.5mm F0.95 lens wide open - the scene is solely lit by the lights on the river bank: I'd recommend you wait for the sample footage and tests as the specifics of how they have implemented the sensor tech will really matter. The Alexa has definitely become the gold standard within some circles. Those circles are basically people who appreciate great colour. I actually don't want ARRI to have the best colour - I'd prefer if the GH6 ends up with the worlds best colour, having the best colour come from a camera I can't afford, couldn't carry, and couldn't realistically use would be a completely stupid wish. I just find it odd that people can say "Sony might include the Venice colour science in their next A7S camera" and it's fine, but saying "I wish someone would make colour science approaching ARRI" somehow is crazy talk, as if the Alexa is a magical unicorn instead of a sensor and a processor in a box... just like every other digital camera ever. I agree. People talk about high resolutions like a "just in case / when you need it it's there" kind of thing. I see that "ready for anything" aspect as the design brief of the GH line. Do people need GH5-level IBIS on every shot? No. Most of the time a lesser-IBIS would suffice, but are there times when you need it? Absolutely. I routinely push the GH5 IBIS past its limits on trips - maybe because I'm cold or low-blood sugar or I'm filming from a helicopter with the door open at 200kph or whatever. Do people need 10-bit on every shot? No. 8-bit cameras make gorgeous footage in when exposed properly and under modest-DR situations, but are there times when you need the flexibility in post? Absolutely. I shot with the XC10 in 8-bit C-Log on a 5-week trip to Italy and have really struggled to clean up the footage because it doesn't have the latitude the GH5 has. Same logic for high-bitrates. Every now and then you film in a situation where there's lots of chaotic movement like in rain or snow or with trees moving in the wind or whatever. Also, sometimes you want to crop in post a bit and not reveal compression nasties. +1 about not wanting an external recorder. People who don't care about camera size seem incapable of understanding that everyone isn't like them, it's rather odd. Its like saying you prefer chocolate ice cream and them saying "no you don't". Thanks for your thoughts on the ALEV vs the GH6 tech. Obviously the proof is in the pudding with the images, which I am really looking forward to, but once it arrives I must admit I'd be very interested in learning more about how it works 🙂 If all you care about is specs then you can make a complete comparison from the spec sheet. Some people will be comparing specs until we see the images, but sadly, other people here only care about specs, and when talking about cameras seem uninterested or incapable of understanding the various other considerations that go into making an engaging end product. Agreed - Prores is a big deal. One thing that people probably aren't aware of is how good a codec Prores really is. For reference, a very large proportion of the movies that people saw in the cinema between the mid 1990's and the mid 2010's probably went through Prores HQ, and a good chunk of those would have been Prores HQ in 1080p. It was the bread-and-butter codec for Hollywood and often still is. People don't seem to understand that.

Man, the GH6 looks so much larger with a huge lens on it than the others do without any lenses at all! GH5 is 725g, so basically zero extra weight. For me the size is really the height, with the width a distant second. For example, comparing my GH5 and GX85 the widths are almost the same, but the "look at me and my huge camera" factor comes from the height: I'd definitely trade height for depth.

There are all sorts of image processing algorithms they could be using. Whatever it is though, it's not high quality! It's such a pity as Fuji have such a great reputation for their colour science.

This is definitely a concern, considering how freakishly huge the S1H is. These pics aren't exactly the same angles, but using the mount should be a common reference point. GH6: GH5 II: GH6: GH5 II: The fan/screen on the GH6 definitely adds some thickness to it, but it doesn't look that much larger to me. Weight is another thing entirely, so who knows about that. Unless I missed a site with more GH6 details?

All great points and reminds me of my other idea for testing stabilisation mechanisms by putting the camera on a mount that will shake it in a controlled way. All you need to do is have it shake the camera at a few speeds (slow, medium, faster, etc) and gradually ramp up the amount of shake. If you took a picture of a control chart with a fixed exposure time then you can compare two cameras and see that camera X had perfect images until strength level 4, and the other was good up until level 7. Back to AF, I really agree with you. The DJI robochicken had a spectacular combination of AF with MF help. Really, almost no manufacturers have even tried. I think Olympus did with their clutches and the XC10 let you help it's AF by flicking it in the right direction when it was completely lost (more common than you'd hope for), but they were pretty pathetic really. Even down to things like on the GH5 it will do face-detect AF and face-detect exposure, but if you turn off the AF then it stops looking for faces and exposes the frame with general "put the histogram in the middle". I mean, if I don't have an AF lens then you'll do AE but you won't even look for faces? Grrrr.

Yeah, we'll have to see I guess. There's a shot of it with no lens showing the mount, so we should be able to compare it to the GH5 using that as a reference. I might give that a go and post in the other thread. I think one of the biggest challenges with cameras is that there are so many features. You can literally tell someone that you want 12 features, they recommend you a camera, and you realise that you'd eliminated that camera because of a 13th feature or criteria you forgot to mention. I mean, who'd have thought that along with all the crazy tech stuff that you'd have to specify to someone that the camera not shut down to stop itself catching fire. I mean, I also don't want my camera to give off toxic gas, but I wouldn't have thought that would need to be specified! This is one of the reasons I am so critical of almost every camera manufacturer focusing on resolution about 4K - it's a feature that most people don't want but it comes at the cost of almost every other feature.

It depends on how they've gone about making the chroma channel look like that. Maybe they blur the crap out of it and the compression algorithm just goes "ooh, no detail... wheeeee!" and auto-allocates it stuff all bitrate. You do have to look closely at the images to notice (although once you see it you can't un-see it).

I'm aware you shoot with a range of equipment as you've mentioned it in other threads, but you did literally just say "Give us S35/FF shooters a major incentive to revert to a smaller sensor" only 5 hours ago! The way that I think about the GH5 is that it fits a niche. That niche is where: you shoot handheld in rough enough conditions to need top-shelf stabilisation, or you shoot manual lenses handheld, or you want it for really long focal lengths you want 10-bit internal with >100Mbps codecs you care about camera size and weight Put simply, it's anyone that shoots in difficult uncontrolled conditions. Adventure film-makers, more wild events, serious travel, etc. 1) The stabilisation criteria eliminates most FF cameras as they don't have the IBIS travel. I've been reading carefully and almost all FF camera discussions include a few reputable people saying something like "the IBIS is good but isn't GH5-level". That leaves a number of MFT cameras and a few S35/FF cameras. 2) The 10-bit internal criteria eliminates most of the other MFT cameras, and the >100Mbps codec criteria eliminates most S35/FF cameras up until the most recent batch of RAW-capable ones (eg R5) or the high-bitrate ones (eg A7S3). Most of those are pretty expensive too. 3) The size and weight criteria eliminates almost all the rest, like the S1H, and eliminates all the ones that rely on external RAW and have poor internal codecs. I'm sure there's a few other candidates that meet the above, but it's not a huge number. There's a strange mindset in the camera industry that says you either: want a small camera and therefore you're an amateur who doesn't care about image quality want image quality and therefore you're happy to have a huge camera and rig it out This doesn't really cater to people who want a great image but want their setup to be super-portable and inconspicuous. Being inconspicuous is often misunderstood to mean doing something wrong, but in reality it means not having a massive impact on the things you're shooting. Having a large / complex camera (or a tripod) when shooting in public just means that instead of getting shots of real life you get shots of people all staring at you and then you get asked to leave by security. There's a reason that people who shoot in public a lot (eg Philip Bloom) use really freaking long lenses - not much use if you'd prefer a wide. The niche of small camera with great image quality is a very strange place, with things like the GH5, Sigma FP, BMPCC and precious few others, and almost all of those don't have stabilisation. I agree that those that don't fit this specific niche may be well catered for in other systems, or even the OM-1, but I still think there's a real niche where this is by far the best option, and depending on your situation, perhaps the only option.

Is this because it will impact the weather resistance? If that's what you mean, it makes sense. I've always been too afraid to test that kind of thing!

I agree. AF testing is one of the tests that is done the least realistically and also the least consistently. I'd prefer someone like DXO or similar to setup an automated test that simulated the various common scenarios can be repeated reliably between various cameras, lenses, firmware updates and various modes.

That's what I'm waiting for 🙂 I'm having devious thoughts about a fourth setup, but I'm not sure if I'd find the motivation to shoot and edit 4 submissions!

@Attila Bakos - great presentation! It's nothing to do with resolution @tupp, otherwise the RAW files would be impacted too, it's processing. I'm not convinced it's chroma NR either, as normally NR is just blurring. Could it just be extreme compression? If it gave the Y channel most of the bitrate maybe that's what happens to the colour channels?

It's a rare day when a camera ticks all boxes for anyone.. I'd suggest buying a lottery ticket! It will be interesting to see people really put the OM-1 (and GH6) through their paces, both technically and also with the image. Unfortunately cameras tend to be mine-fields of incompatible features, like not supporting feature X while feature Y is on and it's in resolution Z, etc. It needs the Gerald Undone treatment essentially. Hopefully someone will post some SOOC footage soon and we can see how robust the image is, etc..

There's obviously a pretty significant difference between you and I. It's probably safe to say that we don't understand each other. That's fine, and I'm very aware that people come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives and values. But here we are in a Panasonic thread talking about the GH6... ...me posting here as a long-term MFT shooter and GH5 owner who doesn't use AF, who has posted a lot about wanting Prores and better noise performance and various other things that the GH5 struggled with and the GH6 seems to have, who owns lots of nice fully-manual MFT glass, and who will probably buy a GH6 in the next couple of years, and I'm saying that AF isn't necessarily a critical factor. ...and you're posting here as a non-MFT user, who seems to have heavy interest in huge resolutions and in PDAF, disagreeing with me about what the average GH6 user would want. I guess I'm just wondering, what makes you think you understand the target audience for this camera? Like, at all?

I think we'll have to see. The OM-1 spec sheet wasn't gobsmacking, but the images looked good. If ARRI was about to release the Alexa and someone leaked the spec sheet and posted it to the forums then in only a few pages people would be dancing around each other singing "ARRIs going bankrupt!".

I have said before that one path for the GH6 would be to do what Sony did with the A7S3 - to keep the same resolution but make it a more serious camera by improving codecs and bitrates and other factors that influence the image, and this seems to be what they have done. To put it rather bluntly, the GH5 is 5K / poor DR / ok colour / ok codecs and the Alexa is 3.4K / crazy DR / spectacular colour / great codecs and the Alexa image absolutely kills the GH5 in every aspect except resolution, so the path is either to prioritise resolution and put the things that make a great image to the back burner, or to ignore resolution and try and catch up on the things that matter. Panasonic seem to have chosen to improve what actually matters... Cool - how does it look with vintage lenses? It sounds very similar to the Alexa pipeline - but that doesn't seem to be reflected in the DR numbers? Other companies who chase DR list much larger numbers in their specs. I'm not sure how that lines up. That looks like the ARRI pipeline from the ALEV sensor: (Source: https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/technology/alev-sensors ) Any idea on how they are similar / different? Unlike @MrSMW I don't have a physics genius on the line!

Ah, I was thinking more about just image quality in high ISOs (ie, images don't look like there's a technicolour snowstorm), rather than DR in high ISOs, but DR is a reasonable part of the image so that makes sense.

I guess we'll see. Lots of people also selling their GH5 and GH5S's to go FF Panasonic or to other brands because the GH5 features have aged, and many of these express regret at having to re-buy their lenses etc. Lots of the newbies aren't buying a GH5 because of the price, but from the reputation. I've seen more than one person claim "this is my dream camera of all time" or similar. There's also a much higher diversity in those groups where lots of people are coming from countries where their greatly reduced buying power makes these things much more expensive in practice. It's always been hard to separate hype from actual sales except when manufacturers brag about sales numbers they are proud of.

Looking forward to your thoughts, I'd imagine you're scanning the threads for the questions people are curious about. Are you allowed to confirm when the release date will be?

There's one file from the Komodo on REDs sample footage page.. https://www.red.com/sample-r3d-files Download links in description of this video: I'm sure there will be others around, just google "red komodo download footage" and see what's out there.

If you think that guy with his Russian accent is hick, you need to adjust your expectations.... Compare them to the Canon L-mount glass or Sony G-Master lenses and see how that comparison goes! However, you're missing the point. You can't buy an apartment for 1/5th the price of a house just because it's 1/5th the total area - that's not how houses work. The reason that they don't scale is because both provide a place to live, and both probably have the same number of kitchens and how water heaters and air conditioners etc. A GoPro is maybe 5% of the weight of a large DSLR camera, but it's not 5% the price because both are cameras that you can use to take images, and both have a lens, sensor, SD card writer, screen, etc. MFT has the same features as a FF camera, it provides much the same value to the customer as a FF camera (takes photos, video, etc) and still takes the same kind of money to manufacture (takes the same number of chips and electronics and the same number of people in a factory to assemble it using the same number of steps in the various processes etc). FF has more options for shallow DoF - sure. If you accept that you won't match the DoF then MFT is smaller and lighter. It's not a competition.... Actually, not always. There were no cheap kit lenses for the Canon flagship DSLRs like the 5D. It came with constant f2.8 zooms, which aren't cheap at all. If you don't care about shooting a lens wide-open then actually most lenses are great. "F8 and be there" works spectacularly well on most lenses. Besides, the kit lens limitations actually tend to look a lot like the characteristics of vintage lenses....... check out this comparison I made.

I find this codec table useful: https://blog.frame.io/2017/02/13/compare-50-intermediate-codecs/ Prores has about the same bitrate per pixel regardless of resolution, so UHD is 4x the database of 1080p because it's got 4x the pixels - twice the width and twice the height. From this standpoint 5.7K should be about 1.6Gbps, so it's more than Prores HQ and less than Prores 4444 (which would be 2.2Gbps). Still, this is an incredible bitrate and may as well be RAW. I'd assume those would all be included. Fun times for film-makers who prefer to capture in a professional codec in the resolution they want to distribute in! If your exposure to a cameras popularity is only on forums like these then you will be missing the incredible popularity that the GH5 still has to this day. I'm in GH5 FB groups where new people are upgrading to the GH5 and posting the newbie questions regularly, like what gimbal is best? what cage? best lenses? best vintage lenses? can it shoot RAW? how can I get it to do X? etc etc.. TBH those groups are a completely different world than here, and other forums. There are people out there filming paid gigs for music videos and weddings and the like that have just bought the camera and are filming them with the kit lens and don't know that colour profiles exist. People post their (often paid) work all the time, ask for feedback, and get 50 people replying recommending they buy lights and study the framing and camera movement of movies and high-end productions. Yeah, the AF seems to sort-of jump and pulse. This might be tunable with settings perhaps. The AF issues from the GH5 were mostly it being slow or just deciding to focus on the background rather than the person in the middle of the frame, so maybe those are lesser issues. It's not like the other manufacturers have worked it out though - I still see AF fails on vlogs shot on Canon and Sony cameras. They tend to be included in the part where something funny or interesting happens and they want to include it for storytelling purposes and couldn't re-shoot it, so those moments are often little BTS on what the camera is really capturing, and sometimes the AF is seriously ugly.