We've got too many tests to go over today that we don't have
any time to waste on a compelling cold open.
So let's just say... Panasonic S1.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music] ♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone.
And this is the viewer selected greeting.
It also includes this sentence.
So let's start with the photo side of things because despite
this camera having pretty great video performance
I still feel like it's a photo first camera,
essentially a full-frame G9. But before we get too far into that
I should take a minute to thank Camera Canada for supplying me
with this S1 kit so I could make this video.
Camera Canada carries a wide range
of Panasonic bodies and lenses.
So if you're in the market, make sure you check out their links
in the description below. When it comes to photography
the Panasonic S1 gets almost everything right.
In fact, it's probably easier to list
the things that the camera can't do since there's really only one
and that's shoot very high frame rate action
with consistent focus. But I was still pleasantly
surprised with how well it did perform
in that regard, but we'll get into that a little bit later on.
Everything else is here though.
The body is well built and easy to use,
although size-wise it's more like a prosumer DSLR.
So not really a compact travel camera.
So you have to keep that in mind,
but the buttons are all there and laid out nicely.
The EVF is fantastic. Hi-res, 120fps
adjustable diopter, nice eye-cup.
It's probably the best EVF on the market right now.
And it's one of the only ones I've used
that maintains its excellent EVF performance
when also in the 4K video modes. The panel is also fantastic.
It has that Fuji style three-way tilt,
so it's great for low angle portraits as well.
And it's very bright and handles direct sunlight
better than a lot of the competition.
The battery life is very good.
And if used reasonably you can get much higher
than the 360-shot CIPA rating. If you don't chimp
and just shoot you can easily get several hundred photos
and upwards of 1,000 on a single charge.
The battery is also chargeable via USB and you can also charge
it while using it, which is great for time lapses and video
and we'll get more into video a little bit later on
but battery life for video is really good; you can get
about two and a half hours with 4K video recording.
So pretty good battery performance all the way around.
It's got all of the functions you come to expect
from Panasonic like the 6K photo modes,
it's got the high resolution mode so you can drastically
increase your image resolution by assembling multiple frames
in camera, as well as HLG photo,
focus peaking, post focus, and multiple exposures
with overlays. And speaking of overlays,
there's also this new function called sheer overlay,
which allows you to choose an image you've already taken
and overlay it on top of your view at a transparency
level you set, and it stays like that until
you stop it or until you turn the camera off.
This is extremely useful for matching compositions.
Pretty much any tool or mode you could think to use is likely
in the Camera, plus a few awesome new things that
you might not have thought of. Like when using a zoom lens
the camera displays your focal length on the screen
so you don't have to guess based on the markings on the lens.
I've seen this in some other cameras before
but it's pretty rare and I'm happy that
they included it on the S1. It also has a night mode
which makes the display much darker and only uses
red light so that you can preserve your night vision
and also reduce camera added light pollution.
Oh and remember how much I liked
the Canon EOS R's focus guide minigame?
Well, the Panasonic S1 might have the best in camera
minigame yet, with the inclusion of their I.S. Status Scope,
which basically shows you how steady
you're holding the camera. You get this target
and you've got to try and keep the green dot in the middle.
It's incredibly frustrating and I love every minute of it.
But that's a decent segue into the stabilization, which
is excellent on this camera. Now, I'm using the kit lens,
so I'm getting dual I.S. because the lens is stabilized as well.
But I was able to get over five stops of shutter speed
reduction using this combo. And that definitely helps
because this lens is long and heavy, and it also
has surprisingly good macro capabilities.
Now, it's not a true 1:1, but it can go 1:2
which is better than what you get with most zooms.
Overall, the kit lens is pretty good.
It's a 24-105 f/4 and it's a pricey one at that.
Now, I don't generally get too excited about this kind of lens.
But while we wait for more glass to come out
it'll definitely get the job done and it's pretty versatile
despite its f/4 limitation. Because like I said,
you can compensate for that quite easily.
The shutter speed can go surprisingly low
because of how good the IBIS is
and the high ISO performance is fantastic.
Now, this might be a bit more pertinent to the video shooters,
but if we compare the S1 to the Sony a7 III
and the Panasonic GH5, we can see that the low light
performance on this camera is outstanding. It holds up
noticeably better than even the a7 III at ISO 6400 and beyond.
Now I can't really fairly test the sensor
for image quality because there's not enough lenses out
right now to do a true apples-to-apples
comparison, so I'll probably come back
to this down the road once Sigma gets their
L-Mount lenses out and then we can do an actual
1:1 comparison, and also by that time there might
be the video upgrade firmware available as well.
But in the meantime though, I can say that this sensor
tested quite well at DXOMARK, coming in very close score wise
to the Sony a7 III and sharing almost the same dynamic range
at 14.5 stops. But on a more subjective note,
I can definitely say that I've been quite pleased
with the quality of the images I've been getting out
of this camera. The body is also very well weather sealed
and is quite well balanced even when using larger lenses.
So like I said, this should satisfy most
photographers who don't mind larger cameras
unless they require very high frame rate continuous AF.
If you need high speed single AF, it's got you covered.
You can get up to 9fps that way,
but when you mix in tracking, the performance does go down.
Now it's rated for 6fps with continuous AF, but what I like
to do to test the practical usefulness of the drive speed
is to set the emphasis to focus priority.
This way it won't take the picture unless it's in focus.
Then I'll see how many frames it's actually able
to capture over a given period of time while tracking movement.
And when I did that, the Panasonic S1 was only able
to get about 4fps continuous in focus,
which is actually pretty good for a contrast
based AF system and better than I expected.
So if that's all you'll ever need,
then I think you'll be happy. By the way,
you'll probably want to set it to focus priority anyway,
because I found the keeper rate to be much, much higher
versus when I was using balanced emphasis and it's not like it
slowed the camera down that much anyway, like it does with some
of the competition, and I'd definitely rather have
four frames in focus than five or six frames out of focus.
but this is one area where the Sony a7 III
pulled significantly ahead.
I put it through the same difficult test which involved
me walking through different intensities of light
with different colours and temperatures
with the drive speed set to the highest setting
and forcing focus priority, and the Sony managed
to grab 56 shots with all of them being usable,
where the Panasonic S1 only got about 29
during that same seven second window.
So that's eight usable shots per second on the Sony
versus about four on the Panasonic.
Often people tell me that my autofocus test isn't really fair
because of the type of light, and the changing light, etc.
But that's kind of the point. People who want
high frame rate action might also shoot sports,
and they might shoot sports indoors.
And if you've ever shot sports indoors,
you'll know that the light can change drastically
from one end to the other with different
intensities, and flickering, and temperatures,
and all kinds of problems like that. And so if you're looking
for a camera that can shoot sports
I would definitely say that the Sony wins
in this department, but I was pleasantly surprised
with how well the S1 held up compared to that.
Again, it's slower.
But I think if you don't require the most
intense action, I think you can actually still
get the job done with it and it's contrast based AF
and I wasn't expecting that. And for the sake of being thorough
I also tested the S1 using the face and eye detection,
the subject tracking mode, as well as the spot AF,
and the 225 wide mode and they all perform pretty much the same
except for the subject tracking, which didn't really handle me
approaching the camera too well at all.
I also tested a few of the different custom AF sets
that are programmed in there for tracking
different types of movements. And again, there wasn't
that much difference between them.
The best I could do indoors with mixed lighting
was about 4.4 frames usable per second.
I then repeated these tests outdoors when the sun
was nice and bright to see how well it would
fare for wildlife shooters and outdoor action photographers
and the results were a little bit better.
Oh, by the way, there's also a built-in
animal detection function in the AF modes.
So if any of the viewers have the S1 and have tested
the animal AF let us know in the comments how well
you think it performs. Now, for the outdoor test,
my best keeper rate was 5.33fps in focus,
which is actually quite admirable and impressive
for a contrast based AF system, and what I like best
about the system is actually the consistency.
It may not be the fastest out there but it performed
the same in both front-lit and back-lit scenarios.
the buffer on the S1 is plenty large and for the sake
of AF-C essentially infinite, since the camera is able
to clear it faster than it can take pictures in most cases.
But when I let it just fire away
on maximum speed it was able to get about 140 shots
on a UHS-II SD card before it started to slow down,
and on a UHS-I SD card it was about 80 shots.
And it has two card slots, by the way.
One for a UHS-II SD card and the other for an XQD card.
Now AF Single works really well, unless you're trying to focus
on bright lights and a really dark environment.
Which is to be expected from Panasonic's DFD,
but I'm also happy to report that all of our previous
lighting accessories still work on the Panasonic S1,
so anything that we had for the Panasonic G9, and GH5, etc.
It seems like the hot shoe is pretty much the same, so our
Olympus type GODOX equipment; TT350S, and transmitters,
and that, they all work as well, and although I haven't
tested it, I believe that this is also true
for the microphone XLR adapter from the GH5.
And manual focus is excellent too.
There's plenty of tools, and guides, and focus peaking
to make sure that you nail manual focus every time.
And they've also added the ability to change
to linear focusing from the typical nonlinear focusing
that you find in mirrorless cameras. And they've also added
the ability to choose how long you want the focus throw to be
or how much the focus moves when you turn the ring.
This would be great for choosing the perfect focusing speed
for the application and keep it consistent,
and this is a much appreciated addition.
By the way, all these tests were done shooting raw
so you might be able to squeak out a little bit
more performance if you're shooting JPEG,
but there's no compressed raw in this camera, but the raw
file format is the same from the previous Panasonics
and it's already accepted by all the common raw developers.
I also found the image and colour to be quite similar
to the previous Panasonic cameras, like the GH5 and the G9
so your workflow when it comes to photo
and video editing for colour should be mostly the same.
And that's a bit of a common thread here
which I quite enjoy: You don't really have to relearn much.
If you've used Panasonic in the past,
you can just grab this camera and start shooting.
Everything will feel really natural and your workflow
and accessories will carry over as well.
There are a few differences with video
however, if you're coming from the GH5.
While the photo functions have been maintained and added to,
the video functions have been reduced a little bit.
You still get unlimited recording which is great except
for the 4K60 mode, that's capped out at a 30-minute time limit
and that 4K60 mode also has a 1.5x crop, by the way,
where all the other 4K modes use a 6K oversampled read out
and don't have a time limit.
Still probably better than anything else out there
in the hybrid space but noteworthy limitations.
Also, you can't quite customize your video stream
in the same way you could on the GH5.
You can't really choose your combination
of bit rate and bit depth to the same extent.
All of the bit rates are fixed
and all the bit depths are 8-bit 4:2:0.
That is, of course, unless you enter into the HLG mode
which switches over to the H.265 codec
and you do get 10-bit 4:2:0, and a smaller bit rate
to feed into the HEVC that it uses.
Now I believe you will get 4:2:2 over HDMI even though it doesn't
actually say that anywhere in the camera or in the manual, but
I believe it's going to perform like the Sony, where basically
everything else stays the same but you do get a little
bit of extra chroma resolution when you record externally.
It's not going to change an 8-bit option
into 10-bit magically just by using HDMI,
but I believe we actually will get some more capability
with that in the future with firmware.
You still get zebras and focus peaking
but you no longer have some of those creative functions
like the 4K cropping and the programmable focus transitions.
Also there seems to be a weird quirk
where the camera goes into this full auto mode
when using the variable frame rate slow motion modes,
you can't seem to adjust any of your exposure settings
while in that high speed video mode.
The HDMI options are a bit reduced as well.
You basically only have the choice between
clean and info display.
Now the info display works well, and screen blackout
and dual monitoring is all handled correctly.
But using the HDMI connection
does have some obscure impacts on performance,
most notably your drive speed in continuous still shooting
goes down to only 2fps.
Now, this will probably only affect reviewers who try
to capture what their camera is doing when they're shooting
continuously because who else really does that,
but it's important to note because if you happen to read
or watch a review on the S1 that says it can only do 2fps
that reviewer probably had their HDMI connected.
The HDMI port is full size though, which is great.
And you also get a proper mic and headphone jack and a USB-C
port used for charging and data. And the camera also smartly
disables sleep mode when it detects an HDMI connection.
So you can use the camera for streaming for long periods
without issue while concurrently charging it over USB.
The body also handles heat quite well,
despite there being a 30 minute limit on 4K60
I decided to run back-to-back recordings
at 30 minutes long on 4K60 until the battery ran out
and I never had any overheating problems at all.
So unless you live in extremely hot environments
I don't think that heat will be an issue for you on this camera.
I also did some quick grades for Cine-D and HLG
on the S1 and GH5 and found them to be very, very easy
to match and in some ways were identical.
So no issues there if you're mixing footage
or want to adapt LUTs or presets you've made.
But overall I'd say the Panasonic S1 was able
to squeeze out a slightly more detailed image over the GH5
despite having a slower lens on, so that's quite impressive.
But it still suffers from the same shortcomings
as the GH5 when it comes to continuous autofocus for video.
You can configure it to work as quickly or as smoothly
as you'd like and it'll find focus and be nice and sharp,
but the reliability just isn't there.
It's very easy to move in a certain way or if something
in the frame that will just cause the camera to hunt
and during that 90-minute test stream that I did
I tried pretty much every different autofocus mode
and each one of them still had a problem
where after a few minutes the camera would just
sort of go out of focus and then come back in.
And then it'd be fine again for a few minutes,
but you just don't have any long-term reliability with it.
Like I was saying earlier the IBIS is quite good.
It has both the normal Shake reduction mode
as well as a boost mode that's useful
if you're trying to maintain a static shot handheld.
It basically makes you into a tripod
and it's impressive every time. And here's another place
where the camera's weight plays a positive role.
It's definitely heavy enough to give you enough muscle
resistance to reduce a lot of the minor shakes
and then when you combine that with the dual I.S.
you get that impressively smooth footage
we're used to seeing from Panasonic.
Lastly, a quick note on sound. When compared to the GH5,
or most of the other cameras to come out recently,
I would say that the Panasonic S1
has one of the best built-in mics I've heard.
[slightly tinny] This is an audio test of the Panasonic GH5.
I have the level set to -6dB
because at 0 it was clipping using the built-in mic.
There's no mic level limiter turned on
or wind cut filter or anything like that.
[less tinny with whooshing] This is an audio test
of the Panasonic S1 I'm using the built-in mic
into the camera and the audio level
is set to -6dB in order to prevent clipping
but the limiter is turned off and so is the wind filter.
However, also when compared to the GH5,
the S1 is noticeably noisier.
When normalized to the same volume, the S1's noise levels
sits about 6dB higher than the GH5's,
but the output levels are also lower when you set
the camera to the same level, like say -6dB on both cameras,
the GH5 is louder.
So you definitely gonna get a better signal to noise ratio out
of the GH5 and this extends into the external mic input as well.
[low room noise]
[higher room noise]
But there also might be a bit of a hidden advantage here.
If you've been using a mic that's too hot on the GH5,
even when you had the GH5 set all the way down to -12dB,
it might not be too hot on the S1.
And I also like how you can now customize the mic jack
on the S1 to either supply power to the mic,
not supply power, or change to a line level input.
Another thing that I really love is the ability to separate
the settings between the photo and video manual modes.
In a lot of the other cameras that I've used
whenever you set anything in one manual mode
it overlaps in the other. So for example,
say that you were in the movie manual mode.
And you set your shutter speed that you wanted
to use for that video, but then you switched over to
the photo manual mode and you change the shutter speed,
it would also be changed in that movie manual,
normally requiring you to set a custom state
in order to have your video settings separately.
Well, you don't have to do that on the Panasonic S1.
You can actually choose which settings you want
to remain unchanged when switching back and forth
between the two manual modes, and this makes switching
between photo and video much more efficient. I highly
approve of this addition. All right, I think that's it.
So now let's talk about value and the ideal customer.
It's pretty early days for this system.
We don't have a large enough lens selection yet,
and I also don't know what kind of potential value
future firmware updates are going to add.
But it's definitely an interesting proposition,
and there is a lot of video potential here.
Imagine a GH5 with significantly improved
low light performance and better image quality.
Well, I guess that would be the GH5S, but the GH5S
up until recently was the same price
as the Panasonic S1 at $2,500 US.
It now sits $300 lower than the S1 at $2,200 US,
but what if that GH5S had terrific image stabilization,
vastly improved photo capabilities,
and probably still better low light performance
without giving up anything other than it's slightly smaller size?
Would you pay $300 for that?
I suppose you'd also be giving up the flip out screen,
but let's be real, this probably isn't a flip-out
vlog style camera, and when it comes to photos,
I vastly prefer that three-way tilting mechanism anyway.
And as a photo camera, I truly believe that once
we start getting those Sigma lenses for L-Mount
we're going to have one of the best image producers in
the game, as long as your game isn't super high-speed action.
But for a portrait or wedding photographer,
landscapes, product, architecture, and real estate,
macro, you name it, basically every other
discipline, this camera is up there with the best of them.
But we also can't ignore the fact that the competition
is $500 cheaper and does most of the stuff
that the Panasonic does. And in the case of the Sony
it absolutely destroys it in the continuous autofocus
department and makes Sony the obvious choice
over the Panasonic for someone shooting action.
So if that's what you like to do definitely save the $500.
So many lenses are already available
and you'll have very good video performance as well.
I think that what will be the draw here is people
who like the Panasonic style. There's definitely value
in having every feature and function you could think of
packed into a robust professional feeling camera
laid out using a brilliant menu system
with a very intuitive touchscreen experience with
virtually no interface-based shortcomings. And I think
for plenty of shooters that's worth the $500.
It's basically a full-frame G9, and then some.
And it's really only one Sony autofocus system away
from being the perfect camera for a lot of people.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining
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All right, I'm done.