A little over two months ago.
I reviewed the Panasonic S1
and in that video I said this:
So, I'll probably come back to this down the road and then
we can do an actual one-to-one comparison and also by that time
there might be the video upgrade firmware available as well.
Well that time has come I've got the matching lenses,
I've got the firmware, and I've got some
test results to show you.
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪Gerald Undone♪
♪He's crazy♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
And there's only one thing we say to death: Not today.
Alright, so let's talk about what's new since the last time
I covered the S1 but I still recommend that you go
and watch my previous review because a lot of
that information still stands and I'm not going
to waste all of your time by repeating everything
from that video. And just like with the last video
I need to thank Camera Canada again for lending me
all of the test subjects that we used
in this video including the lenses,
the adapters, and the Panasonic S1 itself.
So, make sure you show them some love for making
this video possible by checking out their links
in the description below.
OK, so first up, I've got version 1.2
of the firmware installed in here which brings
alleged improvements to the autofocus
and the in-body image stabilization.
I tried to see if I could notice an improvement
to the IBIS, which is apparently improved by half a stop,
but I just couldn't tell. But that's a good thing.
The IBIS was already pretty amazing on this camera.
I was able to get surprisingly low shutter speeds
and the handheld video was great.
And testing it again now, the same is true.
It's not noticeably different in my opinion,
but it's still excellent. As for the autofocus improvements
the tracking is supposed to be better and they've added
some new AF-ON functions that you can map
to custom buttons of your choosing.
One of them is "Far Shift AF-ON" and the other one
is "Near Shift AF-ON." This is to prioritize a range
to focus on. It's basically like a focus limiter but rather
than cutting off the near or far end like a limiter would
it just prioritizes the range that you want
when holding the button. Now, I did notice an improvement
when using the tracking and with the new AF-ON buttons.
For the autofocus tests I used the kit lens,
the Panasonic 24-105mm f/4 and when comparing it against
the Sony, I got a similar lens on the Sony, their 24-105mm f/4.
I also set both cameras to prioritize focus
when shooting in burst mode just like last time
and I also use the same focus modes that we could see if
the usable keeper rate has improved since the last time
we did these tests. Last time the S1 averaged around
4.5 frames per second usable and reached as high
as 5.3 frames per second in one of the tests, where the Sony
did much better. This time the Sony still did better,
but the S1 saw up to a 25% improvement.
in certain modes. The lock on tracking
and the standard expandable focus box were about the same
but maybe a little bit better on the S1 this time around
reaching 4.8 and 4.9 usable frames per second.
But the face and eye detection mode reached up to 5.9 seconds,
which is a noticeable bump and very close to
the max advertised spec of six frames per second.
But with all six of those shots being sharp.
The new near shift and far shift modes were a bit of a mixed bag
actually. The far shift mode didn't really make a difference
for me and still we saw that 4.5 to 4.8 fps.
But the near shift mode had a significant improvement
and now reached 6.3 fps
the newest high that I've ever tested on this camera
and it was the only mode to get all the shots of me
in focus when I got really close to the lens.
Perhaps the far shift just wasn't being utilized well
in my test scenario, maybe if I had a longer lens
with the subject much farther away
we would see better results, like with a 70-200
but with the 24-105mm, I didn't find that far shift
was that much better than just pressing AF-ON regularly.
But either way this is a nice little improvement for the S1
and it definitely makes it a viable action camera now.
Now we just need some more lenses to come out
that are better suited for that purpose.
The Sony still won the match up but only when set to its highest
speed. When both cameras were set to their high setting
the Sony was actually slower than the S1
only getting about 3.6 usable frames per second.
But the Sony has a Hi+ setting that can easily double
the previous result. When using the wide-open focus box with
the latest firmware and the Hi+ setting I was able to get
at least 7.6 fps usable at the lowest.
And when I use the lock on tracking, which works
much better on the Sony than it does on the Panasonic,
I got 9.5 fps sharp on average.
So, on the S1 the face and eye detection
had the best results in my tests,
where on the Sony the lock on tracking
is still king. But both cameras are usable.
The main difference is that the Sony has the lenses
and that it's still a cheaper body.
So, if action sports is your game,
then the Sony is still the better buy.
I was also able to finally do an apples-to-apples
image quality comparison, which I promised in the last video
because now I can use similar lenses.
I still don't have the Sigma L-Mount lenses
that were supposed to come out for the Panasonic.
They might still be a while yet.
But I do have the MC-21 adapter which allows me
to put the same Canon mount Sigma lens on both bodies.
Now the MC-21 is pretty limited
and doesn't allow for continuous AF.
So, this is purely an image quality comparison.
So, here's the two images both raw photos,
both at ISO 800, both at 35mm at f/2.5, and 1/125th of a second.
And if we zoom right into the centre here,
we can see they look pretty much identical in my opinion.
And all the way across the colour renditions.
Pretty much everything about this image
is exactly the same. Now, if we just take a quick
look at these images uncorrected we can see
the actual differences, but these are really easy to fix.
The first one is just with white balance.
So, I set Kelvin to the same on both of these images,
but the first one here, as you can tell,
is at 4,900 and plus 3 and if we switch over to the other one,
it's 5150 and plus 8 and if you look at them,
you can see a slight shift in the white balance
where the one is a little bit warmer and more magenta.
The other difference is in the way that the ISOs
are measured. So, if I reset the exposure here--
remember that on the Panasonic it's still at ISO 800.
But if I switch back to the Sony the Sony is brighter
than the Panasonic and I found that we needed
to bump it about two-thirds of a stop
to get it to look identical to the Sony.
But as I was saying, the rest of the image
is pretty much identical when it comes to sharpness,
and resolution, and rendition, and detail.
It's very, very hard to tell apart.
So, basically when you use the same lens
the photo image quality is going to be
nearly identical between these two cameras.
But there are some differences in video quality because
another thing that comes along with version 1.2 of the firmware
is the ability to activate the paid V-Log upgrade.
Now, this upgrade will give you a couple things.
First, it adds waveforms, which is pretty cool.
But I've always found that these Panasonic waveforms
to be a little bit too small to be completely useful,
but they're great to have if you have nothing else.
And it also adds a whole section of codec options
that weren't there before. To enable them
you have to choose MOV as the container.
Before this upgrade MOV wasn't even a container option.
But now it's the container that stores
all of the 10-bit options,
because you can now record 10-bit 4:2:2 internally
on pretty much every frame rate and resolution
combination if you get the V-Log upgrade
except for 4K60, you can record 10-bit 4:2:2
but only externally, you can only do the 8-bit 4:2:0
internally at 4K60. And the 4K60 still has
the 1.5x crop, even if you get
the V-Log upgrade; that hasn't changed.
And another thing that hasn't changed
is the variable frame rate, you know
the built-in slow motion recording.
Unfortunately, it still doesn't allow you
to change any of your exposure settings when you enable
that mode. So, you're still better off just recording
in a high frame rate and then slowing it down in post.
Lastly, and probably most importantly to a lot
of people, it also brings the V-Log with the V-Gamut colour,
which apparently is supposed to be the same V-Log that you would
find in the VariCam and EVA1 cameras rather than
the V-Log L that we're used to seeing in the smaller cameras.
The main difference here being the exposure clipping point,
which we'll get into in a minute as well as the wider
colour space, and hopefully more stops of dynamic range.
Now I did compare it both in 10-bit and 8-bit V-Log on the S1
against the 8-bit S-Log2 of the Sony a7 III
and I found that when exposed correctly
and corrected to the same level we get very similar images
just like we did with the raw photos.
I did notice a shift in hue, however, between the 8-bit
and 10-bit versions on the Panasonic across all
my tests with the 8-bit being more magenta and the 10-bit
being a bit greener. Now, I corrected these without a LUT
by manually applying a curve so I could make
a determination on which one I preferred to work with
and I would say that they both did fine
the V-Log might have been a tad easier and more intuitive
by using just a simple exaggerated s-curve
where the Sony needed to be pulled back in the highlights
more so and this might not be that intuitive to some
but this does carry some advantages that we'll discuss
later on. One note on getting proper exposure
with the S1's V-Log though, as I mentioned it's different
than the GH5, or GH5S, or GH4 or something
you might have been used to working with,
it now has a higher maximum brightness clipping point.
I shined a bright light at the sensor
to see where the clipping point was.
And I checked this in Premiere and it was falling
I would say around 80, just above 85% and then I popped
it open in DaVinci Resolve, which has better scopes
in my opinion, and we can see that it's lying on the 896 line,
which is about 87.5%, it might be a little bit lower than that.
So, this is much closer as promised to the EVA1
and the VariCam. And so basically if you're
somebody who likes to expose to the right
this means that you're gonna want to set your Zebras to about
85%, so that way if you use that as your guide
for your maximum clipping. Anything above 85% will
likely to be out of range and will clip, where on S-Log2
on the Sony you can set that much higher.
Now, this doesn't mean that one is better than the other,
just that you have to respect each camera's
exposure settings in order to achieve the maximum
dynamic range on each of those systems.
Just to show this in a bit more practical of a situation
if we have a shot here that was exposed using the 85% ETTR
and then if we apply a LUT over here
that will convert it to Rec.709.
We can see that the-- all the levels just immediately go
into spec and the image looks great.
Our 90% white is falling right around
90% and so on as it works its way down
and we get pretty close to zero with the reflective black.
So, it's as easy as that as long as you ETTR, but for this case,
it's 85% that you're going to want to use for the new V-Log.
And here's just some scaling chips to show you that when
you expose for each camera correctly with the Panasonic
and V-Log and the Sony on S-Log2 that they match
each other very closely and you'll get very similar results.
Now the S1 has the advantage of being 10-bit
if you buy the V-Log upgrade, so let's see that
in action first by putting an extreme grade on our scene
and pushing the colours to their limits.
OK, so this is what the shot looks like
with the extreme grade on it.
Now if we look over here
on these chips on the left hand side, we can
see a pretty good example of what happened.
So, this is Panasonic's 8-bit V-Log
and we can see that this particular colour
has completely fallen apart and if we go
over to the Sony 8-bit S-Log it did okay on this chip,
better than the Panasonic did but the darker colour
and this one here, I would say are having a lot of issues.
Now if we switch over to the 10-bit V-Log we can see
that despite the same extreme grade that all of
those colour chips that both the 8-bit
and the Sony version we're having trouble with
is pretty good. And I mean, it's still probably a bit
too extreme for this but that's basically how
you can see the difference.
10-bit.
8-bit. So, if you are somebody
who likes to put an extreme grade on something
you'll definitely see the advantage of the 10-bit here.
I don't know how well this is going to translate
over to YouTube with the compression and the fact
that everything is going to be 8-bit probably
when you're watching it, but I do have another example
here that we can take a look at And for this one, I basically
made a blue gradient across the frame
to see how-- to see what the banding was gonna be like
and how the colours rolled out and if we look
at all three together here,
so they're labelled. So, the 8-bit of the S1 is on top,
the 10-bit of the S1 is in the middle,
and then the a7 III is on the bottom.
Again, I don't know how well this is gonna translate
but let's just have a look here and I will tell you what I see.
So, as the light starts to come across, for me, what I can see--
you're just going to have to take my word for it
in case it didn't translate--
Is that the S1 8-bit, there is a clear line here,
that's kind of distorted too
and this is basically one colour of blue and then
about a second colour of blue and then a third colour blue--
basically about three tones and the a7 III has a similar effect.
But again, I think the a7 III's 8-bit
is better than the S1's 8-bit honestly,
but its the same idea. We kind of have, like, one to two tones.
It's a pretty lame gradient.
But this whole section here is basically
a light gradient of blue and then we have a darker blue
over here that has the same effect.
I like it better than the 8-bit S1 though.
But on the 10-bit S1
We have, you know, one, two, three, four, five,
six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
I would say anywhere from eight to ten variations
of that blue and it's much smoother where, you know,
this line here isn't as corrupted as the 8-bit version.
So, the S1 in 10-bit definitely wins there
but the Sony fights back when it comes to colour accuracy.
So, if we take a look here, I've got the six chips
from the scene with the saturation bumped a little bit.
And then we're looking over here on the vectorscope
to see how well they line up with the target
colours for accuracy. And right away
we can see the Panasonic, whether on 8-bit or 10-bit
which you can see look pretty much the same
suffers from Panasonic's somewhat famous green problem
where the green chip is not really well aligned
and neither really is the cyan one with where they should be.
But if we jump over to the Sony 8-bit S-Log
we can see that the green, while still not perfect,
most of the colours do a much better job both in,
you know, evenness on their saturation
and also bringing the green and cyan more into spec.
So, the Sony definitely wins
when it comes to colour accuracy.
I've said this many times before there's a lot of people
that argue about the Sony not being that colour accurate,
but as you can see here when using this chart for instance,
the Sony sensor is actually quite colour accurate.
Whether you like the way it looks or not
is completely subjective and up to you.
By the way, while I have this set up here
if you want to see yet another reason
why I recommend the Leeming LUTs,
look what they do to the Panasonic colours.
Pretty much fixes everything and I would say
almost every colour is falling exactly
where it should be and this is with the exact same scene.
I didn't do anything other than
put the Leeming LUT on the Panasonic.
Now if we put this all together in a real-world
shooting environment, we can clearly see
each camera's advantages come to life.
Here we have a shot that requires a wide dynamic range
with a subject in shadow, but balanced exposure
designed to keep the sky intact.
Here's what it looks like on the Sony using S-Log2
completely uncorrected and then the Panasonic using V-Log,
same thing, uncorrected. And you'll have to
excuse the little particles on my sensor.
It was a windy day and not ideal
for changing lenses outside and because I stopped
these all the way down to like f/18 or something
like that in order to balance the exposure
without using an ND filter because that would
add another layer of complexity to the tests.
When you stop down that much every little speck
on your sensor becomes pretty obvious in the final image.
So, please forgive that.
Anyway, if we correct this image
to equal levels on both cameras
attempting to evenly recover the shadows
and the highlights for the widest range image
we get this. The Sony again
wins out for colour rendition and highlight detail.
But it suffers from more banding. Again, I don't know
if you can see this but the Sony has this rippled
banding effect all the way across.
I can see distinct lines where it changes shades of blue.
and this is a practical sky example and not just
some gradient that I made with a light. The S1 on
the other hand doesn't have that banding issue at all,
but it wasn't able to recover as much sky and this
has to do with that highlight changing in the curve that I was
talking about earlier in the way that the Sony handles
the highlights versus the way that the V-Log handles
the highlights. And also raising the shadows
the same amount that we did on the Sony led
to more colour shifting issues on the Panasonic which again led
to a more colour accurate image on the Sony.
However, when we raise the exposure to favour the subject
in shadow, me underneath the tree, the tables turn.
The Panasonic no longer has its colour problems
because we don't have to cook the shadows as much
and now looks very similar to the Sony for rendition.
But somehow the Panasonic managed to keep its sky the way
it was before we raise the exposure without losing
any more of it, where the Sony definitely lost a decent amount
of highlight detail from that increased exposure
and it still suffers from the banding. Now in both cases
both images were very usable, but you need to ask yourself
what kind of shooting and grading you like to do
and then choose a system that matches that workflow.
Lastly, let's take one final look at autofocus
but this time for video. I wanted to see if any
of the improvements to the AF translated over
to the video side, but unfortunately, they didn't.
I recorded myself simultaneously on the S1,
the a7 III, and the GH5 for five minutes,
using each of their native standard zoom lenses,
with balanced AF settings, and using face detection.
And I moved around to see which cameras would lose focus
and when and the S1 clearly performed the worst
of the three. This is different than the pop in and pop out
and walking at the camera test that I did last time
and that you see all over the internet.
This is more for talking head or vlogging
reliability while also looking at background pulsing.
Now, the GH5 did surprisingly well and held focus in many
situations where the S1 didn't. And the a7 III dominated.
It almost never lost focus and also doesn't suffer
from the pulsing problems that contrast AF has.
And when we take a closer look at the pulsing,
I think we can see why the GH5 outperforms the S1.
It pulses much faster seemingly, which you may like or dislike,
but it keeps the subject in focus more effectively.
The S1 pulses slower but loses focus more often and for longer.
And the a7 III doesn't pulse at all and is the clear winner
with very reliable AF performance in video.
Alright, so that's all the updates and results.
So, let's do a quick summary recap.
The version 1.2 firmware for the S1
does improve the autofocus performance for photos
making the S1 a viable camera for action photography.
We just need more lenses. It did not help
the video AF though, which is still dominated by
the phase detection competition when it comes to reliability
and the GH5 actually performed better
than the S1 in my tests. The image quality between
the S1 and the a7 III is nearly identical
when it comes to shooting raw photos with the same lens.
The new paid V-Log upgrade is great and adds a lot
of useful features to video, most importantly the 10-bit
recording options, which when combined with V-Log
gives you a very flexible image which can take
harsh shooting conditions and intense grading with ease.
When corrected the same, the Sony's S-Log2
and the Panasonic's V-Log can look quite similar.
The Sony is a bit more colour accurate,
but it suffers from banding that the S1 just doesn't have.
You can fix the colours in post if you have time,
but you can't really fix 8-bit into 10-bit.
Overall, I'd say it's a well-fought match.
Both cameras are fantastic.
I wouldn't exactly call the Panasonic S1 an upgrade
over the Sony, but if you own neither of these cameras
and you're looking to get into one of these systems,
you can't really go wrong. Go with the Sony if autofocus
is the most important thing, and go with the Panasonic
if ergonomics or flexibility is the most important.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining
and if you did make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
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feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.