With 4K on its way to become the standard resolution for video work, and the never ending
quest for quality invading the consumer market, the G7 fills that sweet spot in between your
smartphone and a professional video camera, approaching dangerously the latter in quality
while keeping the price at a smartphone level. But is it the right camera for you?
Hi, I'm Gio, and this my review of the Panasonic Lumix G7.
Okay so since this review is going to take a while, and there were a lot of things I
wanted to talk about, I decided to split it into 5 sections, so that if you're only interested
in a specific subject you can just skip to that part. The sections will be general features,
photo features, photo quality, video features and video quality.
This my first camera review so I might miss something, and I apologize in advance for
that, but I really tried my best so hopefully you'll find the video useful anyway.
So without any further ado, let's get started!
First of all, the very basics. The Panasonic Lumix G7 is a mirrorless, micro four-thirds
camera with interchangeable lenses. I already talked about the design and the build quality
in a previous video, which you'll find linked below, but it's worth reminding a couple of
things. The body feels solid but also reasonably light
and compact, which means that if you plan to shoot for a few hours at a time weight
is not going to be an issue. There is a sufficient amount of dials and
buttons, which we'll briefly discuss throughout the review, and they feel clicky and responsive.
Besides, you can also use the side panel right on the display to get access to even more
functionalities. All of the function buttons, both the physical and virtual ones, can be
customized via the menu, and you can set them to almost anything you want.
The camera offers a detailed 3 inches, 1 million dots display, fully adjustable and swiveling,
with a built-in touchscreen that comes really useful to navigate the menus and to pull focus.
If you're more into photography than videography, you'll find the LVF quite useful too: the
2 millions dots are sufficient for an easy control over the image, and it's responsive
enough not to miss even fast action. By default, it turns itself on every time you get close,
but you can change this behavior in the settings. Whatever you do, it will always turn itself
on anyway when you close the back monitor. On both the monitor and the LVF you'll be
able to access quite some info on screen, including a histogram, peaking and zebras,
each one adjustable from the settings. The touchscreen also easily allows you to
access settings directly on screen, without having to open the menu each time, which comes
useful to make quick adjustments on the fly. Other adjustments can be made via the previously
mentioned physical buttons. By default, the front dial changes aperture while the back
dial adjusts shutter speed, and by pressing the button at the center of the back dial
you can use these same dials to change white balance and ISO, respectively.
Speaking of ISO, in extended mode the camera ranges from 100 to 25600 ISO, making for a
reasonably wide range that will have you covered in most scenarios.
As for white balance, you have all of the most common options, including temperature
selection, plus 4 customizable settings, which are the ones I end up using the most.
Battery life is good but not exceptional: I can get about 4 hours or more of shooting
when it comes to stills, and about half of that when it comes to video, also depending
on the resolution you shoot at.
Before jumping into the next section, I want to spend a couple of words on the micro four-thirds
system, as there are a couple of things worth knowing before getting in.
The first thing to keep in mind crop factor: a micro four thirds sensor has a crop factor
of 2x with regards to the 35mm system or full frame.
What it means in practice is nothing scary or worrying, but it's helpful to keep in mind
when buying a lens that you need to multiply the focal length and the aperture by 2 to
get the "equivalent" on a full frame body. For example, if you want the same field of
view as a 50mm lens on a full frame, you'll need a 25mm lens on your micro four-thirds
camera, and if you want the same background blur as an f2.8 aperture on your full frame,
you'll need f1.4 on a micro-four thirds body. The big advantage for the micro four thirds
system is that you can adapt virtually any other lens on the market to work on a micro
four thirds body, which means still being able to use all of your previous glass without
too much struggle.
The G7 offers all of the most common shooting modes, including Full Automatic, Scene, Panorama,
Program, Aperture and Shutter Priority, and Full Manual.
For almost each one of these, you can choose between single shot, burst shot, 4K photo
mode, bracketing, timer and timelapse. While single, burst and timer are self-explanatory,
I'd like to say a couple of words on the remaining three.
4K photo mode is actually nothing that you couldn't do yourself in post, but it's handy
and it saves you some time. What it does is it allows you to shoot a 4K video, and extract
one or more frames easily afterwards. Now of course to get a usable shot you'll probably
want to set a high shutter speed, so you are not going to use it for a video, but it helps
in not losing that perfect moment for your shot, for example while shooting sports or
wildlife. The bracketing mode allows you to shoot three
consequential photos at different exposures, in order to combine them as an HDR in post
or simply pick the better exposed one. I personally don't use it a lot, because I mostly shoot
in controlled scenarios, but I can image quite a few scenarios in which it can come useful.
Timelapse mode is probably my favorite, as it allows to shoot beautiful timelapses with
ease, zero worries, and a really fast setup. You just set the number of frames you want
to take, the time in between two frames, and then shoot. You can then also create the video
directly in camera and even save the time of doing it yourself on the PC, which is awesome.
When it comes to taking pictures, you've got all of the standard range of options, including
photo quality, aspect ratios, picture profiles, burst rate and so on.
Among the many features offered on the G7, there are a couple which I feel help a lot
my daily workflow. First of all, the possibility to choose a
fully electronic shutter: there is no slap whatsoever, you can silence it completely,
and it allows you to go really high up with the shutter speed, up to 1/16000th of a second.
On the other hand, if you -like me- are into long exposure photography, you can turn to
the good old physical shutter to get up to 30" of exposure or up to 2 minutes in bulb
mode. Something else that's also extremely useful
is the possibility to customize the focusing points. You can choose between face recognition,
tracking, 49-points, center, etc., but you can also create your own patterns on the screen
which is pretty crazy. Honestly, I mostly shoot in manual focus, but if you need it
the single focus is fast and reliable most of the times.
It's no A7s, but it does its job pretty well.
Among the other extra utilities which I'm just going to mention, you have the delayed
shutter for extra stable shots, built-in curves for highlights and shadows, and the picture
in picture magnification for accurate manual focusing.
So what I'm gonna do in this section and in the video quality section is I'm gonna show
you the pictures, which are by the way all edited, so you can see the final results and
judge them by yourself, and then I'm going to add my personal considerations at the end.
Enjoy!
So okay the first downside when it comes to pictures is resolution: while 16 megapixels are perfectly
fine for small to medium sized prints, or to publish on the web, if you wanna get into
editorial work or you need really large prints, there are other cameras in the sub-1K market
with higher megapixels count, so you might want to take a look at those.
Apart from that, I really can't complain about the quality: you get beautiful colors, sharp
edges, and a reasonable amount of dynamic range to work with in post.
If you wanna see more pictures shot on this camera, be sure to check out my 500px page
from the links in the description.
When it comes to video, this little beast offers almost everything an indie filmmaker
or videomaker could want. It's got 4K at 30p, 1080 at 60p, flexible
profiles like Portrait or the super flat CineD, a mic jack, mic levels adjustment, flicker
decrease, and I could go on and on. Keep in mind that you'll need a fast SD card
to shoot 4K, which means UHS 3, even if you could maybe get away with a UHS 2.
I've read online that it can even output a clean 4:2:2 to an external recorder, but I
haven't tried it directly so if that's something you're really interested in don't forget to
make more in depth searches before buying it.
One thing you want to keep in mind is that the 4K video crops in a bit, so the actual
crop factor will be something like 2.3x if you shoot 4K.
There are two main complaints I have for video: the first is the lack of a headphone jack
-which, I mean, seriously Panasonic?- and the other one is the autofocus.
By any means, it's not unusable, in fact I'd say it does what you'd expect 90% of the times,
but it does lose focus from time to time, which is not an issue when I'm operating the
camera, but it becomes one if I'm in front of it.
Long story short, I end up using manual focus for all of my reviews, but autofocus when
I'm shooting stuff like events.
Before jumping on to video quality, I'd like to add a couple of considerations on picture
profiles: if you're just starting out and you don't do any color grading at all, stick
with something like Natural or Standard. If you want a bit more control over the image,
I typically shoot in Portrait with a bit of contrast and saturation down.
Finally, if you really need that extra dynamic range or you really know what you do with
color grading -which is definitely not my case- go for CineD, which is by far the most
flexible of the bunch.
Okay, I know I might be biased here but I find the footage from the G7 just incredible,
even if you forget about the excellent price for a moment.
4K footage is gorgeous: it's sharp, it's vivid, it's really a pleasure to watch for me.
The low-light performance is really good, with visible noise starting to show up just
over 1000 ISO, and from various comparisons I've seen online I can tell you that it's
better than the GH4 under this point of view. I like the color rendering, especially in
the Portrait picture profile, but CineD tends to show an unwanted green tint for some reason.
Rolling shutter is not too terrible, but definitely visible with really fast pans, and the stabilization
built-in into the kit lens is reasonably good.
So, at the end of the day, who is this camera for?
The ideal user of the G7 is an indie filmmaker or videomaker like myself, as well as professionals
looking for something small and portable to use as an excellent b-cam.
You're not really missing out on much, and if you're looking for noteworthy upgrades
from such a package you'll have to spend *at least* double the price.
The photo capabilities are more than enough for prosumer work, but if you're not going
to use any of the video capabilities, this might not be the best option.
Overall, with the superb video quality and the really good photo quality, the compact
form factor and a wide range of features, I was really happy with the G7, and if you
can understand its very few limitations, I guarantee you that you'll be happy with it too
So that was it for this review, I hope this wasn't too much of a pain to watch
as it was my first experience with this kind of video.
And I'm definitely looking forward to your feedback.
If you enjoyed it, please consider liking and subscribing
and as always, thank you so much for watching,
this was Gio, and I'll catch you guys in the next one!