Let us start by saying that we are huge fans of the Lumix line by Panasonic and their cameras in general. The GH5 is still a powerhouse of a camera for serious video work and the 180fps FUll HD slow motion is better than many others before or since at that frame rate while at 120fps is as good as the best Sonys out there. However, the recently announced Lumix G95 drops the ball in several fronts when it comes to really good video performance which has become a trademark for Panasonic.
The G95 has all the looks and character of a great hybrid camera but has a crippled video mode that may put off many buyers looking for the perfect intermediate camera. The 4k, for example, has a 1.25x crop on top of the nearly 2x crop of the micro 4/3 sensor. Making it a little larger than the area of a 1″ sensor. This will sacrifice video quality in the lack of supersampling and low light will suffer from the added megapixels.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
In what could be summed up as a big milestone day in affordable slow motion, Krontech.ca the company behind the excellent 720p 1500fps Chronos 1.4c slow motion camera has now announced ready for pre-order a new 1080p Full HD 1000fps slow motion camera that starts at a bargain basement price of $5,000 US Dollars. Considering just a few years ago this performance in the Phantom camera space was a six-figure proposition, this is major progress towards a camera that we have been waiting for a long time.
So it seems the rumors were true about the slow motion component being preserved on the Galaxy S10 phones from last year’s S9. Last year the stand out feature of the phone in video mode was the slow motion capability and it was one of the main selling points for the Galaxy S9. We got no mention of the feature during the Samsung event today for the S10 but we can find it buried in the phone specs with some details.
It seems the feature is slightly improved in bit-rate quality, color, and dynamic range. However, the main improvement is the recording time which has gone up to 0.4sec from 0.2sec and up to 0.8sec in 480fps mode which is half the frame rate. In essence, it seems the phone is now the flagship slow motion performer for Samsung.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The next Galaxy Phone release by Samsung flagship line the Galaxy S10 is due for release this month. The rumor mill is suggesting big improvements in screen size coverage, processing, fingerprint reader below the screen and our main interest slow motion video capture. It seems the next phone will improve on the video quality of the slow motion and may even add better time recording at 960fps 720p but will not introduce higher resolutions.
The Galaxy S9 and Note 9 already handle slow motion very well but we wanted to see better time recording on the 960fps slow motion mode above the fractions of a second offered by last years release. The OnePlus 6, for example, offered 3.75 seconds recording at 480fps which made it our slow motion phone for the 2018 calendar year.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
As it was initially unveiled at Photokina last year, the Panasonic Lumix S1 and S1R cameras are their answer to the domination of larger sensors in stills and video mirrorless cameras. Is there any reason now to buy a Full Frame DSLR when mirrorless is so advanced? The only thing we can think of is to have marginally longer battery life. The mirror is on its last legs and fans better start offloading their lenses if they don’t want to mess with adapters. In the case of Panasonic however, it is not possible to use Lumix Micro 4/3 lenses on the Leica/Sigma/Panasonic Full Frame L-Mount.
The S1 and S1R will both shoot up to 180fps 1080p video with a crop that may or may not be impactful. Seems the S1R has less crop on 1080p than the video geared S1 which is an odd spec. We will have to wait for more samples and info on the HFR mode to see which of these cameras offers the best slow motion performance. From the limited samples, we can say that the quality looks very good and at least on par with the Lumix GH5 at 120fps.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The newly announced Sony a6400 is what the a6300 should have been almost two years ago. It is still missing a key feature that was introduced with the a6500 that of IBIS or Sensor Stabilization which works with any lens added to the system. However, if you remove the IBIS fail from the equation this is a killer camera for just $900 which in this day and age of $1000+ cellphones, it is quite a bargain for the body only.
We were amazed by the 120fps full HD quality of other sony alpha cameras like the a9 and the a7 III which fully track subjects while recording in super slow motion which really makes the feature stand out compared to other cameras which force you to go manual while on that mode. The codec quality has also been bumped in this camera for 120p to 100Mbps from 60Mbps on earlier cameras like the a6300 which should preserve more detail while sacrificing little in image crispness.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
