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Exactly. It does so much for such a cheap price. I am currently very torn between getting a Panasonic 12-35 2.8 II or a Sigma 18-35 1.8 & Metabones 0.64x speedbooster. I know both will autofocus well. I am unsure...would I prefer the small size of the Panasonic 12-35 or would I appreciate the 2 stops extra lowlight I'd get with the sigma combo. DOF is far from everything, so I think I could live with the DOF of the 12-35...decisions decisions.

Hi Everyone, What a year...ugh. In these troubling times, I thought I'd finish out the year with a music track that maybe offers a little bit of hope: "THE MEADOW WE CALL HOME" (looping) You can listen to it here: https://soundimage.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/The-Meadow-We-Call-Home.ogg And download it here: https://soundimage.org/fantasy-13/ Have a safe New Years Eve.

Once they brought the price down it made so much more sense to me, $2k region was always asking just a tad too much for a Micro Four Thirds camera, at least that was the perception. But this now has the specs of a $6k camera, only it's a Micro Four Thirds size sensor. So even at $2k it's a good deal. At nearly half that it's a total must-have. In the old days, the smaller sensor lacked dynamic range, low light performance and decent autofocus. This is just not the issue it used to be, gap has closed up.

So in the end, I went with an R6 III. 🤷‍♂️ How did I end up here, you may ask. I originally wanted R7 and R8, but had a hard time reconciling their limitations (R7 = slow readout, crazy 4K60 crop, AF issues, shutter issues; R8 = no IBIS, tiny battery). So I was still stuck without a "hero" camera. Something I could use for handheld video in most situations, and for photo on the same job if needed. I decided to get an R6 II, due to the holiday discounts that I hadn't anticipated earlier, to get past all limitations. Though now, I'd need to get a Ninja V+ to get the highest quality out of it ($500ish used), but I was OK with that. And then I got a deal I couldn't refuse on a new R6 III, which would end up costing the same as the R6 II/V+ combo, while exceeding even their limitations. Grabbed a 28-70/2.8 STM and Godox V480C while I was at it. Everything arrived at the very last second, and I was able to use the combo for the Xmas Eve job I had lined up that same night (nightclub photo/video). Photo AF was about on par with my A9 in extreme low light (good but not amazing). Got hung up on too many unintended faces, so I turned off subject detection. Video AF was definitely better than photo (no noticeable wandering/searching), probably because it moves slower. Lighting was super dark, so I was at ISO 25,600 4K24 video/6400 photo + flash, but the video quality held up thanks to the second base ISO being close. Added Canon's own CMT LUT and some Topaz NR, and the video was good to go! Vs my old OM-1, it's not even a contest. R6 III feels like a decade newer. Even the IBIS is MUCH smoother with more natural movement, despite everyone constantly blanket-praising m4/3 IBIS. It's hard to make it look bad if you move somewhat deliberately (slow walking through a crowd), while OM-1 would twitch at random, no matter how smooth you were, even with plain old panning. And OM-1 would randomly lose video focus in much brighter situations than that night, no matter how large the focus box was. R6 III stayed in place through some absolute hell situations (nightclub strobes), though photo AF completely choked at that point. Wondering if it was the 1/8 mist filter causing AF issues (no noticeable flaring), but it doesn't matter. I got all the shots I needed, the client was happy with the output, and the R6 III roughly worked as expected.

Well for me it is taking me out of the film right away. I feel there is something off in each shot. ( color, dof, detail, dynamic range, bad lighting,...) So for each their own I guess, but this is not for me. As I am constantly wondering why each shot looks off and that is keeping me off the story.. (not sure if people with no film experience can spot it, I think they can). But just my 2 cents. The only film I ever saw that kinda worked that way was "the blair witch project" but they tell you in the first minute. This is the footage of some students that went missing in the woods" so I could give it an place.

In one interview the director spoke about a black forest diffusion filter. The key factor is that they really wanted to go unnoticed. On the first day of filming, they had to abort because the crew showed up all dressed in black; everyone realized they were doing something and a crowd gathered to see what was happening. They sent everyone home and the next day they forced everyone to wear normal clothes and disperse once their tasks were finished. The group following the actors consisted of only 4 or 5 people.

At least judging by the trailer, I agree. The only thing that bugged me, really, was the glow/halation effect - were they actual diffusion filters or did they just smear the lens with vaseline? Other than finding the diffusion distracting, though, I thought the look was absolutely well-suited to the story being told. The choice of a phone felt intimate and immersive.

I think we are missing the point. Does it really matter exactly how it looks? The low-fi aesthetic fit the story perfectly and, to be honest, I enjoyed it visually much more than that Portuguese film shot on the GH7. Obviously, both are deliberate stylistic choices. If you read the article, the choice to shoot with a phone and minimal equipment was absolutely necessary to be able to film in a real market on an open set.Baker already shot a movie on an iPhone 5 years ago and looking at Anora, it's clear he isn't afraid to spend money when the production calls for it.

Do you honestly think it looks good?

It looks good. The use of iPhones is interesting. The quality is now more than good enough for narrative. I would imagine the camera operator would have been seen as just another YouTube travel and food blogger and ignored. I don't know how "guerrilla" their approach was though. Did they inform the market authorities they were shooting or did they just go and do it? Story wise it seems fine. From my perspective (in a progressive city in another country) the left handed thing is so old fashioned that I wonder if it's truly a thing in Taiwanese culture or just a device for this story.

I'm dumbfounded by the fact that the GM5 commands the same price as the S9 at roughly 840 euros on MPB. When will Panasonic take notice?

It is absolutely in a different league.

I know I can finally breathe haha. I’ve learned full frame is NOT the savior of the world. Shocking really!

Ignore it today, it's stuck in the past. E. :- )

I have not seen the film. I just watched the trailer because you shared the name. But I wonder why they chose the iphone 13 as the main camera. I wonder if its not just to tell people "hey we shot this on an iphone". I get you can win time with just shooting on an iphone, but the image just isnt there. Based on the trailer alone, its not a movie I would want to see, as I have not seen a single frame that looks great. It all looks like something a soccer mom or kid on youtube makes these days. Not into that vloggy style of filmmaking myself.

Welcome back! Can you tell me your name? Where are we? What year is it? Good, good... You've been in a DOF-induced coma for the last 7 years. We'll contact your families and let them know you've woken up - they'll be very happy to see you!

It's sad to hear this - the S9 seems to suffer with the same cost-cutting mechanisms of all smaller cameras. It's funny how consumer electronics mostly tend to charge a premium for smaller devices and yet when it comes to cameras the industry seems to regard small as being cheap and large as being professional.

This is the core challenge of film-making - compromises and trade-offs. Absolutely, open gate without dropping quality means many trade-offs.... more rolling-shutter, more processing demands in-camera, greater heat generated in-camera, more power requirements and therefore shorter battery life or larger batteries required, great write-speed requirements for the media and larger capacity media, more processing power to edit, greater hard drive capacity, etc etc etc. His choice to use the Ronin 4D would have been like any other choice in film-making - a tradeoff of various factors to try and optimise the outcome (video quality, customer satisfaction, profit on the job, or some other factor) but if I had to guess it might have been that the 4D has excellent stabilisation including a fourth axis, which would have been important if the operator was walking/running rather than having the shot on rails or using something that rolls (considering the shot was a horizontal move with parallax on what looked like a longer lens). So this situation ends up potentially being a trade-off between DOF, sharpness, size of area required for a shoot, and stabilisation (fourth-axis stabiliser / slider / rails / dolly / etc and the associated setup and teardown times, etc). The value of open gate is that it removes the requirement to trade some of these things off against each other. The key question being debated though, is choice. No-one is suggesting that everyone be forced to record in open-gate modes. Yet the people who are arguing against it are saying that it shouldn't be in cameras and therefore no-one should have the option to use it.

I work on a daily live national pop culture program - and while we are theoretically a terrestrial radio program first and foremost, realistically speaking we are a multi-platform program that is consumed as a traditional radio show, a podcast on Apple, a video podcast on Spotify/Youtube, and there are a lot of people who ONLY know our program via the video reels we post on our IG account. The program is captured with 3 Sony PTZs, and guests joining us via Zoom are patched into the convo by our digital producer who is also our live switcher, who is also framing each person (up to four guests, including the host) for our Youtube/Spotify podcasts AND our IG reels... so yes, Open Gate would prob be a helpful option for our digital producer/switcher/editor to have in post.

Yes. I haven't tried the G9ii, but I bet the build is in a different league; yet, the pricing of the S9 would indicate otherwise when it first came out. Not having that EVF meant to me they were not going to cheap-out elsewhere, but they gave us GX800-level buttons. I got the SmallRig cage and it does feel much better to hold and it has all those rigging options now. Still, it does have a lot going for it in terms of output. Personally, I thought it would be a major problem not going above 1/100 in artificial lighting, but it doesn't seem so.

I saw this film in the cinema few days ago and I wanted to share a few short thoughts on this work, which I found extremely interesting for the balance between neorealist aesthetics and the use of natural light in complex urban environments like the markets of Taipei. The composition of the image and the dynamism of the camera manage to give a rare sense of immersion, keeping a consistent style for the whole film. It is a remarkable example of how cinematic language can work without huge technical equipment: in fact, the film was shot entirely with an iPhone. The choice of the iPhone 13 Pro Max was mainly due to the need to move with extreme agility and discretion inside the night markets of Taipei, contexts where a traditional crew with bulky cameras would have inevitably attracted attention and compromised the spontaneity of the scenes. By working with such a common and non-invasive tool, the director managed to adopt an almost documentary-like approach. Reading several articles and listening some interviews, the director gave several details: The film's aesthetics were built around the use of four iPhone 13 Pro Max cameras, integrated into a workflow that used the Beastgrip Pro system as the base for the rig. To achieve the characteristic anamorphic look and typical horizontal flares, the production used a prototype anamorphic lens from Beastgrip, paired with Black Forest diffusion filters to reduce the excessive digital sharpness of the sensor and give a more organic feel to the highlights of the night markets. On the software side, the shooting was managed entirely through the FiLMiC Pro app using the 4K Lux mode, a choice that allowed for a file with a wider dynamic range, which was later processed in post-production through advanced color correction in DaVinci Resolve. Seeing some BTS shots, this was really a run&gun configuration. An iPhone and a Gimbal et voila! https://thefilmstage.com/left-handed-girl-director-shih-ching-tsou-on-collaborating-with-sean-baker-and-seeing-the-world-through-a-childs-eyes/

I just freaking bought this thing. I so agree with you. The camera is unbelievable for the price. I genuinely will never need anything more than what this camera has. Lowlight was quite impressive. And I'm coming from having shot on the OG Nikon Z6 for nearly 4 years; that camera was very good in low light. Like "lets shoot a wedding reception at 25,600 ISO" level good. And on this G9 II...you can actually use it at 12,800 if you are fine with some somewhat pleasing grain, or just denoise the image in Davinci. Cleans up easy. Colors are VERY thick. Dynamic range is great. IBIS is the best I've ever used. E-stabilization high is amazing and crops less than 1.3x according to my tests. Planning on getting the Panasonic 12-35 2.8 OG and the 25mm 1.7 and pairing those two together for a nice compact kit. I think its the most underrated camera of 2025. A real steal. Also I consider this camera to be a real tempting alternative to an FX30.

It turns out I am a bit wrong. ... That Micro Four Thirds was dead. Well near me, the G9 II came down to a much more sensible 1299 so I thought I'd give it a try. This thing... oh my gawd. Feel like putting the rest of my gear in the bin! This little box of joy is pure art in the handheld 4K/120p mode (and also in 5K open gate). The colour science, slow mo and IBIS are so, so good. The new GH7 sensor is quite something. Beautiful filmic quality to it. And I thought IBIS was good on the full frame Panasonic cameras or Olympus OM-1 but this is taking the biscuit now. You can just stand there and get a completely static frame especially in 120fps. I keep putting shutter at 1 second for long expose stills, pin sharp...The first camera that can really lay claim to being a tripod killer, in my view. Then there's the image processing... It totally defies the price. The new sensor just looks so clean in low light and dynamic range is fantastic. The real-time LUTs look stunning here. No other Micro Four Thirds camera has nearly as good colour processing (except the more expensive GH7), so in this sense I prefer it even to the Olympus OM-1 with the lovely Olympus skin tones. In some ways it is better than a flagship $4k full frame cam... I am not joking. Not missing a full frame sensor that much to be honest. It has the dynamic range, the low light, the resolution, and with a fast enough lens... the full frame look as well. The Metabones Speed Booster 0.64x fits without scraping the sensor-box. Also, the EVF is enormous and totally defies the price. Criticisms? Autofocus is very lens dependant - it's still a bit rubbish with the older stuff and adapters. Also no ProRes LT like the X-H2... With two SD card slots, it limits you only to 1080p in ProRes mode which is a bit silly... but the high-res stuff is available if you plug in an SSD via USB. GH7 has an advantage there for sure. But in plain old 10bit H.265 the image is superb. I think this body design suits the smaller lenses too... You know I'm not the greatest fan of the S5 II body design, well it is growing on me here... Micro Four Thirds and small stuff seems to go well with the G9 II / S5 II body design. It starts to make more sense. The sharp angles cut in less, camera as a whole is lighter, the grip is sufficient for everything and it's got that "GH2 feel" when you put the tiny 20mm F1.7 pancake on there whereas the S5 II with the larger lenses doesn't have that same charm to it. I am inclined to say Micro Four Thirds LOOK is back too... It's an antidote to predominance of a super shallow depth of field in commercial work and Netflix. It really makes me want to fully commit again to the system as it just does SO MUCH, far more than any full frame camera remotely affordable. It does more than a Sony a1 II FFS!

FX30 is more than just a cinema-line camera for people who are used to shooting with it. Those damn, counter-intuitive Japanese menus — so shooting-unfriendly (a PITA, and truly a shame; these guys have no notion of photography/filmmaking at all) — are the only thing I’ve got against it, and the only gripe I’ve ever collected. - EAG

Very true. And here's another one: At same time, I am buying all of them... Pocket 3, Osmo 360, Nano and Action 6 ; ) An all-star lineup ;- )