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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 ;- )

Right there ; ) There is the muse of the silver screen. And the persona. Under Carl Jung, the mask. Archetypes. :- )

I second that. They seem to wear out fast too. This summer when I briefly owned the S9, the rear dial just felt mushy and very easy to turn. I recently tried a Lumix S9 at a bestbuy that seemed to be in good condition; the rear dial felt better. And on a Lumix S9 FB group I've heard reports of the dials going bad and becoming less responsive. A major reason I went Panasonic G9II instead of S9 this time around. I also never really loved the Smallrig grip for the Panasonic S9; the grip felt lose half the time even when tightening. With all this being said, the S9 is still quite the value for the money. I think it smokes the Sony ZVE10II for example.

I think Clara Bow was the first to teach the camera things with her gaze. Especially desire. Free desire. Or was it defiant desire? I forget. 😉 Also, the camera has a bad memory because it keeps getting re-taught all those things by different people. But I suppose being enamored by others is normal. Celebrities exist for good reason. Cultural context mixed with a harmonizing charisma. Maybe it's not even the camera. The story and image of Mona Lisa is still around in our collective consciousness. The girl with the pearl earring. How about Adele Bloch? Or maybe if you'd rather consider the male rendered in a painting to think about ... well, again, the Mona Lisa ... ? Regardless, legend has it that Anna Whistler was a right old twat. Kicked a cat once and liked to slaughter chickens.

I love it’s size, it’s weight and it’s capability but as a pro tool, it is sorely lacking. I have used it as my primary video unit on a couple of occasions and the result has been great…mostly, - too many times I have jogged those dials etc though 😏 I would like to see a second gen, but for now/2026, I have relegated mine to back up/spare apart from one single use case (locked on to grooms face for bridal entrance…which seems a bit overkill to have a camera dedicated to and then packed away but 🤷‍♂️) and so it stays. For now.

Incredible pun ahah.

Hezekiah Northrup is somewhere in the background too. He's just hard to make out because the photo was taken just a few weeks after he invented Bokeh.

The 2 "cheapest feeling" cameras I've ever used (and there are many) are probably the Olympus e-p7 (which felt hollow) and the Panasonic S9. The S9's rear d-pad is simply ridiculous, feeling much more like a GX800 than anything remotely premium. It really needed proper front and back dials and go for buttons on the d-pad for a minimum. Also, give us similar buttons as on the other FF cameras. I would have also preferred a flip-up, not out screen.

Needs to be lockable on the next gen camera…if there is one. Plus more robust everything!