Andrew Reid

The thing is, this was the last chance for 2024 to do something. Which means heading into 2025 there is not an update to 3 important 2018 cameras. That is quitting.

I'd say the A7 IV has a better sensor in a similarly priced body ($1500-2500 market). The Z6 III clearly is a new generation of sensor, in that same mid-range price bracket. The S5 Mark II is competitive on price, but Panasonic may as well give up on taking any sales away from the others. I really do think now that they have quit the flagship enthusiast and high-end market, in order to leave it to Leica. There can be no other explanation. The S1 series didn't sell well enough, so why throw good money after bad when they can use a tiny fraction of the budget on very low-cost stuff like the S9 with a 7 year old sensor? And they have continued to get new LSIs and new firmware features such as on the GH7, new codecs, ProRes, etc. So maybe there is a built up to a new S1H or something like that. But I just find it all very strange that in the 6 years between the big important S1 series launch and now, they have absolutely nothing to show for it. https://www.eoshd.com/news/panasonic-hiatus-worries-as-flagship-cameras-remain-nowhere-to-be-seen-in-2024/

They have not entirely quit the camera industry but it does feel like a soft quit at the moment.

BTW do you have an URL for the figures?

Wow... the buying public really are not rewarding the innovation shown by Panasonic and Fuji judging by those numbers. You wonder how sustainable 260k is for Panasonic, as 3.6% is just pathetic for a company that size. What were Samsung on before the exit? Olympus? OM are doing very badly considering the size of a system they inherited, many loyal users. Canon, what can I say - they just don't deserve to be that far ahead when there are so many better options behind from Sony, Nikon and Fuji. People... their habits die hard don't they. Makes me think they rushed out the original EOS R just to bind people into the RF lenses early.

There is a rumoured Panasonic... i mean Leica SL3-S coming soon, and another sign things are not well. Panasonic have given Leica an S1R Mark II and an S1 Mark II, and it would be trivial to put the same thing in a Panasonic body with a Lumix badge... But they haven't. It's all very suspicious in my view.

All it takes is a tiny amount of prompt engineering. Just a tiny amount. Is this the secret to embracing household chores then? You couldn't do it in CG though because it would be the computer moving stuff, whereas claymation is about the human hand moving stuff. It's a big difference.

In that case, I'll replace the video with something with more value to the DJI discussion 🙂

That's the thing, it's all become very insular. Self-congratulating technological achievement, and I don't really feel to grateful towards it, whereas an actual human artist you do feel a sense of awe and gratitude and good will when they do something brilliant, or anything that demonstrates talent. Now the danger is that the feedback loop of inauthentic procedurally generated content feeds into the AI and it becomes split off from human input to a factor of something like 9:1, which will unmoor it even more from the hand of an artist. What could save it is only if it concedes more control to us, not less, and becomes a proper in-depth tool, not a single button press or prompt. I recently watched the documentary about Hayao Miyazaki, A never ending man, where he retires and instantly regrets it because he's a total obsessive. He's aging and can't be fudged with a feature, so decides to delegate to a team of CGI experts and instantly regrets that too, so he ends up literally drawing it himself on top of the CGI frames. Even though the CGI experts were absolute top notch, almost all of his style got lost in the delegation process. It didn't matter if he sat next to them and micro managed, it just wasn't conveyed. The only way he could do it was to put his hands directly on the paper. It's the same with AI, unless your hands are directly on the paper and it stays in the background as an assist, it will never be authentic art!

To be honest looking at GH6 used prices now you could probably stretch to one of those for not much more?!

I haven't been following his recent personal stories for obvious reasons!

Since I am refusing to watch this crap can somebody summarise the video - does it have any evidence of a new camera or not, if not, then this thread is getting deleted.

Some 10bit codec are worse than the best 8bit stuff, you're right. MJPEG on the 1D C is still a thick chonky image... In 8bit. The compression quality, macro blocking, noise reduction and DSP all are more important than whether it is 10bit or not, in my view!

In the 90s I loved magazines... Nearly all the good ones are fucking gone. You can't sit with a phone and digest an entire magazines worth of content, it has to be in broadsheet-style print. Otherwise it just isn't satisfying or healthy to stare at a pokey little phone screen for that amount of time.

There's another devious slight of hand with Facebook and the socials, in that if they encouraged or even facilitated longer posts and content like a blog article with multiple photos and videos, their business model would suffer as the ads would get less time and attention, if everyone was to read long articles. So the reason they are making everyone ADHD dopamine addicts, killing livelihoods and long form content is purely for the ad $$$$ Cynical bastards or what?

I remember similar stuff in 1996, here's me a teenager at college... They had very early cable internet, which was a huge step up from the home modem. The crap is held aloft and in high regard by people. You only have to look at some of the videos in this thread 🙂 I find Facebook a mixed bag... There's some very good group content, user generated stuff like Reddit has. But it never has room to breathe. A photo, with a caption... max... Then you scroll past. It never goes anywhere... it's orphaned content, without a home or any parents. And Facebook has a certain demographic too... Not many younger voices on there. It's practically a boomer platform! If you for example are a 1990s PC game enthusiast on Facebook you can get a dopamine hit with a rush of likes by posting a photo of your setup and how nostalgic it is... fine... Erm, do that on a blog and you have a livelihood. You're a publisher, writer and journalist whereas on Facebook you're NOTHING but an end-user to be monetised for sake of Mr Zuckenberg. Bloom is an interesting example as he started off 80% professional cameraman, 20% blogger and ended up 10% professional, 90% social media influencer. The influencer role is bad for your mental health and has a very short career-span of perhaps 10 years maximum before the companies get bored of you. And it leaves you a hollow shell of a person, who has shilled his reputation away... and his credibility. This is because they are trying to get off the endless treadmill and save their mental health. Thanks for that observation it has cheered me up. Nearly outlived DPReview as well which never expected to do 🙂 Haha.

I just remembered this from a while ago on the Sony a7s iii... https://www.eoshd.com/news/sony-a7s-iii-10bit-image-quality-vs-same-camera-in-8bit-with-surprising-results/ I think it's still relevant now. Can someone prove me wrong and actually show with some examples that are not TOO extreme in terms of a silly grade that you wouldn't use in real life?

Exactly, but those 3 are facing extreme competition too now... Advertising work faces competition from the influencer garbage, and the ability to fly out influencers to a launch rather than film a professional ad for the web, etc. Series, there's just too many. Movies, too many and too many of them just no good. Yep, fully agree. It's got sooooo bad. When the meritocracy breaks down, this is what you get. A race to the bottom! Yeah it's because they're digesting it on phones... it's fast food content. Anything too crafted or demanding, and they just switch off. Or perhaps just too ADHD distracted to focus on it, even if it grabs them in the first 30 seconds? I hope we can turn the ship around. The industry is going to be in deep trouble if it doesn't. The internet has to be nursed back to health. We can't afford to have any further slide into the pockets of Meta and the like... The founding principals have to be better defended!

Is the 5.8K mode oversampled from full width of the sensor? The secret to the GFX for me is to use manual focus full frame SLR lenses on it like a Canon FD 55mm F1.2 Aspherical or something, I don't mind the fall off to darker corners as long as the hard vignette isn't present, which on many of these lenses 50mm or longer, it isn't. Even some of the cheap 50 euro stuff. And there is also now the very good Fringer GFX EF adapter which has fast phase-detect AF on the GFX 100, it works brilliantly with my Canon 35mm F1.4L EF, again very little vignetting but opens up the possibility of Full frame video or XPan look on a Fuji if you pair it with the Mark II in crop mode... So in that sense you have your replacement for the likes of a Panasonic S1H. How's the autofocus in video mode?

This could be what has happened... Panasonic effectively pulling out of the high-end and leaving it to Leica, and will now only focus on the mid-range enthusiast market.

Maybe a bit off topic but I am keen to know how you're getting on with the GFX 100 II in terms of everything else! I absolutely love the design and feel of the body last time I tried it out. Is it a big step up on the GFX 100 OG in terms of video with all the extra crop modes and faster sensor? How's the 4K?

I find it very odd that there's still no rumours about Panasonic's next flagship stuff. There's absolutely no way I believe an S5R is on the way! Why would Panasonic give away 8K FF 16:9 30fps 25ms super-sampled in a mid-range / entry level mode?

Some worrying thoughts are occupying my mind at the moment so it might do me some good to let them out for a run... Here goes. In the 1990s I grew up with the early internet, it wasn't very media rich due to the bandwidth constraints and it only worked well on a big screen with a keyboard at a desk, so it suited web pages and forums. Written stuff, basically. Come the y2k and we began to see the early social media sites like Myspace and then Facebook but you still had to use these at a desk. Which lends itself to being able to type long sentences and create art. Come smartphones, they couldn't offer the full world wide web experience, on a pokey slow browser, but this changed with apps. So fast forward a bit to the 2010s... There has been a proliferation of apps into our lives, but it wasn't really until Youtube and Facebook Groups got some serious traction that things started to change. I used to be pretty confident in the EOSHD blogging days that if I sat down to write a review, or opinion, or do some proper journalism or get a scoop and break the camera news first it would get some attention and traction, now I am not so sure it will as it is a separate indie .com website outside of social media, and this is very bad news for the internet because we cannot let Meta and Google and a handful of other corporations OWN the entire web. So to the making a living bit... For creatives like photographers and filmmakers the internet was a real blessing, it allows you to setup stall with a website and get your work out there. You get noticed and then you get hired, that's how it used to work. There has to be a strong demand from industry for those positions as well, no matter how good you are it doesn't matter if the cinema industry is in a downward spiral. Cinema and photography have to compete with other forms of content too. Again it comes back to smartphones. Neither cinema and photography are well suited to a small screen and even smaller attention spans, they are supposed to be viewed on a large canvas and in a socially interactive way like in a gallery or theatre. Now with stuff like streaming, this works fine when everyone has a subscription to one or two of the same platforms like Netflix and are stuck at home with nothing better to do like during covid, but after a while there is a total oversupply of stuff to watch, and a total ADHD mess of an audience who is getting constantly distracted by social media content in direct competition to the long form stuff. So we have a meltdown at the moment in the filmmaking industry, and even in the commercial videography industry where it is now so easy to shoot something, companies may as well hire an intern to do it or have some staff do it themselves, because the bar is set by social media and that as I said works best with very short authentic bursts of home made content, where production quality or even the camera doesn't really matter. With photography, if you're an artist trying to compete for attention with all of that stuff you are going to be in trouble if you don't do double-duties as a social media influencer, which of course means making YOURSELF the story and front and centre. Not a lot of artists are all that comfortable with that. I'm not. So the business model now is that your content has to be free, and you merchandise it or earn from advertising and sponsorship due to your social media reach as an artist. And I REALLY hate that because it cheapens what it means to be a photographer or filmmaker. At the end of the day, the photos and films should be what matter and they should be paid for. PS Have you noticed by the way - that the AI bubble has completely lost people's interest, the content is all so un-compelling? Why do you think this is... It's because there is so much of it... And it is disassociated with the artist's own hand... And that is exactly what all this tech has done to use filmmakers and photographers... The accessibility of tech means that there's now too much content, and not enough demand for the next piece. A big economic correction is on the way.

Social media is destroying the internet as a medium and turning it into cable tv. I don't think people will realise what this means until a lot later, but now that print media is going away along with a lot else, including proper journalism, we're about to enter the find out stage. The internet as it was originally intended with net neutrality was the greatest invention of the century and we are really harming it by making independent .com websites bankrupt and the written word obsolete. It's going to become more and more of a problem. Maybe one day, blogging will make a come back like vinyl? I remember when a certain cat owner, who went by the name of Philip, switched predominantly to social media tweets and youtube, rather than blogging... his own site is now dead basically, and his content is now at the whim of an algorithm he doesn't own or have any control over... Anyway, he switched, and HE became the story - front and centre, private life out there for all to see, and it clouded out his actual work and images... and the other point I'm making is that he had no choice anyway because smartphones work better with YouTube and social media, the large in depth pages of the web just don't work well with modern attention spans or small screens with no physical keyboard, especially since most of the WWW these days is such a mess - so much poor content and horrific web design... you know, ads everywhere, popups, autoplay, cookie prompts, constantly scrolling by itself as new elements load. It's unworkable. I want us to come back to the founding ideas of what made the internet so special, before it's too late.

The strikes were not a great idea in retrospect.