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Multi-aspect could possibly impact IQ if the sensor that Sony was offering was not MA but had better IQ than an in-house MA design (and they decided that IQ was more important than MA).

Please shoot some still-image black frames! Put on the lens cap, shoot RAW, manual mode, fast shutter, and take two shots each at ISO 200, 400, 800, and 1600. That will tell us more about the real sensor dynamic range (and whether it's really the same E-M5 sensor) than random footage or stills of real stuff.

Techradar said no peaking, but cnet says explicitly: [quote]Other really useful video additions include timecode (both record run and free run, drop frame and NDF), a headphone jack, focus peaking, audio levels control, and clean and uncompressed HDMI out.[/quote] Possibly all these people have just tried cameras with different pre-production firmware versions.

There's definitely confusion about multi-aspect. I wish one of those who actually had a camera had just taken a couple of $#@! stills and taken a look at the image sizes. Best guess at the moment is probably no. Bloom's update says definitely EXTC (was used some in Genesis).

Panasonic is almost certainly never going to add IBIS. If you need it in video, I think the E-M5 is currently the only game in town, both in micro-4/3 and otherwise.

I wouldn't hold your breath for tracking; if you need that, you need phase-detect. For regular single AF in low light, the GH2 is already pretty good; I'd expect a bit more from the GH3, but nothing revolutionary.

The E-M5 sensor would make sense in some ways, but not in others. Makes sense in that Panasonic and Olympus together could probably get a lower price due to the increased volume. Doesn't make sense in that Olympus only seems to be reading the sensor at 30fps in video mode; if it was really capable of 60fps, you'd think they'd have at least put in 720p @ 60fps. Also the E-M5 has a base ISO of 200, while the GH2 will supposedly start at 100. I suppose ISO 100 could be a digital overexpose-and-pull, which would be yet another bummer.

I agree with hoodlum; it's clearly 4:3 instead of the 3:2 of the GH2. That would be a major bummer if multi-aspect is gone :(. I guess it's still possible that's it's an oversize 4:3 sensor but one that's wide enough for the 16:9 crop to use the full 4/3 image circle.

I generally think we'd be better off with software patents because I don't feel they're needed in order to provide an incentive to innovate in this domain. That is, I don't think the rationale for why society should grant patents applies in the case of software like it does in the case of, e.g., drugs. However, given that we're in a world where patents are granted on software, I don't see this particular example as outrageous. First, it's not a patent on basic physics. It's a specific patent on a method for indicating to the user that they've reached the bottom of a page. Second, given the fact that we had many years of various forms of scrollbars and whatnot, none of which indicated reaching the bottom in such a way, then I'd say that it doesn't fail the obviousness test. In general with software patents, I often hear people saying "that's so obvious" when they really mean "that's so simple to implement". They are not the same thing.

[quote author=5DGH link=topic=455.msg2870#msg2870 date=1332530050] It doesn't work that way for video due to line-skipping mechanism. For video, what matters is native pixel performance. [/quote] Do all cameras do line-skipping?  I would agree that much of what matters is the "effective" sensor area, which for a line-skipping camera might be only a fraction of the stills area.  And of course the downsampling algorithm matters too.

[quote author=RichST link=topic=372.msg2354#msg2354 date=1331238627] The downsampling methods shown on that Cambridge site all assume you are sampling every pixel on the sensor and reducing it from there, that would require a full sensor scan in video mode which no consumer camera can currently do (the Nikon One is fast enough but they don't make use of it). I take that back: JVC's ugly little camcorder can evidently do that with a tiny chip but the processors aren't fast enough to properly deal with all that data, it has to get butchered in the process of converting it to video [/quote] Doesn't the GH2 have some sort of parallel on-sensor A/D?  Perhaps they're doing some amount of digital combining on-sensor before actually reading off the data.  (I have no idea what they're doing of course, but it seems plausible that having a bunch of highly parallel logic on the sensor might enable them to reduce the data that they have to process off-sensor by a large amount.  It would be interesting to turn someone like Chipworks loose on one of the sensors.)

[quote author=Andrew Reid - EOSHD link=topic=372.msg2344#msg2344 date=1331206890] Nice analysis. What trick would you say the GH2 has up her sleeve to get the video resolution it does from a 18MP native chip? What is the next step up from 3x3 binning? My guess is that the GH2's processor is reading out a 4MP or even 8MP 4K image from the sensor and downscaling intelligently to 2MP on the image processor itself. I cannot think of any other way it would be better than so many cameras that do binning on the sensor like the NEX 7, 5D Mark III, Nikon D800, etc. [/quote] I have no idea what the GH2 does, but perhaps you could get an idea by looking at how it renders a zone plate.  Different downscaling methods tend to produce different "signatures", ala [url=http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-resize-for-web.htm]http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/image-resize-for-web.htm[/url] and a few other million references.

I wouldn't say that the NEX is unusable in stills over ISO 800, but certainly the 5DII is better (by about a stop in print if you believe DXO).  I'd give the NEX the edge at low ISO though, and certainly in lens flexibility if you don't require AF.  Video is a separate question, since the downscaling determines the effective sensor size, and the 5DII is notoriously weak in that.

The 5D2 gets 4x more photons at the same f-stop as the GH2 in stills mode, but in video it's not so clear.  Because of line-skipping or other hacks for downsampling, the 5D2 probably has an effectively smaller sensor in video mode (still maybe not as small as the GH2's, but certainly not 4x the area).

While they no doubt need to support AVCHD, there's nothing to stop them from adding the option for other formats with higher bitrates.  (Well, nothing other than the marketing department.)

I love these sorts of articles.  Much more so than the technical ones, however useful they may be.