I'll believe it when I see it. If it does do true 5K readout to the engine processor and then uses the downscaling engine most cameras use when you set them to lower resolutions the video should be razor sharp, the difference would have jumped out at Dave and he would have been gushing all over the look of the video. But he didn't because I don't think the camera can do it - the dead giveaway that it isn't really doing this is that it should offer a limited 60 fps burst mode like the Nikon One cameras, but all I see in the specs are 10 fps. Now maybe it's using a binning technique that utilizes every pixel on the camera but I don't think it's discreetly sampling every pixel for its video mode.
A bit disappointing but hopefully we won't have to keep waiting too long; Aptina says it will have 1" sensors with accompanying processing engines capable of 4K ready next year. It's not that I want 4K - I don't - it's just that I want a 1080 mode that has been derived from an entire 4K image sample. JVC's PX10 was the first camera to do this but it threw away so much fine detail along the way it ruined the usefulness of it. Their conversion processor probably wasn't up to snuff. Hero did better, I don't know about Samsung's Note.
The reason you're seeing these fast smaller sensors is because it's a lot easier to bus the incredibly high numbers required for video off of smaller sensors than it is for large ones, that's just physics. That's why the A7's video is probably not going to be anything to write home about. For the smaller sensors I imagine the bottleneck right now is getting processors fast enough to take 5K worth of data and downsampling it to 1080 in realtime like you would for a smaller jpeg image, then encoding that to mp4.
Here's another interesting snip from the article about its video:
Perhaps more intriguingly, Panasonic says that the better image sensor means that it need only bin four pixels to create each pixel in the final movie, rather than six pixels as in the G6. The mixing is performed in 1 x 4 pixel lines, rather than 2x2 blocks, and the image processor performs low-pass filtering on the resulting data as it comes off-chip.
I'm not sure how they would bin in 1x4 lines, I'm wondering if it improves horizontal resolution in video. I'm also not sure how they could bin 6 pixels off a 2x2 block. The low-pass filtering of the data coming off the chip may have been how Panasonic has been getting relatively moire-free video for years now.
RichST got a reaction from ike007 in Surprise! New Sony RX10 sensor has 5K full pixel readout
RichST got a reaction from Andrew Reid in Panasonic GX7 in body sensor stabilisation will not work for video!! according to imaging resource.