BTM_Pix

To be fair, their own product page for the S9 certainly says otherwise though. It’s all about the casual shooter. Particularly the crossed out edit graphic. I don’t disagree that it does a lot more but that’s what they’re aiming at based on their own marketing. Which is another aspect of the bundled launch in not having the right lenses or the right type of “reviewers” there. They hedged their bets and it all just looked very confused. Plus, the S5ii 😉 https://www.panasonic.com/uk/consumer/cameras-camcorders/lumix-mirrorless-cameras/lumix-s-full-frame-cameras/dc-s9.html

All of whom work in their accounts department.

I've said it before but the camera that presents the biggest challenge to Panasonic getting traction with their latter releases isn't made by someone else, its made by Panasonic themselves. The S5ii is the spanner in the works for the G9ii, GH7 and S9. Cheaper than the first two (and lets not ignore the not insubstantial difference of it being FF over MFT) and easily justifying the extra £300 over the last one for the additional features. How likely do you think it is that someone walks into a camera store to buy a Panasonic camera and doesn't walk out with the S5ii when presented with all four? Actually, or even all five if you are in Europe when you throw in whatever the hell the S5d is The ARRI LogC3 got a lot of buzz for the GH7 and maybe it could be the thing that does the same for the S9 but that is at the expense of pissing off every owner of the other S cameras. Discontinuing the S5ii seems the only way out of this for them !

I think the significance of this camera extends far beyond whether you actually want it because it doesn’t tick every box for you. That significance is being able to say to other manufacturers “OK, now why can’t YOU do this for $799?”

Oddly enough, I think this might well re-awaken interest in the XS-20 too.

Just going off prices at B&H (dream on for UK/EU punters of course) the S9 with the new 18-40 kit lens is $1797.99. Whereas the following : Fujifilm X-M5 15-45mm f3.5-5.6 kit lens with OIS and Power Zoom Viltrox 23mm f1.4 AF Meike 55mm f1.4 AF Fujifilm 55-200mm f4.5-6.7 OIS zoom MK2 Adds up to $1796.99 So for a dollar less (not sure what that buys you in NY anymore but still) you can have the camera, a more useful kit lens due to the OIS and the power zoom, two fast and very capable third party AF primes and a real hidden gem of a stabilised telephoto zoom. For anyone not married to L mount looking at an S9, that is a pretty compelling alternative as you can get a really comprehensive kit instead. IBIS and Full Frame be damned !

Zhiyun Crane-M 3S and FeiyuTech Scorp Mini 2 would be contenders. Both are reasonably compact and not outrageously expensive and offer camera control as well as having enough weight handling to cope with much bigger cameras too with expansion options for focus motors. The Scorp Mini 2 has additional useful functionality with its built in AI tracking.

I think this a pretty significant release. The lack of IBIS wouldn’t bother me for a few reasons. Namely, that I can do without the destructive warping, a lot of Fuji lenses have OIS and the options for post stabilisation are now both more plentiful and more sophisticated. $799 reminds us of how things used to be in the golden days of MFT before we all slept walked into accepting the received wisdom that three times that price was the price of a low-mid price camera body.

Fujifilm have had Panasonic’s pants off with the X-5M release today. It’s offering the upgrade from the compact MFT cameras that Panasonic refuse to do and cuts the price in half from the still sat on the launchpad S9 and has appropriately sized lenses to boot. It also leverages the kudos that the X100 has created in the market that they are trying to break into. Panasonic should’ve made this camera two or even three years ago - particularly when Leica vacated the APS-C area discontinuing the CL and TL - but instead they put an MFT sensor in a FF body and priced it even higher. They definitely need to do something along those sort of lines as the “me too” stuff is not moving anyone’s needle. The head start they had by being in mirrorless early has now disappeared.

Fuji have just announced the X-M5 which is another swift kick in the goolies for the S9 (albeit "only" APS-C) and at $799 is the sort of price point and form factor that Panasonic should've been looking at for a new GX80. 26MP X-Trans BSI CMOS sensor X-Processor 5 with AI-powered subject detection AF On-sensor phase detection Fully articulated 3", 1.04M-dot LCD 20 Film Simulation modes, including Reala ACE Continuous shooting up to 8fps (30fps with E-shutter and 1.25x crop) 6.2K 3:2 video up to 30p, 4K up to 60p with crop 10 but 4:2:2 External mic and 3.5mm headphone socket https://fujifilm-x.com/global/products/cameras/x-m5/

They might well be working on one but the one they've actually released today is another one with the very much have used before APS-C sensor size. The X-M5 might be IBIS and EVF-less but it packs a big punch for $799. 26MP X-Trans BSI CMOS sensor X-Processor 5 with AI-powered subject detection AF On-sensor phase detection Fully articulated 3", 1.04M-dot LCD 20 Film Simulation modes, including Reala ACE Continuous shooting up to 8fps (30fps with E-shutter and 1.25x crop) 6.2K 3:2 video up to 30p, 4K up to 60p with crop 10 but 4:2:2 External mic and 3.5mm headphone socket https://fujifilm-x.com/global/products/cameras/x-m5/

So this could either be rumours of a new firmware version or him testing the version without the recording limits then. Removing the recording limit for the S9 does add to its utility because with a dummy battery it was likely not going to cause the same sort of heat issues that necessitated the limit in the first place so it would’ve been an artificial restriction for that use case. Fumbling the initial launch with the wrong lens and now fumbling the re-launch with the right lens and dodgy firmware is not a good look though. Though it will certainly benefit us S5ii users looking for a cheap companion version as the used S9 prices tumble due to these fuck ups !

Call me cynical but as the S5 already charged over USB then they could simply have removed the charger from the boxes to become compliant rather than make a whole “new” camera for a specific region. After all, the changes come in at the end of 2024 and it’s not as if the original S5 was going to have much of a life beyond that anyway as a new product. They could also make additional money by selling the chargers separately. I know that no manufacturer is going to say “we’ve got shitloads of these in a warehouse and need to get shut of them” but this stretches creativity in spinning that situation very thin. Also, the famously absolutely NOT part of the EU anymore UK government has previously stated that it wouldn’t align itself to this particular EU directive. Mind you, they say a lot of things. My conspiracy theory is that they took a production run of the old box camera and a production run of the S5ii and swapped the internals to make the new box camera and whatever the hell this is on the basis it would be easier to clear stock of a “new” S5 than the old box camera. I’m only kidding of course but it makes about as much sense as their given reason.

Something the S9 has going for it over the other S cameras is the hybrid zoom function. Its 1.5x in 4K so this new 18-40mm becomes an 18-60mm with that extension so it actually makes the whole combo a more interesting proposition as a package. I'm guessing that Panasonic not giving it to the other cameras is a deliberate differentiation for that purpose so they can offer compact packages albeit with slower lenses that still maintain some of the range people want. If it was launched as this combo from the get go then I think a lot of the "I'm trying to be positive about this camera because they've flown me all the way here to shill it for them" lukewarm fixed grin "reviews" would've been a lot more positive. Because with this lens - and I'm guessing a similar tele companion version won't be far behind -the S9 makes a whole lot more sense. As it was, they blew that by having the silly pancake lens with it for the launch so all compactness would have to go out of the window by putting the usual L mount lenses on it.

Live stream for the announcement of whatever it is they're announcing.

Yeah, as per usual, he's serving up more half baked nonsense.

Not for the onlookers though 😉

Or their father who has abandoned them inside the log cabin to keep the log fire stoke while he does an urgent emergency live rumour broadcast from the verandah. With only one day to go before this announcement, if this announcement is something as major as the v2 of the S1 cameras then I would have expected to see tweets from the usual suspects humble bragging about the strains of having to go overseas as they are wolfing down Takoyaki in Osaka with the rest of the bros. But there haven't been so maybe it isn't significant enough to take them all to Osaka. It doesn't rule out them having been sent them or there being localised events but my reading of this is that this is (white) smoke without a lot of fire.

I do now. They REALLY want you to use the ATEM (which is what I have it for anyway) but if you buy the zoom demand add on then you can assign one of its buttons to trigger the AF. However…. The P4K/6K have a beta firmware that uses the same Ethernet control now so I have developed two different controller options last week in preparation for getting the Micro Studio 4K G2. Just tested them and they work well. I’ll be doing a third type this week as I’m trying a different approach. So I’ll personally be covered if I want to use it outside of the ATEM environment but I’m not convinced enough other people will be interested in doing the same for me to commercialise it. It’s laughably small when put next to a regular P4K so it would be great for a lot of applications but the Bluetooth omission is definitely borderline kinky.

It might help if a) Every piece wasn't introduced with the breathless "hey look what I made with AI". It should stand up whether you did or didn't and it just comes across as being inauthentic. Which, of course, it is. b) It wasn't being pushed by the same NFT/Crypto/Whatever this week's fad is shills. c) It evolves beyond more or less just remixing existing content. People aren't moved by it because they get the feeling they've seen it before. Which, of course, they have. I remember in my 30s going back to a hip club that I frequented when I was in my teens and very early 20s and feeling completely out of place and absolutely not getting it. Its a bit like that for the internet with the internet now.

I'm curious to know if anyone has any experience with their Nikon to GFX AF adapter as it looks pretty decent from what I've seen and could make the GFX100 more appealing to me as a home for my Nikon collection if I don't buy a Z8 as my forever camera.

Instead of an actual new FF sensor (which would go against the grain for them of straddling both sides of it), I'm wondering whether they might simply do what Panasonic did with the LX100 when they used an MFT sensor but only used a portion of it. So in this case FujiFilm could use their existing 50mp GFX sensor (or the 100mp if they fancied it) to make a virtual FF camera without having to go down the route of having a new sensor and processing. With the fixed lens there would be less restrictions size wise in not having to accommodate that big lens mount so they could make significant reductions in size and have a far more compact version of their GFX-50R. If they've no intention of getting into FF as a system then a pseudo FF camera like that would be a fast turnaround product that if it wasn't priced insanely would do pretty well.

To paraphrase Tony Wilson of Factory Records, Sigma protected themselves from ever having to have the dilemma of trading the camera's low light capability for image quality by having no low light capability whatsoever. On the upside, there's absolutely no need to carry ND filters around 😉

Maybe when they’ve got their act together sufficiently to produce enough of the current focal length version to meet demand they will think about it! Having said that, their approach with producing dedicated wide and tele adapters for them is an OK halfway house. I had the wide for my original X100 and it performed well, although the 0.79x and 1.4x respectively of the adapters is a bit conservative but I guess those were the optimum to not degrade performance too much. At the time that I bought my DP2m, I had a Nikon D800 and a Hasselblad H3DII-39 and couldn’t imagine that it would live with them but it actually did. I bought it on impulse really as I was at a dealer picking up a lens for my actual job and they had just started a price slash offer on them to clear stock and I thought I’d take a chance as I’d looked at it before but at £900 it seemed way overpriced. Turns out it wasn’t even at that price and I even ended up using it for work as well for certain roles. I then kept my eye out for the DP1m and DP3m at used prices (which plummeted because the new price had been cut) and picked them both up as well. It’s interesting that they completely write the JPEG’s off in that video as for work because of the live editorial fast turnaround time of it I used JPEG quite a lot! The ultimate quality is only to be found when using the Sigma software though and, as I said, that really does bring you back to the slower paced days of developing images. Funny thing about prices is that because I paid smaller prices for mine, looking at the current used markets, they are the only cameras that I have ever owned where I could make a profit ! Which I suppose takes us back to the “value” in cameras as even if I had paid full retail for them then they would still be about 65-70% of the original cost. My D800 and H3DII-39 on the other hand…. Yeah, let’s not go there. By the by, it’s interesting to see the iteration of Chris Nichols in that video compared to the current one.