kye

I missed your point about it being in the S9 chassis, but that makes total sense and gives a lot of hope for a GX10, as if they can fit a FF IBIS sensor assembly in there they should be able to fit a MFT IBIS sensor assembly in there too. If they announced one of those I'd be very tempted to pre-order one. I'm super happy with the images from my GH7 but the size is cumbersome for a lot of things, and my GX85 still softly calls to me because of the form-factor. Once you add a large lens to it the difference becomes less significant of course, but there are lots of small lenses. This is the GX85 vs the GH7 (they haven't put the L10 in yet) but it shows my general point: Looking at the size this way really does show the genius of the LX100 and L10. This is the LX100 vs the GX85, but the GX85 has the 12-35mm F2.8 lens, which not only is MUCH larger than the LX100 (open and closed), but the lens is 1.5 stops SLOWER at the wide end than the one in the LX100 and L10!! In order to get an MFT camera to match / surpass the LX100 / L10 lens, you need to go to the 10-25mm F1.7 lens, which isn't a fair test as it's wider and constant F1.7, but the size difference is.... stunning. The more I think about it, the more I realise the F1.7-2.8 lens and GH7 sensor combo really an 80% combo, where with its speed and aperture and the GH7s ISO performance, for general travel / family / hobby / creator / vlogging / etc stuff you'll only really miss the odd situation here or there where you'd wish for something more. This is absolutely in contrast to the other little cameras I've looked at (the Sony ZV-1 comes to mind) where as soon as you go inside or after the sun sets the image turns to mush with the poor ISO performance, plus the DR of the GH7 sensor will seriously embarrass lots of the alternative options too. This is because most of them are just old, but that seems to be the state of the market for these smallest options. I'm not really sure what the current alternatives are for the L10, but happy to hear if someone wants to make a list...

Size is a funny thing as there are two different comparisons to be made - one is with it switched off (and lens retracted) and the other with it on and lens extended. I've noticed that people often only care about one of these and don't give a hoot about the other. The EDC crowd only care if it's pocketable (while off and lens retracted) so they can take it everywhere and others (like me) only really care about it when it's being used. From the perspective of what it's like when it's on and extended, especially if you use the sci-fi looking triangle door lens cap thing which will attract all kinds of "WTF is that thing?" attention: It never ceases to amaze me how different we all are from each other, even when literally talking about the same piece of equipment!

Perhaps the biggest mistake was inviting a bunch of influencers with tiny hands to come to Japan and make it look enormous by comparison. They could have just had someone the size of Shaq in the lobby holding one and posing and every video would have started with a very different tone! Sounds pretty normal to me, but my household has a rather eclectic purchase history, so I might be an outlier!

The battle of Resolution vs Common Sense was over long ago and us consumers were the losers.

Well, that intern got Panasonic 20 hours of clear air, but the intern from Canon that chose when to announce the R6V only managed to get about an hour before Sony released the A7R VI, so I guess everything is relative! Still, they're all for different audiences and at different price points etc. A $1500 P&S vs a $2500 FF camera vs a $4500 67MP beast. I doubt many people went "oh no, I preordered the L10 but the Sony has higher resolution - pre-order cancelled!"

@mercer Canon just released the R6V, which is somewhere between the R6III and C50. Another option to consider...

Yeah, some pretty nice looking images from that lens. Realistically, on a consumer camera without RAW or Prores, the codecs are potentially going to be the limiting factor more often than the lens. I'm easy to please though, as my aesthetic leans towards the analog and emotive rather than the person building a personal database of all image sharpening techniques ever created.

I'm optimistic about it, but there are no guarantees. Also, if it has an MFT mount it might be more expensive rather than cheaper, you never know.

I searched for "LX100" instead of "Landscape" and it seemed to work, with most shots meeting the criteria...

Well, they just launched the Canon R6V, so I hope Panasonic enjoyed their 20 hours of PR!

Looks decent. Finally a small camera that isn't arbitrarily locked to 100Mbps (or 200Mbps if you're lucky) IPB codecs. I always wondered if the small form-factor would influence how much processing they could fit into it, or even IF the size influenced the processing at all.

Like. Subscribe. True. I was referring to a fictional interchangeable lens version in the future, but for this one it seems like they've compensated for this in their menus as the focal lengths seem to all be in FF equivalents: I very much doubt anyone shooting with a zoom will be terribly fastidious about shooting with exactly 35mm (and not 40mm) but I could be wrong, and the ability to set that zoom switch to preset focal lengths will certainly encourage people to stick to exact settings. Absolutely. Although TBH unless you're shooting professionally (which this isn't the camera for) or doing something really specific (like shooting green-screens) then a downsampled and lesser codec is still in the realm of being passable for most purposes. Especially with software like Resolve bringing all kinds of processing within reach. I must admit that I find judging image quality from other peoples images to be almost impossible as you're likely just seeing average images of the most incredible scenes. I remember back in the early days of digital when almost all photos were completely rubbish but there was always one or two photos you shot that looked magical because the light was just right and the scene happened to make a great composition or the scene was rubbish and the colour profile was also rubbish but they happened to collide in a way that is creatively interesting. Unfortunately for me, that means when judging lenses I either have to replicate that focal length / aperture combination on my existing equipment or just buy the damned thing to understand what it's like to actually use!

Cool camera. I literally did an ISO test on my GX85 less than an hour ago and was calculating what ISO/lens combos I could get away with for shooting street at night. I love my GH7 but the size of the GX85 keeps quietly calling to me. I see it as a fun little camera for photography with some cool video capabilities. I also see it as an incredible sign we're likely to get a new small interchangeable-lens MFT camera, although maybe the form-factor would be a bit small for including IBIS, so we'll have to see if the size gets a bump. I also see if as a fantastic sign that I missed the announcement completely as the only video in my feed about it was from Micro Four Nerds, so that's an encouraging sign about the amount of professional camera YouTubers I subscribe to! I'd go even further than @BTM_Pix about the crop-factor and say it's potentially even better than a 'normal' crop factor. By the time you're playing MFT you're already doing lens math all the time, and my experiences with the GH5/7 and GX85 and OG BM cameras was that it encouraged curiosity in different lenses, different focal lengths, different looks (from different FOVs), and different creative directions from the different looks. For me the (imposed) variety was a source of creativity rather than a limitation. I've seen videos recently talking about new 40mm lenses and the people struggled to understand the lens, and also seemed to struggle with the entire concept of how small changes in FOV can have large changes in how you use them, whereas this is something I'm very familiar with and seems to be an advantage over people who only ever use "proper" cameras. The other thing that might be relevant is that the GH7 actually has some small crop-factors too. Obviously shooting 5.7K doesn't crop, but C4K, UHD, and 1080p have subtle variations in their crop factors, so maybe that 2.2x is coming from the sensor? Still, even if no future MFT camera materialises, this might end up with a spot in my lineup anyway. The GH7 sensor has incredibly improved low-light (compared to any camera of a similar size) so the F1.7-2.8 lens should be quite serviceable in low-light and would have a shallow enough DOF for some nice separation in many situations too. I'm keen to see some numbers about how large it is.

Yeah, unfortunately it didn't have captions so I couldn't use auto-translate, but I noticed some waveforms and the tests seemed controlled etc so pretty good effort. His enthusiasm was..... pretty darn high too!

I'd be very curious about what this one is (from his thumbnail): Unfortunately it's not in the video and some googling couldn't find it, so I suspect it's AI?

OP hasn't logged in for 18 months and the post is over 2 years old, but I'm actually going down this rabbit hole right now. I bought the Neewer one below but don't recommend it because it clamps onto the touchscreen of the phone (and if you watch the reflections you can see the screen bend around the clamp!), plus is seriously bulky. The idea you need a large one isn't necessarily true - I have a range of ND filters and I found that if I hold a 46mm one up to my iPhone 17 in just the right spot it covers all the cameras with no vignetting. Having said that, as some (or all?) phones don't have apertures, you'll need enough ND to shoot wide open. I tested my iPhone 17 Pro a few days ago and discovered it needed more than 5 stops of ND in direct sun conditions, and from about 2-3 stops onwards became unusable with IR pollution, so mine is going to need my 4-stop ND, my 1-5 stop vND, and an IR cut filter. I've just ordered the Tiffen MagSafe one (that only claims to work for the iPhone 16, not my 17) and plan to attempt to modify it to work with my phone case and see if I can get it to work, and if the 58mm filter size covers all the lenses without vignetting (especially if it doesn't align properly).

Yeah, I guess you could just start using it and see if it bothers you, and like you say - there are various tools to fix it even if it shows up on a few shots where the ground doesn't obscure it. The C300 having a similar problem helps to give more confidence that your unit wasn't treated especially badly, but also gives less confidence in it happening again, or in the Canon design department! I've had a number of things repair themselves over the years. The power mirrors in an old car I bought just started working out of the blue, and on the same car I bought it from a different state and was taking it to be inspected so it could be registered and I realised I'd forgotten to fix the horn, which didn't work. The guy was running through a checklist and said "horn" and I remembered I never fixed it. I decided to press it, pretend to be surprised, then promise to fix it later, hoping they'd be lenient.. so I pressed it and it worked - scared the crap out of me! I've had electronics do similar things too. I was visiting a friend in the Windows 98 plug-n-play days and he had a new card in his computer that wouldn't work in Windows so we were chatting and just for amusement I tried over and over to install it, using the same process (open device manager, delete the entries with errors, restart, repeat) and I had gotten to the point where I remembered each mouse click in the process and then out of the blue it just installed correctly and worked fine. When something doesn't work now I just treat it as the first offer in a negotiation and switch it off and let it chill for a while and come back to me when it's ready to raise it's offer 😄

Ah, I didn't realise it was behind a layer of glass... I'm assuming the ND moves in and out of position, so maybe it got it on there when it was out of position? I'm assuming that whole volume isn't completely sealed. It still begs the question of how the dust got into there, and how much dust it's been exposed to in its life... the probability the camera has only ever gotten one bit of dust in it, and that dust happened to get to that spot is pretty slim by my estimation! Can you call CPS to get an estimate for how much it would cost? Maybe that would help inform if it's a return or if you'll keep it and send it off for the service.

Thanks! Partly I feel like I've moved past shooting the obvious stuff and started focusing on what I'm looking for, but also there's a bias in what frames I choose to post online too as wider more normal shots often look really cool when moving but as soon as you look at just one frame as a still image all the movement is gone and the depth collapses and the frame just looks like a chaotic mess. This happens even if you've been looking at it in motion and so your brain already has a 3D mental model of what it's looking at - you hit stop and it just collapses. This shot is a moderate example and looks like a very busy but confusing still image (taken right next to the Shibuya train station): When watching the video clip the train stands out most because it's moving quickly, the pedestrians on the bottom right are moving a lot and the ones in the distance and to the left are moving less but still moving, and the side of the rail bridge and buildings in the rear are completely still. Seeing these things your brain instantly builds a sense of depth, which combined with the rear of the signs then means you recognise the cars as being several lanes of traffic despite it being almost completely stationary, and so in only a fraction of a second the frame becomes about six clearly-defined areas, rather than the almost indiscernible chaos that the still frame is. The process of pulling nice looking frame grabs from my footage is a fascinating exercise in how different still images are from moving images. They really are a completely different thing, and I shoot for motion and chaos and layers, so in a way I'm posting my least interesting shots. I agree. I follow someone on YT shooting with the same Takumar 50mm F1.4 on FF and they shot a video of using it wide open in daylight and it just didn't look right. There are strong anatomical reasons for this as in lower light our pupils dilate giving our eyes a shallower DOF, we can often get flares etc from strong light sources (which will be on our periphery because we're probably not looking at them directly), and in very low light we even start relying on the rods in our eyes (which are far less detailed) instead of the cones which we usually use. I have a trip later on in the year where I will probably only be shooting during the day and won't have many/any chances to go off shooting at night, so I'm forcing myself to get excited about daytime images again, and in thinking about equipment I'm not sure that shooting with larger apertures / fast lenses makes visual sense so I might not even take any, instead just using my usual 14-140mm zoom lens.

Nice. Good idea about giving it a solid clean out with rocket blower etc. Mine tends to leak air quite a bit from the one-way valve, but if you put a thumb over it then it turbo boosts the air to give a much more solid blast. It'd be good to know if there's dust all through it, and if you end up dislodging a bunch, at least you can include that in any cleaning service you arrange. I have also found that fan brushes for painting are really nice for dislodging the dust that is just attached enough to not move from air alone, but they tend to be gentle enough that they're not picking up dust and then pressing it onto the surface as you move it around. I don't know how far I'd go if something was on my sensor - I'm mostly blowing dust off my lenses or off the outside of the gear after a trip. Speaking of brushes, the makeup section in most shops will often have very soft brushes with a short handle that fit really well into the case/container you're keeping your lenses. In terms of how it got there, I've noticed a minority of people seem to be perfectly happy taking their time and doing other things while the camera has no lens or body-cap attached. Personally when I'm changing lenses I do it in a sheltered area, taking the rear lens cap off the next lens, then swapping the lenses as quickly as possible (while still being calm and controlled) and then putting the cap onto the previous lens. If I'm at home and feeling fastidious I blow the rear element of the next lens (and rear lens cap) before fitting it, then blow the rear of the previous one before putting the rear cap on, in an effort to not let dust hitchhike its way into the camera.

I don't want to side-track the thread by diving into IBIS but I find that mostly the specs of "stops of stabilisation" are meaningless, as the limiting factor is what it does when you reach the limits of the mechanism, not what stabilisation can do if you don't shake it that much. A much more meaningful factor in the performance of these mechanisms is the way it responds to movement, like the difference between the mode that stabilises by smoothing the shake and the one that emulates a tripod by eliminating it as much as possible. I also found the behaviour of the OG BMPCC and BMMCC to be excellent, being about 80% towards eliminating the movement but not quite being clinical about it, a very nice feeling response. Maybe I'm just using it in far more aggressive ways and therefore constantly pushing it to its limits. I really like the Dual IS where it combines the lens OIS with the IBIS too. I shoot everything up to 280mm equivalent handheld, and frequently shoot while tired, while hungry, while cold, while holding the camera in odd positions or at the very edge of my reach, etc, so this probably isn't something most people really test that much. I often look at shots I have taken and wonder why I didn't hold it a bit more still, or didn't pan a bit to the right, and then I remember I was shooting blind holding the camera out the window of a moving vehicle and framing in my head while paying attention to the posts flying past, or while walking down stairs into a cave while holding the camera in one hand and the handrail in the other trying not to hit my head. The Crop Zoom function is nice, if a bit limiting (it won't go past 1:1 so if you're shooting 4K you can't get much crop, whereas the GH5 and GX85 2x and 4x crop didn't care and gave you the extra reach regardless, with the ETC 1:1 mode giving you a 1:1 if you wanted it).

Back from a visit to Japan. We spent most of the time in a small town but went to Tokyo for a weekend, so I shot a lot in Tokyo and used the rest of the time to test a range of lenses I took just for that purpose. I tested the 12-35mm F2.8 for Night Cinema and it worked great and I loved the images, but as it got darker I kept cranking up the ISO and in the end it just didn't have the levels for the truly dark backstreets. I also tested the tiny 35mm F1.6 c-mount CCTV lens I got off ebay some time ago. It produced some really nice images in the right scenarios, but the plane of focus was so incredibly distorted that any scene with stuff off-centre in the frame would look really strange. It had more level than the 12-35mm but still fell short of my better options. My themes for the place emerged very quickly.... vending machines, bicycles, and lanterns. Anyone who has been to Japan will be surprised by this exactly zero percent. At this point we went to Tokyo and I treated it like a Night Cinema interval event, basically shooting as much as I could. I shot a whole sequence from the hotel window as the sun set using the Takumar 50mm F1.4 and SB, my go-to setup. I did a number of walks around the local area with the same setup. Each time I went out I liked using the setup more, and each time I reviewed the files I liked the images I got from it more as well. After China I was feeling like it was a bit too vintage / low-fi but I've really warmed to it since. I found myself a bit at odds with Japanese culture, especially in regards to the fervent dislike of badly-behaved foreigners and the locals dislike for being filmed in public (despite the fact no-one will tell you they don't like it), so I mostly filmed the place and not the people, or at least I didn't tend to film individual people, instead including them small in the frame, or en-mass, or out of focus. I think that lent itself to the cultural experience as well. The city, and to many extents the culture, dwarfs the individual, placing the focus on the group. As a tourist I can only glimpse the culture from afar, so taking the perspective of the outsider in the compositions is very much representative of the experience. My "big" outing was a walk from Shibuya to Harajuku on our last night there. As these places are known for youth and fashion and culture (and the counter-culture that fashion normally draws from) I concentrated on the grittier side of these areas. I also leaned into the layers and the overall chaos of the place, taking advantage of the Takumars ability to focus on a small slice of the chaos, both through the 70mm FOV and also the shallow DOF. Back in the small town I did more "test" walks with the TTartisans 50mm F1.2 (100mm F2.4 equivalent), the Helios 44M + SB combo (82mm F2.8 equivalent) and Takumar + SB combo for comparison (71mm F2.0). As the small town was much less dense I found the extra reach of the TTartisans to be useful, and the DOF was shallow enough to be useful at distance, and the image was much cleaner across the frame compared to the Tak. The Helios 44M was a different beast. I felt like I was fighting with it basically the whole time and came back from the shoot thinking it was a bust and I'd wasted an outing. The FOV often seemed wrong, it lacked the aperture to get enough light to the sensor and I was pushing the ISO a lot, the DOF was also deeper and so I found myself having to get closer to objects to get the separation I wanted, which then meant I was too close and the parallax motion from my hand-held movement was really distracting. The focus on my copy is very stiff and it is a very low gear so to go from distance to closer focus had the ergonomics of opening a jar where something sticky had gotten into the threads. Still, I got back from the shoot and lots of the images looked really nice, which I think is to do with the extra diffusion this has. It was also better behaved on the edges of the frame compared to the Tak too. One thing that isn't obvious from the frame grabs is the ghosting from the strong light-sources in frame, and because I shoot hand-held and have IBIS active, they move in unnatural ways. At first I thought they were coming from my vND but if anything they got worse on both the TTartisans and Helios after I took it off. I think due to this I'll have to lean into the imperfections in the grade and edit and go lo-fi, which is why I've applied a film emulation softening equivalent to 20mm film to the Helios footage. I also shot a lot with the iPhone 17 while there, normally during the day for non-cinema purposes, but that's a different topic for another time.

TBH I never really noticed any improvement in the IBIS between the GH5 and GH7, although I didn't really use them that closely together so maybe I missed it. The IBIS (and Dual IS with compatible lenses) on all the MFT cameras I have is pretty incredible actually, GX85, GH5 and GH7.

When it comes to things like the extra DR, I think about practicalities. Back in the day they had a certain amount of DR, so they filmed what they fit into that DR, modified scenes with too much DR where they could, simply didn't film other scenes with too much DR, or accepted sub-optimal results. They often had far more budget and leeway for lighting etc than you or I have. They also didn't tell some of the stories that you or I might want to tell. You and I are filming things they might or might not have filmed, we are doing so with far less resources than they would have had (*), and are doing so for an audience that is far far far more discerning than audiences used to be. (A note on resources.. Anyone who shot film automatically had a pretty large budget as just the line-items for negative film, development, and printing were absolutely huge compared to the entire project costs for what you and I are doing. As such, for them the cost to add a light here or modify something there was drastically less percentage of their production. I also suspect that back in the day the simple fact that someone was shooting on film gave them a sort-of legitimacy that would have meant they could get away with a more invasive shooting environment (adding lights etc) whereas now that level of legitimacy doesn't really come unless you're getting official permission.) I think of extra DR as being the thing that lets me bridge a gap between the worse conditions I shoot in, the lack of ability to control or modify the scenes I'm shooting, and the far greater expectations of myself and anyone else watching. Another note on DR, this is the curve from 250D: This has easily more stops than the GH5 has, potentially more than the GH7 has, and is likely to respond to high-DR scenes in a more pleasing way as well. Of course, the print stocks had far lower DR, like 2383 which only had 5-6 stops: But they were still capturing the greater range and depending on how fancy they wanted to get in the darkroom (or if they had a DI to play with) they could definitely print the 5-6 stops of DR they wanted from the negative (essentially adjusting exposure in post) or they could extend the DR by printing different areas of the image differently, using graduated filters and all kinds of other tricks. I sort-of feel like comparing film-making now to back in the day is a apples-vs-oranges kind of thing, so comparing the specs directly without acknowledging the situations were vastly different doesn't really make much sense. However, to return to your situation in the present, I look at several factors to assess if equipment is good enough: Does it allow you to shoot what you want to shoot? Does it provide the speed / efficiency / convenience you need to create the work in the budget / schedule limitations you have? Does it provide a pleasant-enough experience while using it? Does it create the quality of results you are looking for? If these things are all true, then why change?

Just a thought about that last statement.. if you're taking a practical approach to considering upgrades then I'd say it's the other way around.... ...you've matured TOO much for the market 😉