Origami101

It's so self sabotaging, because by doing this to your customers pretty much ensures that they're never going to buy your products again. 
I love my GH5. I love the XLR adapter. It is such a compact set up. I use it for everything from filming pro wrestling to interviews. I don't have to build up a rig unless I want to... just throw a lens on, connect the XLR adapter and you can get excellent results. No fuss. 
I WANT to stay. Give me a reason to! Can't lead the pack with specs now that full frame has caught up? Fine! Innovate in other ways! What's stopping you from putting a GH5 into a GX85 body? I'd buy two, along with a GH6! Nothing would delight me more than even smaller, lighter cameras! I'd carry one with me pretty much at all times! 
And I don't believe this notion that you can't sell a kick ass GH6 for less than a S5 because the truth is there's a segment of the full frame market that won't consider a M43 camera no matter what the specs are. Go for broke, fuck it! Or just give people what they want: I mean just adding phase detect AF alone to decent bumps in specs would sell a bunch of new M43 cameras! 

I’ve said this before multiple times and will repeat it again and that is, like several others above, I wish camera companies would be a bit more up front about what is coming and when.
When they don’t, I imagine someone in a black & white boardroom meeting somewhere is whispering in the bosses ear, “let’s not tell them anything and build the mystery for them”.
We are not children that need to wait until Christmas morning to see what’s under the tree.
As a hybrid user (approx 90% of my work these days is hybrid, building steadily over the last 15 years from my roots as a pure photographer) and 4/3 never cut it for me in that regard.
Fuji APSC had been my sweet spot for the last 10 before going FF with L Mount at the end of last year.
I would seriously consider a GH6, or any 4/3 camera providing it ticks the boxes I need.
The Olympus OMD EM1iii for video does in every regard except to 4K 60p.
The current GH5 does in every regard except no PDAF.
Both just shy of my needs.
Other than the new FP-L, no L Mount camera has phase, yet I recently bought into it. Why?
Because there is so much other good stuff with it but I wish wish wish it had PDAF.
Summary: If Panny do not release a GH6, 4/3 doesn’t die. It simply continues to die. It’s been doing that for some while now, but then so have total sales of all cameras regardless of sensor size.
if they don’t bring out an absolute banger of a GH6, they need phase on every new L Mount camera going forward or Panasonic especially amongst the alliance, will also die.
Leica should be fine for other reasons.
Sigma also because they are 99% lenses.
But Pannyboy needs more than the Pony of Hope for even medium term survival.
A final note. My S1H is the best camera I have ever owned bar none. It’s fkn fantastic in every regard except tracking AF and if it can give me 3 years of service beyond 2021, it will be enough for me, but I fear for even their medium term stay in the camera business.
I also have the S5 but it’s not even slightly close how much better the S1H is in almost every regard.
However, if Panny bring out a PDAF GH6 by Spring 2022, I would buy one for my pure video needs I am pretty sure.

Let me point out a few things that could have been updated without needing a new sensor (and which, other than I think Canon for HEIF, none of the other manufacturers support, so this is hardly exclusive to Panasonic):
HEIF as an option or in lieu of JPEG. That’s easy to add since HEIF is just a subset of H.265. DCI P3 or ProPhoto RGB image space for HEIF or JPEG. Apple’s ProRAW, a demosaiced DNG with tags for tone mapping, as a raw format. One thing specific to Panasonic I’d like to have seen — other than a new sensor, phase detect autofocus, and the viewfinder and monitor from the S1 — is Bluetooth 5. They’re still using Bluetooth 4.2 from 2014.

Panasonic’s logic is baffling. They seem to think by neglecting m4/3 users they’ll incentivize them to switch to L-Mount. Instead, they’ll drive them to Sony, Canon, Fuji, or Olympus. At this point I wonder if their camera business is viable at all. L-Mount certainly hasn’t been a roaring success, which was completely predictable considering they foolishly chose to take on Sony, Canon, and Nikon where they’re strongest, 135 format. M4/3, at least, was a defensible niche.

If they’ve got a GH6 coming, they’ve got to be crystal clear about that. It’s coming next year, will have a brand new sensor, and will be priced substantially above the GH5 mk2. Otherwise people will draw the obvious conclusion: Panasonic’s pretty much done with m4/3 and this warmed over offering exists solely to milk a few more dollars out of their existing customers.
The thing I don’t get is the strategy here. Two short years ago m4/3 users were 100% of Panasonic’s customer base; now, they’ve effectively abandoned them. Most people looking for a 135 system will choose a less fickle partner to invest their money in. 

I'll go further and say there should be a future for M4/3 but might not since Panasonic's backed themselves into a strategic corner.
To start with, why should M4/3 hang around? Well, aside from the obvious benefits that it generally yields smaller and lighter camera kits —especially for telephoto—has sufficient image quality for both stills and video and is broadly supported, there’s two other distinct advantages. The first is, for any given sensor generation, a M4/3 sensor will read data off faster. This is where I think the traditional camera makers have gotten lost. Did the stunning jumps in iPhone image quality come from bigger sensors? They’ve gotten marginally larger, but no. The jumps have come from throwing massive amounts of computational power at the data, which means reading it as fast as you can. Blown highlights? Merge multiple exposures. Terrible low-light performance? Same! But with different algorithms. Excessive depth of field? Depth map! A smaller, but still sufficient, sensor like M4/3 fits the computational imaging paradigm better. And as a bonus, they’ll also hold an edge in IBIS, heat generation, and battery drain due to the smaller size and mass.
The second is smaller sensors—or more accurately, smaller image circles—have distinct theoretical advantages for lens design. I don’t pretend to understand the theory, though I do know the complexity of making lens elements increases with the cube of its diameter, so all things equal you should get better, smaller, or cheaper lenses for M4/3 for any given field of view versus larger formats.
Which leads to the tragedy of Panasonic going the L mount route (in the dumb business decision sense, not Romeo and Juliette). I get the rationale of wanting to consolidate their cinema and Lumix lines on one mount, and the logic m4/3 was too small for the former. The problem was they picked a sensor size, 135 format, putting them in direct competition with Sony and Canon, who offered, or were inevitably going to offer, soup to nuts mirrorless solutions, picked a mount designed for APS-C, and stranded their entire current user base. Heck of a job, guys.
Worse, since L mount is now their halo product, they’ll be loathe to undercut it by offering better features on m4/3, even if they’re technically feasible. So a GH6 that substantially outperforms the S1 or S1H? Probably not going to happen, even if S series sales continually underperform. But I would love to be proved wrong.

I'll go further and say there should be a future for M4/3 but might not since Panasonic's backed themselves into a strategic corner.
To start with, why should M4/3 hang around? Well, aside from the obvious benefits that it generally yields smaller and lighter camera kits —especially for telephoto—has sufficient image quality for both stills and video and is broadly supported, there’s two other distinct advantages. The first is, for any given sensor generation, a M4/3 sensor will read data off faster. This is where I think the traditional camera makers have gotten lost. Did the stunning jumps in iPhone image quality come from bigger sensors? They’ve gotten marginally larger, but no. The jumps have come from throwing massive amounts of computational power at the data, which means reading it as fast as you can. Blown highlights? Merge multiple exposures. Terrible low-light performance? Same! But with different algorithms. Excessive depth of field? Depth map! A smaller, but still sufficient, sensor like M4/3 fits the computational imaging paradigm better. And as a bonus, they’ll also hold an edge in IBIS, heat generation, and battery drain due to the smaller size and mass.
The second is smaller sensors—or more accurately, smaller image circles—have distinct theoretical advantages for lens design. I don’t pretend to understand the theory, though I do know the complexity of making lens elements increases with the cube of its diameter, so all things equal you should get better, smaller, or cheaper lenses for M4/3 for any given field of view versus larger formats.
Which leads to the tragedy of Panasonic going the L mount route (in the dumb business decision sense, not Romeo and Juliette). I get the rationale of wanting to consolidate their cinema and Lumix lines on one mount, and the logic m4/3 was too small for the former. The problem was they picked a sensor size, 135 format, putting them in direct competition with Sony and Canon, who offered, or were inevitably going to offer, soup to nuts mirrorless solutions, picked a mount designed for APS-C, and stranded their entire current user base. Heck of a job, guys.
Worse, since L mount is now their halo product, they’ll be loathe to undercut it by offering better features on m4/3, even if they’re technically feasible. So a GH6 that substantially outperforms the S1 or S1H? Probably not going to happen, even if S series sales continually underperform. But I would love to be proved wrong.

I'll go further and say there should be a future for M4/3 but might not since Panasonic's backed themselves into a strategic corner.
To start with, why should M4/3 hang around? Well, aside from the obvious benefits that it generally yields smaller and lighter camera kits —especially for telephoto—has sufficient image quality for both stills and video and is broadly supported, there’s two other distinct advantages. The first is, for any given sensor generation, a M4/3 sensor will read data off faster. This is where I think the traditional camera makers have gotten lost. Did the stunning jumps in iPhone image quality come from bigger sensors? They’ve gotten marginally larger, but no. The jumps have come from throwing massive amounts of computational power at the data, which means reading it as fast as you can. Blown highlights? Merge multiple exposures. Terrible low-light performance? Same! But with different algorithms. Excessive depth of field? Depth map! A smaller, but still sufficient, sensor like M4/3 fits the computational imaging paradigm better. And as a bonus, they’ll also hold an edge in IBIS, heat generation, and battery drain due to the smaller size and mass.
The second is smaller sensors—or more accurately, smaller image circles—have distinct theoretical advantages for lens design. I don’t pretend to understand the theory, though I do know the complexity of making lens elements increases with the cube of its diameter, so all things equal you should get better, smaller, or cheaper lenses for M4/3 for any given field of view versus larger formats.
Which leads to the tragedy of Panasonic going the L mount route (in the dumb business decision sense, not Romeo and Juliette). I get the rationale of wanting to consolidate their cinema and Lumix lines on one mount, and the logic m4/3 was too small for the former. The problem was they picked a sensor size, 135 format, putting them in direct competition with Sony and Canon, who offered, or were inevitably going to offer, soup to nuts mirrorless solutions, picked a mount designed for APS-C, and stranded their entire current user base. Heck of a job, guys.
Worse, since L mount is now their halo product, they’ll be loathe to undercut it by offering better features on m4/3, even if they’re technically feasible. So a GH6 that substantially outperforms the S1 or S1H? Probably not going to happen, even if S series sales continually underperform. But I would love to be proved wrong.

I'll go further and say there should be a future for M4/3 but might not since Panasonic's backed themselves into a strategic corner.
To start with, why should M4/3 hang around? Well, aside from the obvious benefits that it generally yields smaller and lighter camera kits —especially for telephoto—has sufficient image quality for both stills and video and is broadly supported, there’s two other distinct advantages. The first is, for any given sensor generation, a M4/3 sensor will read data off faster. This is where I think the traditional camera makers have gotten lost. Did the stunning jumps in iPhone image quality come from bigger sensors? They’ve gotten marginally larger, but no. The jumps have come from throwing massive amounts of computational power at the data, which means reading it as fast as you can. Blown highlights? Merge multiple exposures. Terrible low-light performance? Same! But with different algorithms. Excessive depth of field? Depth map! A smaller, but still sufficient, sensor like M4/3 fits the computational imaging paradigm better. And as a bonus, they’ll also hold an edge in IBIS, heat generation, and battery drain due to the smaller size and mass.
The second is smaller sensors—or more accurately, smaller image circles—have distinct theoretical advantages for lens design. I don’t pretend to understand the theory, though I do know the complexity of making lens elements increases with the cube of its diameter, so all things equal you should get better, smaller, or cheaper lenses for M4/3 for any given field of view versus larger formats.
Which leads to the tragedy of Panasonic going the L mount route (in the dumb business decision sense, not Romeo and Juliette). I get the rationale of wanting to consolidate their cinema and Lumix lines on one mount, and the logic m4/3 was too small for the former. The problem was they picked a sensor size, 135 format, putting them in direct competition with Sony and Canon, who offered, or were inevitably going to offer, soup to nuts mirrorless solutions, picked a mount designed for APS-C, and stranded their entire current user base. Heck of a job, guys.
Worse, since L mount is now their halo product, they’ll be loathe to undercut it by offering better features on m4/3, even if they’re technically feasible. So a GH6 that substantially outperforms the S1 or S1H? Probably not going to happen, even if S series sales continually underperform. But I would love to be proved wrong.

I'll go further and say there should be a future for M4/3 but might not since Panasonic's backed themselves into a strategic corner.
To start with, why should M4/3 hang around? Well, aside from the obvious benefits that it generally yields smaller and lighter camera kits —especially for telephoto—has sufficient image quality for both stills and video and is broadly supported, there’s two other distinct advantages. The first is, for any given sensor generation, a M4/3 sensor will read data off faster. This is where I think the traditional camera makers have gotten lost. Did the stunning jumps in iPhone image quality come from bigger sensors? They’ve gotten marginally larger, but no. The jumps have come from throwing massive amounts of computational power at the data, which means reading it as fast as you can. Blown highlights? Merge multiple exposures. Terrible low-light performance? Same! But with different algorithms. Excessive depth of field? Depth map! A smaller, but still sufficient, sensor like M4/3 fits the computational imaging paradigm better. And as a bonus, they’ll also hold an edge in IBIS, heat generation, and battery drain due to the smaller size and mass.
The second is smaller sensors—or more accurately, smaller image circles—have distinct theoretical advantages for lens design. I don’t pretend to understand the theory, though I do know the complexity of making lens elements increases with the cube of its diameter, so all things equal you should get better, smaller, or cheaper lenses for M4/3 for any given field of view versus larger formats.
Which leads to the tragedy of Panasonic going the L mount route (in the dumb business decision sense, not Romeo and Juliette). I get the rationale of wanting to consolidate their cinema and Lumix lines on one mount, and the logic m4/3 was too small for the former. The problem was they picked a sensor size, 135 format, putting them in direct competition with Sony and Canon, who offered, or were inevitably going to offer, soup to nuts mirrorless solutions, picked a mount designed for APS-C, and stranded their entire current user base. Heck of a job, guys.
Worse, since L mount is now their halo product, they’ll be loathe to undercut it by offering better features on m4/3, even if they’re technically feasible. So a GH6 that substantially outperforms the S1 or S1H? Probably not going to happen, even if S series sales continually underperform. But I would love to be proved wrong.

One thing to note, we're not seeing the steady trickle of rumours from Panasonic you'd expect if the GH6 were imminent. All the 4/3 rumors post that kicked this thread back to life shared was that, yes, Sony's listed a new m4/3 sensor in their catalog. It's pure guesswork that's heading to a GH6. Where're the hints and teases you'd expect from the Panasonic side ('Breaking! the GH6 features [shiny new spec]!'? 
 

This is just a Wishlist, not even speculation what a potential GH6 might have. But if I were Panasonic -- which I'm not! -- I'd go bold: micro 4/3s is always going to have a perceived, though not necessarily actual, image quality deficit versus 135 and APS-C formats. So play up your strengths and use the cost savings from the cheaper sensor to bundle in better tech.
For the body, pick up the refinements from the S series like that gorgeous 5.7m dot viewfinder, highres touchscreen, and 8 way joystick. Also sweat the details, for example, calibrating both the EVF and touchscreen from the factory.
Emphasize connectivity. I'd like to see the latest Wifi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 or 5.2. Then add 2 thunderbolt 4 connectors. 
Aggressively ditch the legacy stuff. Cut the card slots and instead offer 128 or 512GBs of internal storage. Make transferring data off via thunderbolt or wifi simple, fast and dependable. 
Push the boundaries on tech. How about H.266 as an option? For stills, 10 bit HEIF and Display P3. And please, toss the proprietary raw and go with DNG. Adopt the latest 1.6 spec and use that semantic and tone mapping Apple's done on the iPhone 12 Pro (ProRAW is just a DNG file). 
For autofocus, I doubt Panasonic will go with phase detect. But maybe this'll be the update that makes DFD great. Drive that at 240 hertz with improved algorithms and processing power, especially for subject recognition, and it could be pretty good. While you're at it, profile the Olympus lenses (I suspect they may have done this but don't advertise the fact. But if that's the case, make it official. You want m4/3s to be as attractive a platform as possible). 

Panasonic’s L mount push still seems quixotic to me. Canon, Nikon, and Sony users won’t move as the benefits aren’t sufficient to justify repurchasing their lens stable, and the AF’s second rate. And there’s no cross-comparability with m4/3, so what’s the incentive there?
Strategically, I’d say going all in on m4/3 makes more sense. The smaller sensor has significant advantages, so long as they can capitalize on them: better IBIS, faster readout, deeper DOF, more compact body & lens packages, and, hey, less heat. Leave 135 format to the other three. 

However nice the cameras may be, I have no idea how Panasonic plans to make a success of this system. The most likely target market is high-end Nikon and Canon shooters, but they’re used to their respective brands, have a stable of lenses, and want autofocus that works. Micro 4/3 shooters moving up? Maybe a few, but there’s no interoperability between systems. They could just as easily move to R or Z mount, or even Fuji. That leaves video shooters, but are there enough to make this viable? 

The iPhones actually take the first image before you press the shutter (i.e. they’re constantly buffering). Android phones might do the same, I don’t know. 

The iPhones actually take the first image before you press the shutter (i.e. they’re constantly buffering). Android phones might do the same, I don’t know. 

The iPhones actually take the first image before you press the shutter (i.e. they’re constantly buffering). Android phones might do the same, I don’t know.