New L-Mount Lumix (cinema?) Camera

[MrSMW]

On 5/15/2025 at 2:03 PM, Thpriest said:

I think that all the S line has produced very nice images and colours. I say that as someone who has noticed that the S5ii is not quite at the level of the original S1 and S5 but it’s still great

I'm not really seeing any difference between any of them; S5, S1H, S5ii.

Yes there are some very subtle differences such as that from the S1H is a teeny weeny bit softer due to the OLPF, but otherwise, nothing for me.

There's some chatter about over-sharpening. I don't see it.

There's some chatter about moire. I'm not seeing that either.

Highlight roll off and blah di blah, - what are we shooting here with these things? Are we really comparing the results from our humble mirrorless cameras with Hollywood lighting, productions, lenses and budgets? I'm not, - to be even remotely in the ball park is hilariously ridiculous.

Here's a screen grab from my S9 which is my principal run & gun unit, from last weekends wedding I am currently editing.

A pretty dark hole of a room for bride prep and unless anywhere near that window, then screwed. It's SOOC and not touched it in any way; exposure, WB...nuffink. 6k 30p shot at 1/50th, 4000 iso, 5000 WB, Freewell ND 2-5, exposure otherwise eyeballed on the rear LCD with the wave form I rarely look at.

[eatstoomuchjam]

2 hours ago, MrSMW said:

A pretty dark hole of a room for bride prep and unless anywhere near that window, then screwed. It's SOOC and not touched it in any way; exposure, WB...nuffink. 6k 30p shot at 1/50th, 4000 iso, 5000 WB, Freewell ND 2-5, exposure otherwise eyeballed on the rear LCD with the wave form I rarely look at.

Not cinematic enough.  I fixed it for you.  Now that's cinematic.

[MrSMW]

1 hour ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

Not cinematic enough.  I fixed it for you.  Now that's cinematic.

I’ll send you all 300 clips and see what you can do. Yeehaw!

[Thpriest]

4 hours ago, MrSMW said:

I'm not really seeing any difference between any of them; S5, S1H, S5ii.

Lovely shot.

I think they are all great, I've had the S1, S5 and S5ii. But I can't deny that the first generation just had something nicer about it, for want of a better word. Saying that, the S5ii has a great image and the handling is much improved.

[Parker]

@MrSMWYeah I agree, I pre-ordered the S1 right as it came out, did the same thing with the S5iiX, have shot them together on pretty much every job since, across a huge variety of use cases, never seen any kind of real, noticeable difference between them, at all. Ditto with the original S5, which I have also had with those other two cams on many dozens if not hundreds of shoots over the past several years.

I think people just always find something to complain about. Especially when it comes to super arbitrary, impossible-to-prove image-quality mumbo jumbo, i.e. "motion cadence," "video look," "micro-contrast" or "3D-Pop," etc. 

[Marcio Kabke Pinheiro]

On 5/16/2025 at 11:51 AM, Al Dolega said:

And for the GH6/G9ii/GH7 sensor too, I believe.

Still a mystery who makes this 25mp m4/3 sensor. Back in the day there are sites that opened the cameras and microscope the sensor to find the manufacturer, but these days are gone.

To add to the mystery: the newest Mavic from DJI uses a m4/3 100mp sensor. Maybe Panasonic uses the same sensor in a Quad-Bayer configuration? (100/4 = 25mp)

[Andrew Reid]

I think it's OnSemi.

They are ARRI's partner on the new ALEXA sensor.

TowerJazz had / have a joint venture with Panasonic, but OnSemi make the more up-to-date sensor tech and there are quite a few parallels between the ALEXA sensor readout tech and latest Panasonic cameras.

In 2022 Panasonic exited the semiconductors business and sold all the assets. The organic sensor project is official dead, but it allowed them to partner with more than just Sony for sensors.

[Al Dolega]

Maybe the Arri/Panasonic relationship is more than just the LogC thing, maybe they're sharing costs/tech at OnSemi.

[alsoandrew]

On 5/15/2025 at 8:44 PM, eatstoomuchjam said:

... and Black Magic seem to be able to source sensors from Fairchild.  And Red from Towerjazz (or at least they did once?).   Even if those are exclusive contracts, there are plenty of others able to make image sensors. 

https://us.metoree.com/categories/image-sensor/

At least in the case of BMD and Red, that also means that they have sensors that are a lot more interesting than others - with Red having a global shutter with similar DR performance (or superior in the case of V-Raptor) to non-global shutters used in most mirrorless cameras.  And in the case of BMD, the RGBW sensor in the UC12K and Pyxis is fantastic and a great differentiator vs Sony's offerings.

The catch is that there's a big upfront cost in development of those or other sensors and Panasonic are unlikely to invest that - instead focusing on extracting money from customers who are locked in to their mount and from technology licensing deals with Leica.

 

 

On 5/15/2025 at 8:08 PM, D Verco said:

Except they made a sensor

 

https://petapixel.com/2024/03/11/panasonics-organic-sensor-may-be-complete-but-likely-wont-be-used/

 

On 5/16/2025 at 11:40 AM, eatstoomuchjam said:

I dunno - the V-Raptor [X] sensor seems to be a marvel of modern engineering - and while it's designed by RED's engineers, the semiconductor manufacturing is done by TowerJazz.

And quite good, if not marvelous, the Komodo and Komodo-X sensors are also made by them and they are fantastic.

Plus the GH7 sensor is, from everything I've heard, really really good.

My guess is that it's largely a cost-based decision.  The off-the-shelf part from Sony has much better economy of scale and it's "good enough" for most things.  It's sort of the basis for the Z Cam business model - integrate high-end (though inexpensive) off-the-shelf components and write good software to glue them together.  The entire E2 series is basically a wedding of Sony sensors with... I think it's Hisense?  Anyway, with another off-the-shelf circuit board.  They shove those things into a box and put a lens mount and teeny tiny screen on it.  The majority of their R&D is in software.

It's not hard to imagine somebody in Panasonic management looking at a price sheet and saying "We could integrate this TowerJazz sensor for $1,200 and get 10% better performance than the Sony sensor which costs $600.  Either way, we're going to sell the camera for $3,800.  Will we get enough extra sales based on 10% better performance to make up for a $600/unit shortfall?"

That's even more the case when you are also supporting budget cameras like the S9 which basically demands a commodity sensor which will come from Sony.  So you already have a team of engineers who are familiar with the ins and outs of Sony's sensors and having them also support (or having a different team to support) TowerJazz is also going to be expensive.

I have no insight into the actual costs of either vendor, but if you're Red and were selling the Komodo for like $6,000 or $7,000 when it was first released, spending an extra few hundred bucks per sensor ain't so bad because you have enormous margin.

BlackMagic are the real outlier here.  They seem genuinely less interested in turning a huge profit per unit with their cameras.  It's not to say the high end where they use Fairchild isn't expensive, but I'm still a little bit boggled by the UC 12K which, at $7,000 is a lot, but less than 2x an R5 Mark II.  Other than the fact that my car's suspension groans when I set the camera on the passenger seat, that is.  Well, that and offloading footage from the media module.  They really need to release a single module reader with USB-C.  Having to offload directly from the camera over 10gE is really silly.  It means I'll have the CF Express module in my bag most of the time, just in case we need to offload on-site.

My orig comment was in response to why Panasonic can't compete in regards to access to image sensors and instead gets access to the latest tech a year/cycle behind Canon, Nikon, and Sony. Their organic sensor never made it out of the lab and even if it did Panasonic themselves have no fab to manufacture it themselves and would have to contract it out to a third party. 

I have a little bit of experience in filing patents, and in a segment as technical and complicated as cameras the IP landscape is like a minefield, there is no way to not encroach on a competitor's patent. So all companies (including Panasonic) will end up having licensing agreements and patent swaps to allow themselves to conduct business, lest they sue each other into oblivion. 

Sony is the largest image sensor fab with 60% market share and is leading the market in technology, Nikon makes the 2nd best lithography equipment, and Canon makes the 3rd best lithography equipment, own their own fab, and are the historical market leader in cameras. The thing is, Sony probably uses some Nikon and Canon lithography equipment to etch their chips, Nikon contracts Sony to manufacture some of their sensors, Canon DPAF probably builds on some phase detect patent that Sony owns. Panasonic in comparison has nothing that comes close to this when they go to the bargaining table. And this is in addition to lacking the amnt of staff in image sensor development that the other companies have possessed for decades (accumulated patents). So arguments on why couldn't they include the latest sensors earlier are moot because it is probably impossible. They have to make do with what they have.

Although this also forces the question on why they tried to compete with Sony/Nikon/Canon with the S1II instead of trying to differentiate themselves with novel features like internal ND or what not like @Andrew Reid said.  But maybe there is some exclusive licensing agreement with RED or Sony blocking that.

I think sensor capabilities have platued and it is more about small features to differentiate systems. I've been pretty happy with my Z6 and am not sure how the latest and greatest would help me (although I am just starting my journey). 

[eatstoomuchjam]

7 hours ago, alsoandrew said:

My orig comment was in response to why Panasonic can't compete in regards to access to image sensors and instead gets access to the latest tech a year/cycle behind Canon, Nikon, and Sony. Their organic sensor never made it out of the lab and even if it did Panasonic themselves have no fab to manufacture it themselves and would have to contract it out to a third party. 

We all understood your point and you seem to have completely ignored the responses that you quoted.

Panasonic don't have to make their own sensors in order to have access to the latest/greatest technology.  Other companies like Red, Arri, and BlackMagic don't make their own sensors and go to third-party vendors like TowerJazz, Fairchild, and OnSemi.  Each of those three vendors have sensors that are desirable over the sensors made by Sony for various reasons.

As to the patents thing you halfway brought up, a google search for Panasonic image sensor patent returns a non-zero number of results.  You say Panasonic doesn't have anything to bring to the bargaining table, but you don't seem to actually know that, especially because you make statements like "Canon's DPAF builds on Sony's PDAF" which doesn't make a lot of sense, given that they are radically distinct technologies (sure, DPAF is a form of phase detecting AF, but then, in any realistic way, that sort of phase detection is how every manually-focused rangefinder camera in the history of cameras has worked).

But more than any of that, people already brought up specific examples of Panasonic buying sensors from someone other than Sony, including for the GH7 which was announced almost exactly 1 year ago and has the most advanced Micro 4/3 sensor ever made - with PDAF.

[Andrew Reid]

Fairchild are part of OnSemi now.

The Blackmagic 12K sensor manufacturer is probably OnSemi as well?

[eatstoomuchjam]

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

Fairchild are part of OnSemi now.

The Blackmagic 12K sensor manufacturer is probably OnSemi as well?

I certainly don't follow the mergers or spinoffs of semiconductor companies too closely (and especially not closely since apparently the acquisition happened in 2016, though maybe the Fairchild branding still remains?).  😅

I think they've said "designed and manufactured by BMD," but I'm guessing that's "manufactured" as in "handed money to someone who owns a sensor fab who is probably apparently-former-Fairchild-now-OnSemi" since BMD building a sensor fab would be pretty bonkers.