Panasonic Lumix G7 vs. S5II, used as camcorders

[EduPortas]

10 hours ago, John Matthews said:

I'll credit @Andrew Reid for the look with EOSHD Pro Color. I only tweaked it a little.

From what I've understood about Panasonic in that era, even their pro video division was surprised by the hacked GH2. I remember many videographers were saying the 1080p out of the GH2 was WAY too sharp and digital. Some of the hacks even offered less sharp versions. After with 4k, it didn't seem we had to worry so much about detail anymore. IBIS meant we could now actually see the detail because with no IBIS, it turned to mush. 

Nice.

Out of curiosity, could you unsharpen the included profiles in the GH2 in video mode?  

[Andrew Reid]

The GH2 is pixel binning to produce the 1080p, so the digital-edge comes more from that than the built-in sharpening algorithm.

When you view the image at a longer viewing distance on a larger screen, it looks a lot better than up-close on a laptop.

[John Matthews]

Quick question: Is the G7's 4k line-skipped or pixel-binned? I cannot seem to find definitive information on this. I can easily get it to moiré but usually in the blue channel.

[ac6000cw]

I don't have a definitive answer, so this is an 'engineering opinion':

For UHD (3840 x 2160) the G7 crops a slightly larger area out of the centre of the sensor, around 4100 pixels horizontally. Someone on Reddit estimated it to be 4130 x 2323 - see https://www.reddit.com/r/PanasonicG7/comments/3zfu0f/comment/cym5c9j/ - which is very close to 4096 x 2320 (and both dimensions of that are divisible by 16).

If you take 4096 x 2320 and multiply each dimension by 15/16 you get 3840 x 2175, and I suspect because of the low scaling ratio it's most likely using 'nearest neighbour' re-sampling (line-skipping in camera speak) to generate UHD from it.

So my educated guess is that its reading out a 4096 x 2320 region of the sensor, de-bayering it and then using line-skipping to down-sample it to 3840 x 2160.