Panasonic on-camera mic released

[kye]

Panasonic just released a new on-camera mic.  Looks like an excellent option for events etc where you want something small or something really flexible.

I've watched a few YT showcases and for me, the best features are:

• It gives you 32-bit without having to have the external mic preamp box (and then adding microphones to that, making it larger again)
• It's small, much smaller than an on-camera shotgun mic
• You can quickly swap between modes
• (I assume?) it's powered by the camera
• It unlocks the ability to record >2 channels of audio into the files (one person said you can record left/right/mono/mono-20dB as a combo, and left/right/left-20dB/right-20dB as a different combo)

It's definitely not magic and the laws of physics still apply.

There don't seem to be any really good on-location stress tests posted yet, but there's a few examples.

Media Division did an in-kitchen test to compare it to in-camera mics and lav and a DJI clip-on, and also applied a bit of AI voice isolation too to see how far you can push it:

Dustin did some good tests including walking a 360 around the camera in each mode, which showed how directional it is, which seems pretty impressive.  He also compared it to the Sennheiser MKE440.

This shows the different modes out in nature:

This is probably a complete revolution for a number of niche uses.  Content creators would be one, where they're recording in noisy environments but still staying relatively close to the camera where physics will be helping them.  Another is where the flexibility really helps, like shooting events where getting pristine audio isn't an absolute must but working super-quickly is more important and perhaps the 32-bit would really come into its own.

This reminds me of how people used to talk about Panasonic when the GH4 and GH5 were around and people were saying that Panasonic just listened to people and then implemented the features that people would use rather than trying to be flashy and grab headlines.  This will be an invisible workhorse for lots and lots of people.