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VincentP
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[b]Dear Andrew, Dear All,[/b]

I am one of these fans visiting EOSHD.com every day, a couple of times and checking every update. So finally after purchasing my GH2 I decided to register to the EOSHD forum. Just finished university and now have some time to film with my brand new GH2. I am living in Germany and bought my GH2 from a Germany onlineshop. The serial number starts with WE1HA.

Now as I have rad the EOSHD GH2 shooters guide and went out filming I discovered one really sad GH2 bug which I found out is well known. The horizontal darker line ind footage shot over ISO1000 and underexposed situations. Panasonic is aware of the problem and many users complain about this problem.

http://vimeo.com/17281822

http://personal-view.com/talks/discussion/693/gh2-showing-fixed-darker-bandstripe-20-pixels-high-across-footage/p1

If you read all these posts you'll see, that each GH2 seems to have a problem with this issue. [b]Andrew Reid,[/b] from reading sooooo many of your posts and articles I know you have some contact to Panasonic. Don't you think it is time to ask Panasonic to solve this problem and take back all the thousands of defective GH2s? I am so sad I just discovered this after my 2 weeks return policy expired. Now I have to live with this but maybe Panasonic could work around the problem? Any chance you could ask Panasonic for an official statement?

Kind regards,
Vincent
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Hi Vincent. Does the band go away at 1/25 shutter? This is a common artefact not a defect. You get around it by exposing a brighter shot. There's only very few times where it is a real issue. Use a faster F-stop and light the wall.
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Hi Andrew,

yes the band does go away at 1/25 shutter. I use several Nikon lenses with F-stop 1.4 and 1.7. I know it is only a problem in underexposed situations but I filmed an university graduation ceremony and it distroyed most of the footage. Don't you think Panasoic could solve this? Because as other users reported, the band is changing possition with different shutter speeds (1/40, 1/50, 1/60 etc.) Do you think this is a software problem or hardware related? I have also seen some GH2s don't have it as strong but mine and many others have it very very bad.

Thx for your fast reply.
Keep on your awesome work. I am already thinking abou selling my GH2 on Ebay and getting the new Sony RX100 cause I love it from what I have seen from your review though it doesn't have 24P etc.
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I have spoken to several people at Panasonic about this issue and sent them examples because it has been an issue for me as well. Panasonic is aware of the problem but their canned response is basically that it's a consumer-level camera and the video function is not meant to be pushed the way that we are pushing it, so they are not going to do anything about it. Their attention is on the GH3 now.

The banding actually starts showing up at anything above ISO 640 for me. Andrew may disagree, or maybe I just got a bad unit, but I do not see the GH2 as an adequate "low-light" camera at all. But this has forced me to pay more attention to lighting composition, which I really should have been doing all along. If you light properly, you can get great results with it.
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Thx QuickHitRecord,

I think I'll try to sell my GH2 as I wanted to use it for documantery work as well such as DJs and nightclubs. But with this horrible band in underexposed situations it is quiet difficult to get propper results in dark scenes. Though I wonder how all that nice footage on Vimeo is beeing made.

Of course if you have the possibilty to light and pay attention to lighting composition you can get awesome footage. But the Sony RX100 and the new Olympus videos are very promising for steady shots and especially without the band. I personally prefer more b locking instead of an ugly horizontal band in low light situations.

Thank you guys very much for your help!
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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
I've been using my GH2 for several months with and without various hacks and it's just now that my camera has started to produce bad horizontal flashing/banding. It wasn't there before. It's so bad that I would have noticed it right away because now the problem renders the shot unusable. The noisy banding shows up on my camera not in dark shaded areas of the shot but somewhere half way between 0.3 and 0.5 volts on a waveform monitor.
This problem occurs usually when I'm using ETC mode even at low ISO. It's more noticeable when one underexposes. Some say, well just don't underexpose - but for a camera prone to ugly blotchy blown highlights, underexposing a landscape to capture more detail in highlights is sometimes necessary.
This is a real deal breaker for me. ETC was such a unique and powerful feature but now rendered unusable.
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