It now seems possible Panasonic have been responding to the excitement caused by the Panasonic GH1 custom firmware over the past few days. But in a quite subtle manner.
In the space of just a week the official Panasonic twitter channel added me on Twitter and then had a marketing department guy register on my forum to post a link to the official Panasonic Facebook and Twitter pages, directing people to Panasonic’s marketing efforts. Then the French branch of Panasonic released a G series firmware update in cooperation with French electronics store FNAC which seemingly corrects very little but tempts people back into installing the official firmware.
Now Hot Rod Cameras has shown (via 1001NoisyCameras) that Panasonic have decided to make an early push on the AF100 sales pitch, with a brochure a full 6 months before it’s release which you view here on Panasonic’s Pro AV website. Pictured is the prototype AF100 with HotRod PL adapter and Zeiss Ultra Prime. This is a pro-division camera, not a consumer division. I find it quite incredible that the pro-division is taking trickle down hardware from the consumer division. It’s usually the other way round and sums up the whole DSLR revolution nicely.
I have very few doubts that the timing of this brochure is designed to remind people of what’s coming, now the GH1 is turning into a miniature AF100 with the high bit rate recording and native 24p.
The AF100 is a very exciting product though, because it will have an uncompressed HD-SDI output and XLR audio jacks, plus a number of professional handling features. Some of the things mentioned in the (rather small) brochure are:
AVCHD PH Mode, up to 12 hours recording on two SD card slots (48 hours in HE mode)
Dynamic Range Stretcher (just Lumix Intelligent Exposure?)
Gamma Select
Timecode support
The question now is, how are Panasonic going to cripple the better sensor in the GH2 to line-differentiate it? Or maybe a fairer question would be, what compromises will Panasonic make on the GH2 to deliver such capable technology in a consumer camera with a much lower price point than the AF100? I hope for one that there is no intentional AVCHD bugs or ridiculously low bitrates because this really did hurt the GH1 in the market place. Had it been jailbroken from the start, it could have gone head to head with much more expensive cameras like the 5D Mark II and garnered much more attention and a bigger buzz.
There are 2 kinds of line differentiation that companies like Panasonic seem to employ. The first is tailoring in a product to the target audience, which is what I expect Panasonic did with the GH1 when they employed a rather dodgy low bitrate AVCHD implementation. Then there is the quite different purposeful crippling to segment lines, like with the GF1 versus GH1 video mode. The lower-cost GF1 was kept under the top of the range GH1, since it was actually capable of full HD as the firmware patch showed. Instead it had 720p AVCHD Lite.
But it costs less, so we shouldn’t complain.
