32 PANASONIC LUMIX G9
With its more photography-orientated feature set, the Lumix G9 is Panasonic’s answer to the OM-D E-M1 Mark II and consequently another mirrorless challenger to the higher-end D-SLRs.
All the best bits – as far as keen photographers are concerned – of the hybrid GH5 have been reprised in the Lumix G9 along with new features to create what Panasonic is called its “ultimate photography camera”.
The Lumix GH5 has been quite rightly widely lauded for its video capabilities – essentially a prolevel camcorder packed into a very compact camera body – but as we concluded in our road-test, “…it’s an equally fine stills camera”.
However, it is still the video stuff that’s made the headlines with the result that many photographers have got the idea that they could be paying for a lot of features they don’t need or want. The reality is that the hardware fundamentals – sensor, processor, autofocusing, image stabilisation, bigger buffer memory and dual memory card slots – are still the same irrespective of how you use the camera, but the perceptions can be persuasive… so Panasonic has come up with the Lumix G9, which it’s touting as “the ultimate photography camera”.
Under the skin, the G9 is pretty much the same as the GH5, but the ‘packaging’ is very different and the feature set has undoubtedly been tweaked to appeal to photographers over video-makers. That said, the G9 still ranks among the top mirrorless cameras for videography, but here this is more a bonus than the main game.
The bodyshell is an all-new design and makes the G9 look more like a D-SLR than ever before, especially as there’s now a large LCD info panel on the top deck which is a first for a Lumix G series mirrorless camera.
THE D-SLR DISGUISE IS DELIBERATE AND THE G9 DOESN’T JUST LOOK LIKE ONE, IT HANDLES JUST LIKE ONE TOO, ESPECIALLY IN TERMS OF THE CONTROL LAYOUT.
There’s also a much beefier handgrip and a more pronounced cover over the EVF… looking for all the world like a pentaprism housing. No prizes for guessing who Panasonic is trying to appeal to here.
The body panels are magnesium alloy over a diecast chassis and with full weather sealing plus, as with the GH5, insulation to enable shooting in sub-zero temperatures down to -10 degrees Celsius. Perhaps intentionally, the G9 looks and feels a lot more like its direct rival in the Micro Four Thirds format, the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark II.
The EVF – or “Live View Finder” as Panasonic calls it – uses the same 3.686 megadots OLED panel as the GH5, but with an increased magnification of 0.83x (35mm equivalent) and the option of switching to 0.77x or 0.7x settings. Additionally, the refresh rate is switchable between 60 and 120 fps, the latter eliminating black-out when shooting at faster frame rates… which is another plus for the electronic finder over an optical one. This is all-important because the viewfinder experience is a key difference between D-SLRs and mirrorless cameras, and Panasonic is working hard to make its EVFs better and better.
The G9’s monitor screen is a 7.62 cm TFT LCD panel with a resolution of 1.036 megadots and adjustable for both tilt and swing. It provides full touchscreen controls including for autofocusing, metering and shutter release in live view; and is also adjustable for brightness, contrast, colour saturation and colour balance (red tint or blue tint).
The control layout is based on a main mode dial with front and rear input wheels. As on many D-SLRs, the main dial has a selector located at its base for the drive modes (which includes the self-timer options) and the G9 also has a joystick-type control, another common feature on the higher-end reflexes. The joystick’s main role is to enable faster and more efficient selection of the focusing points, but it’s multi-functional so it serves as a navigator too.
There are dual memory card slots for the SD format and both support UHS-II speed devices which deserves a round of applause because limiting one slot to UHS-I really harms productivity by compromising, in particular, the overflow and backup file management modes. As on the GH5, the G9’s options here include the facility, while using the overflow or Relay (as Panasonic calls it) set-up to replace the full memory card while the camera is still recording to the second one.
PERFORMANCE ENHANCED
As noted in the introduction, the G9 shares all the GH5’s key imaging components, starting with the 21.77 megapixels ‘Live MOS’ sensor which has an effective pixel count of 20.3 million and goes without an optical low-pass filter to optimise the resolution and dynamic range.
Panasonic continues to squeeze yet more performance out of its M43 sensors to the point where size really doesn’t matter anymore (as is the case with the latest ‘APS-C’ format imagers). Much of this is down to the latestgeneration ‘Venus Engine 10’ image processor which not only delivers more speed, but employs a number of powerful algorithms to enhance various aspects of image quality. ‘Multipixel Luminance Generation’ and ‘Intelligent Detail Processing’ work on the brightness and contrast, while ‘ThreeDimensional Colour Control’ – the third dimension being brightness, in addition to saturation and hue – is designed to give more accurate colour reproduction across a wider range of shades. Finally, ‘High-Precision Multi Process NR’ is a more intelligent method of noise reduction, primarily to better preserve definition and detailing at higher ISO settings. Additionally, there have been further tweaks over the GH5, specifically to boost JPEG performance, again concentrating on the colour reproduction and noise reduction.
JPEGs can be recorded in one of three sizes – the largest being 5184x3888 pixels – with two compression levels and the option of 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 and 1:1 aspect ratios (although the latter three are all crops). RAW files are captured in one size only with 12-bit RGB colour. There are two RAW+JPEG settings, giving a choice of fine or standard compression on a large JPEG. A few more options for RAW capture – such as Nikon offers on its higher-end D-SLRs – may be an opportunity missed here.
In terms of shooting speed, the G9 can fire at 12.0 fps with the AF/ AE locked to the first frame or 9.0 fps with continuous adjustment which is quite respectable, but… this is with the camera’s conventional focal plane shutter. Switch to using the sensor-based shutter (a.k.a. the confusingly titled “electronic shutter”) and things speed up very dramatically… as fast as 60 fps with AF/AE locked to the first frame and 20 fps with continuous adjustment (which matches Sony’s A9). So, we’re gunna need a bigger buffer which, fortunately, Panasonic has
installed, giving a burst length of up to 600 maximum-quality JPEGs or 60 RAW frames. This means you can actually use 20 fps (or even 60 fps) for more than a second or two of action.
Like the A9 – it’s probably just a coincidence that the two fastest mirrorless cameras share the same model number – the G9 really is all about speed, with Panasonic also targeting both highend enthusiasts and professionals, particularly in the fields of sports, action and wildlife… all traditionally D-SLR territory. Not surprisingly, the G9 can record 4K UHD video at 50 fps (PAL standard) with this faster frame rate enabling the better reproduction of subject movement and smoother slowmotion effects. Full HD video can be recorded at up to 150 fps for 6x super slow-mo footage (hop over to the Making Movies panel to get the rest of the video story).
IN THE MOMENT
The processor’s capacity to handle this much data has useful spin-offs for still photographers beyond just the faster continuous shooting speeds. Panasonic has been promoting its video-derived ‘4K Photo’ modes for a number of years now and which have utilised still capture at 30 fps with various burst options.
A 4K video frame is worth 8.3 megapixels so these high-speed shooting modes have proved to be useful for a variety of applications (and not just sports or action). Like the GH5, the G9 steps up to ‘6K Photo’ capture which delivers 18 megapixels frames and that’s more than enough resolution for a whole lot of uses. Additionally, the ‘4K Photo’ modes are now available at 60 fps which effectively doubles your chances of grabbing the decisive moment. Of course, shooting at 60 fps you’re going to end up with a huge number of frames in a very short time which presents some logistical challenges so Panasonic is also refining the handling options for ‘4K/6K Photo’ capture, including bulk saving in five-second batches, touchscreen browsing and batch processing for automatic noise reduction or correction of any rolling shutter distortion.
At these very fast shooting speeds, obviously the camera’s sensor shutter is being used.
There’s a choice of capture modes called Pre-Burst, Burst and Burst Start/Stop which run at either 30 or 60 fps in ‘4K Photo’ and 30 fps in ‘6K Photo’. Pre-Burst is interesting because it starts recording prior to shutter release which means it’s ahead you as far as anticipating the action… by either 30 or 60 frames depending on the selected mode. While PreBurst is timed at two seconds, the Burst mode allows for unlimited shooting while the Burst S/S mode
Autofocusing performAnce is currently the mAjor reflexversus-mirrorless bAttleground with sony, in pArticulAr, mAking significAnt AdvAnces. pAnAsonic hAs upped the Ante too.
eliminates the need to keep the shutter button depressed… one press starts the sequence and a second stops it. A Pre-Burst option is now also available for these latter two modes and also when shooting normally at the 20 fps and 60 fps speeds, again recording a second’s worth of images prior to shutter release. There’s also the option of setting a loop function which divides the Burst S/S recording into two minute segments and then starts automatically deleting anything older than between ten to 12 minutes… should you need to wait this long for something to happen (and by which time you could already have 36,000 frames!).
Continuous autofocus is automatically activated with the ‘4K/6K Photo’ modes and they can be used with any of the standard ‘PASM’ exposure control modes (albeit with a few restrictions). All four frame aspect ratios are available with 4K capture, but only 4:2 or 3:2 at 6K. However, the 8.3 MP or 18.0 MP image sizes are essentially maintained in each instance so, for example, the 6K frames are 4992x3744 pixels at 4:3 and 5184x3456 pixels at 3:2.
Also derived from 4K or 6K video recording are the ‘Post Focus’ and ‘Focus Stacking’ modes. ‘Post Focus’ captures a high-speed burst at either the 6K (30 fps) or 4K (30 or 60 fps) resolutions, changing the focus point in each frame… which, in this case, represents a burst of 225 frames. Subsequently, by simply tapping on any part of the displayed image (except for at the very edges), you can select the frame which used that particular focusing point. Alternatively, all or a selection of images can be merged in-camera via the ‘Focus Stacking’ option with the potential to greatly extend the depth-offield irrespective of the lens aperture used. Not surprisingly, the G9 is endowed with Panasonic’s full suite of JPEG processing functions, including seven ‘Photo Style’ presets, 22 ‘Creative Filter’ effects, lens corrections (for vignetting and diffraction), resolution enhancement, long exposure noise reduction and dynamic range expansion. There’s also a ‘Highlight/Shadow’ control which works in a similar way to Photoshop’s Curves, with adjustments applied to a tone curve displayed in the monitor screen.
You can also tick the boxes for an intervalometer (up to 9999 frames), a multiple exposure facility, multi-shot HDR capture and something new on a Lumix G camera, a pixel-shifting ‘High Resolution’ mode. This is a feature we’ve already seen on the highend Olympus OM-D models and certain Pentax D-SLRs, but Panasonic’s version is different again and captures four images to record full RGBG colour at each pixel point and then another four to boost the resolution to 80.6 megapixels for both JPEGs and RAW files. The result is discernible improvements in both the colour reproduction (especially in the highlights) and the definition. The camera needs to be on a tripod, of course, as the eight frames are captured in sequence which will take a while if you’re using slower shutter speeds. For the same reason, the best results are achieved with largely static subjects.
Pixel-shifting (the G9 actually uses half-pixel shifts between each exposure) is derived from the sensor-shift method of image stabilisation which can now be exceptionally finely-controlled. Compared to the High Res mode, Panasonic is encouraging you to leave the tripod at home more often with its latest development of the five-axis ‘Dual I.S.’ stabilisation which extends the correction for camera shake up to 6.5 stops. Dual I.S. 2 employs a combination of a gyro, accelerometer and data from the image sensor to work to more accurately determine the direction of movement. It can also operate in conjunction with compatible ‘Power OIS’ lenses, primarily to provide enhanced stabilisation with longer focal lengths. The extended correction range effectively enables hand-held shooting with shutter speeds as slow as one second and effective focal lengths up to 280mm. You need a steady hand, but we did indeed shoot at one second (albeit only at an effective focal length of 120mm) and anything static in the frame was sharply rendered.