Yeah I ended up missing out quite a few things I wanted to cover because it was already horribly long 😅 One cool thing about the SSD recording is that you can apparently hook up a CFExpress Type B reader - Angelbird make one intended for iPhones that should apparently work, but it's out of stock everywhere. I'll make a video about that when I eventually pick one up! I haven't actually tried the ProRes recording yet - something else for the list.

Thanks very much! And I 100% agree; I've got years of photo editing experience, but that's why I also love how good the photos straight out of camera are - I struggle to believe that anyone "loves" editing photos 😆 The default colours are good in every situation too, which is surprising. For comparison, the Nikon colours are great for wildlife but I find the greens far too saturated for landscapes. It's interesting that Panasonic have managed to come up with a default configuration that seems to work for everything.

The handheld hi-res is really good! I mentioned that a bit in a previous video rather than this one, but I'd definitely like to do a proper comparison with that mode at some point. The 28-200 is very interesting and quite tempting - I'll definitely do a video if I get ahold of one 😀 Would make for a really nice hiking/landscape lens.

I'm hoping to try out a long lens on it soon - I've previously tried the Sigma 150-600 Sport on the first S5 and it worked better than I expected, and actually got a few photos I really liked. Jeremy Neipp has some good videos about Panasonic cameras for wildlife, if useful: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hsmBfc-cmdHRj2Q.html. That Sigma 500mm is a really interesting lens! Can't wait to try that out 😀

That's an excellent tip - I never even thought of doing that 😮

Tough decision! It's something I'm kinda stuck on as well, and was just as stuck on last year too. The Z9 is a great wildlife camera but I honestly don't use it for much else. Panasonic wouldn't need to do much to get me interested in an S1II; probably "only" needs a faster sensor, higher burst speed, and CFExpress Type B cards, in order to make a perfectly viable wildlife camera. But who knows what they'll come out with 🤔 I keep telling myself that Sigma must be releasing all these telephoto L-mount lenses for a reason 🙈 The Zf looks like a really nice camera though. I imagine it's somewhat more annoying for video but it certainly has good photo specs. I still haven't had a chance to try one out myself though - hopefully I'll get my hands on one at a trade show sometime this year. One holdup for me on Nikon is that I don't really love most of their lenses outside of the super cheap ones (like the 40mm f/2) or the telephoto range. I find myself really enjoying the L-mount lens range far more - I've always liked Sigma lenses, and the Panasonic ones are proving really great too. I've been planning to borrow a long lens for the S5IIX for a while in order to properly test it out for wildlife, like I did with the S5. Hopefully I'll have a video out for that in the next month or so 😀

@@robert_mayFirst, thank you so, so much for taking time out of your day to respond. I much appreciate it! Second: oh god now I must wait for that video I suspect.. the GAS is real! I was even considering X-H2, for the higher resolution and "ok" speed, but with longer reach and all that. But moving to a Nikon system also seems appealing, having to get a Z F first, because of price, then Z8 later on. But really, this is really hard. 😅 Waiting for a S1ii would be a risk, but it could also be SO worth it, and without taking a huge (for me) loss in money, over changing systems. This is.. difficult. I only do photography, who knows about the future, but for now that is my only priority out of the two. Cheers again.

@@VandrefalkTV I just discovered that Sigma have shut down the lens rental scheme they had here in the UK so getting a long lens to try the S5II out is going to prove to be a bit more awkward 😩 I'll see if I can find any other way of nabbing one for a test.

@@robert_may Whaaaat? Noooo! 😭 I've taken steps to MAYBE even join a local photography group but.. oh god. Maybe. Just to see if anyone has any camera or lens combinations that might interest me. 🙈

I'm gonna make sure to actually spend some time with a Pentax camera this year. It has been too long 😆 Yeah I'm still annoyed about the XH2S problems - I really liked that camera 🙈 I think there's at least one major downside to every camera system right now. The two most enjoyable experiences for me in the past couple of years have definitely been Fujifilm and Panasonic cameras. Panasonic really wouldn't need to do much to win me over to an S1II, but I'm worried that they'll do something stupid like make it SD-card only or something, or inexplicably still have a 5FPS burst rate. They have at least proved they do somewhat listen to their customers with the past two releases, so maybe I'm being overly pessimistic 😅

@@robert_may About Pentax, I dunno if in 2024 there will be much to say positively about the brand or camera. The K-1 was their best camera imo (I have owned or tried most), but 4.4fps and a buffer of 13-17 shots (with questionable IQ), worst video on any brand etc. The camera and experience would need to be appreciated on a whole other level that has basically nothing to do with modern cameras. Comparing the K-1 as an alternative to film camera experience would be fairer 😅 so yeh just bare that in mind. K-1 is still a landscape beast, super tilting screen, LED lights to illuminate buttons and sd card slots in the dark, the very best iteration of pixelshift from any brand, built in astrotracer. Honestly its kinda mind blowing how the big YT landscape channels just completely skipped this camera. My recommendations, K-1+ any FA Ltd (31, 43, 77), that glass is iconic and the pairing is really quite nice. After the success of the Kimono (K3III Monochrome), many are praying that Pentax/Ricoh does the same with a K-1 and GR. Fingers crossed. The K3III started with too aggressive built in Denoise, many of us are hoping that will be the last time they behave in this manner. But yeh, in short Pentax for Play, Fuji for work. It's a completely different thing. If you get the chance to play with a K-1 take it, anything else I wouldn't really bother tbh. It is interesting today that because our interests are wide and varied that its hard to find a single brand camera that can do it all. It's not surprising that you need Nikon for birds but chose Lumix for casual/video, it's just a shame we need to do this. Ah well...

Ooh that's good to know - I hadn't seen many details of what changed between the two models.

I actually haven't used the SSD recording much yet, but as I'm experimenting a bit with recording more in the 3:2 6K mode lately I think I'll be trying it out much more. I do not want to buy big V90 SD cards 😅 Yeah I'd like to see an update to bring it closer to the G9II. It's a huge improvement over the first S5 but they should look at how Nikon has continuously improved their AF via firmware and try to emulate it. The G9II has a few really nice quality of life improvements to the AF.

Blackout isn't too bad (and doesn't exist in electronic shutter mode from what I can tell, though the EVF does then lag a bit), but it does have a curious adverse effect - I think it combines with the slow-ish sensor speed to cause some AF issues, as it often loses the subject focus after 2-3 shots in a burst. Will cover this in an upcoming video!

Haha I can relate on the Olympus menus. They did thankfully fix them somewhat in the OM-1 and later cameras 😅 The S5II really is a good all-rounder, just as you say. I’m also super interested in what models they bring out next, especially as there are lots of nice lenses on L mount now. I’ve not actually tried either of those Sigma lenses yet, though I did briefly have a go on the 35mm variant of that range and really liked how it felt. The 65mm is a really interesting focal length!

Ooh you could be right about the fan - they can generate electrical interference as they're basically small electric motors involving magnets. I'll do some proper testing and see if I can verify it, because that'd make for an interesting video anyway 😀 I haven't had a chance to test out a G9II yet but in general I find the S5II surprisingly accurate on eyes, possibly more so than the Nikon Z9 - the Z9 in particular has a front-focusing issue where it tends to hit eyelashes on humans and cheek feathers on birds 🤔 But it wouldn't surprise me if the S5II/G9II do the same. Sony do seem to be the best at this right now, and I'm not sure if it's because they have more focus points on their cameras (and thus having a more accurate hit on the centre of eyes) or if they're doing something clever in the firmware like shifting focus back minutely when focusing on eyes, but it really is very accurate. I think Canon are probably the closest in terms of performance to Sony right now, from what I've heard. I don't do a huge amount of printing these days so I'm a bit rusty on DPI, but they should be identical as far as I know - it might be something weird going on in the photo software. Photos from my Z9 and S5II both show as 240 DPI in Photoshop for me. Which is a bit of a weird number but I don't think I've changed it on any photo since installing this version of Photoshop.

@@robert_may thak you. regarding dpi, I'm not talking about those that we can set after editing via software, I'm talking about those that the camera itself imprints on the file. By the way, have you tested the effectiveness of the AF with S5 II on the eyes of subjects who are approaching or moving away? that's where I run into problems with accuracy. On static static subjects I agree that it is precise A greeting

I don't have any of those unfortunately, though I have briefly played with an FX30 (nice camera!). I'll make sure to give them all a proper try at an upcoming trade show though, as I'm interested in them myself too. I can possibly compare more generally between Fujifilm & Panasonic if you have any specific questions though, as I did previously have an X-H2S 😀

Oh that's really interesting - I've never thought of testing out the SD cards. I have a bunch of Lexar cards that were fairly cheap, and they did cause problems in the Fujifilm X-H2S when I had that, so probably worth a test 🤔 When I get a bit of spare time soon I'll see if I can figure out the exact conditions that cause the sound. Unfortunately the audio part of mirrorless cameras is still pretty far behind, except on the higher-end cine cameras. Thankfully the XLR adapter works really well on the Panasonic, so there is a workaround at least.

Also thanks for the channel recommendation! 😀 Lots of good Japanese KZfaqrs don't get shown to me very often, and between auto-subtitles and my extremely limited language skills I can usually figure out what's going on. That channel is exactly my sorta thing!

@@robert_may You're welcome, there's indeed a lot to dig with somewhat obscure foreign youtubers for sure - korean feature film and ad director from 감송필름 Gamsongfilm channel, for instance, was rolling with Lumix as primary cameras for a while (starting from original S1), and his color-grading practices is nothing but amazing (even when it comes to occasionally tested 8-bit only cameras, like Z6), the best I've seen on YT so far, to be frank. Auto-translate is very much adequate with korean content, much better than japanese, for example, so it's very much worth check it out for Lumix users around. Regarding sound - eh, some part of me wants to complain about QC, but, then again, many modern external recorders can be mounted underneath the cameras nowadays, so that's not really a problem for me. Realistically speaking, how good ML preamps can possible be?.. Even without obvious chirping tied to QC-issues, I would expect built-in mic's sound to be atleast somewhat hissy, so, I probably wouldn't use it for anything other than sync in post anyway.

Yes they support 4:4:4, and 4:2:0, but weirdly no support for 4:2:2. As far as I know, only Intel and Apple support 4:2:2 chroma subsampling. Example of other people complaining about this lack of support: old.reddit.com/r/nvidia/comments/180c4l2/422_footage_decoder_in_the_works_please_we_video/

Mainly using a Sennheiser MKE 600, going into a Tascam Model 12 mixer (wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for vocals but I already owned it). I then pass it out to the Panasonic XLR adapter to keep the recordings simple, and post process with some Izotope plugins and EQ 😀 Since this video I’ve started using a Roland interface I already owned to run the mic as it has cleaner gain, but then it passes that into the mixer again.