Today, Panasonic launched the new Lumix S1 II mirrorless camera. I'm convinced this would be the best hybrid video camera on the market if it didn't have one major flaw.
I used to be a huge Panasonic fan. I bought 5 GH5 cameras, and we shot every Fstopper's video with them for years. But Panasonic fell behind. Although they always had the best video features, the GH5's small sensor struggled in low light, didn't easily produce shallow depth of field, and never got the most important feature of them all, reliable continuous autofocus.
Today Panasonic launched the Lumix S1 II. It's Panasonic's newest mirrorless camera with a 24mp sensor, geared more toward video shooters, and it has fixed every issue I had with my old GH5s. It's everything I want in a hybrid camera, but can I recommend this camera? More importantly, can I recommend their ecosystem?
Why Ecosystem Matters
For the last 5 years, anytime someone asked me to recommend a camera, I've given the same answer: "You can't go wrong buying any modern camera from Sony, Nikon, or Canon." It's not that other brands don't make great cameras; it just comes down to market share.
When you buy a camera, you're stuck in that ecosystem, potentially for the rest of your life. You want to buy a brand that has a large user base. You want a wide range of lenses. You want third-party accessories to actually work with your camera. And when it's time to sell your gear, you want to know there will be a buyer.
If you decided to buy into Pentax years ago, I guarantee you're regretting that decision today.
What About Lenses
In 2019 Panasonic launched the S1, their first full-frame camera, with a completely new mount. I remember hearing about this camera and thinking, who would buy into a brand new eco-system when there are so many great cameras with established brands? Panasonic knew this would be an uphill battle, and they created the L-Mount Alliance with both Leica and Sigma. This meant that three major camera brands were combining forces to create a larger ecosystem.
Today, there are actually more L-Mount lenses to buy than Canon RF lenses. You can get ultra cheap 3rd party L mount lenses, entry level and pro level lenses made by Panasonic or Sigma, and outrageously priced lenses by Leica.
And if sports or wildlife is important to you, Sigma just announced their new 300-600mm f/4 lens, which many people are calling the best ultra-telephoto lens ever made.
What Flashes Work With Panasonic Cameras?
Ok, the lenses exist, but what about the hot shoe? This camera does have its own proprietary hot shoe. All standard triggers will work on this camera, but if you want automatic TTL metering, you're going to need a trigger designed for Panasonic.
I recently did a big comparison review of all of the major speedlights and as far as I can tell, only one of these brands makes flashes and triggers for Panasonic. Luckily it's Godox, who made my favorite flash and trigger.
So the Panasonic ecosystem is much larger than I thought, but they are still at a massive disadvantage, due to market share. Sony and Canon are on top, and the S1 II is either going to have to be a lot cheaper than the competition, or a significantly better camera, and spoiler alert, at $3200, this thing isn't cheap.
First Impressions
The S1 II feels great. The button layout feels much more intuitive than my Sony cameras. The screen on the back flips in every direction, even forwards, but also tilts up and down in place which makes it even better than my Sony screens. The electronic viewfinder is incredible, second only to the EVF on the Sony a9III. Sony's EVF is so good I forget it's not an optical viewfinder. But when I compare the S1 II to the Sony cameras I actually own (a7S II and A7IV) the S1II is a gigantic step forward.
The Most Customizable, And The Most Confusing
The S1II is the most feature-rich camera I've ever used. This camera has so many shooting resolutions, aspect ratios, and frame rates that they had to design a filtering system so that you can actually find what you're looking for.
It's also the most customizable camera I've ever used. If you like the way another camera works, or the location of certain function buttons, you have complete control over every aspect of this camera. The downside to all of these features and options is that this camera will require days or weeks to fully set up. Gear heads will love it, but even I, as someone who shot Panasonic for years, still feel lost in the menu.
My Favorite Features
I could write a book listing all of the features of this camera, but here are a few of my favorites.
High Resolution Mode
If you're taking pictures of a relatively still subject, you can turn on high resolution mode, and it will take multiple pictures and combine them to create a much higher resolution shot. This works best on a tripod but they also have a handheld mode that also works great.
Pre-Capture
This camera has pre-burst shooting that silently captures pictures in the background, and when you decide to take a picture, it will save images captured up to 1.5 seconds in the past.
Automatic Timelapse Creation
Panasonic has the best timelapse functions I've ever seen. You can either record a video with a shutter speed as low as 1/2 a second, and it will create a smooth timelapse in camera, or if you want a longer shutter speed, you can shoot images and after you're done, the camera will turn all of the images into a timelapse video automatically. We used this feature exclusively when we filmed hundreds of timelapses for our Photographing the World photography tutorial series.
The Most Filming Options
The S1 II can shoot video in 16x9 6k using the full width of the sensor, or you can shoot ungated, allowing you to shoot in a 3x2 aspect ratio to take full advantage of the entire sensor. This makes editing vertical videos from horizontal footage easier, and it allows you to shoot with anamorphic lenses, and the camera has desqueezing playback so that you don't need an additional monitor.
Hybrid Zoom
If you shoot in 4k, you can turn on Hybrid Zoom, which will use the entire width of the sensor when you're zoomed out, and it will digitally crop in as you manually zoom the lens. When you reach the end of your physical zoom, the camera will be filming in APS-C, giving you an extra 1.5X zoom without any loss of resolution.
The Best IBIS
The S1 II has the best stabilization I've ever used. The highest level of stabilization is called boost IS, and it is specifically made to make handheld footage look like it was shot on a tripod it's shocking how well this works. If you are a run-and-gunner who likes using minimal gear, the stabilization this camera has may be your favorite feature of all.
V-log Assist and Internal LUTs
The S1 II has a ton of color profiles, but you'll get the best quality shooting in V-Log. You can turn on V-log View Assist to make the footage look normal on the camera to make exposing the shot easier. If you want to take things further, you can upload LUTs into the camera and combine and blend LUTs in camera to see graded footage live, as you film.
Better ISO Performance
In terms of low light performance, the S1 II seems to have around one stop better ISO performance over my A7S III, but the Sony does have 3 additional stops of ISO performance if you need to see in the dark.
Autofocus, The Fatal Flaw
Yes, face detect continuous autofocus finally works, and it's reliable enough to leave on all the time. Sadly, the other AF feature I use on a daily basis (spot tracking or touch to track AF) does not.
One of my favorite aspects of on my Sony cameras is the simplicity of their autofocus system. I leave my autofocus zone in "wide," which uses the entire sensor, and I leave human face detection on all the time. If I ever want to focus on anything other than a person, I just touch the back of the screen it will track whatever object I click on.
The S1 II is not that simple. You can either detect a subject, or you have to turn subject detection off and move over to the "tracking mode" if you want to touch to track something. This itself is a massive inconvenience, but I don't think you'll have to worry about it because this mode is completely unusable. The tracking isn't accurate at all and it will jump around the frame or turn itself off as soon as the subject or camera begins to move.
What's so strange is that Panasonic solved the hard part. Automatically detecting and tracking a human eye anywhere in the entire frame seems way more difficult than tracking a small contrasty spot I click on. It seems like this could be easily fixed with a firmware update, and Panasonic is known to constantly improve the software of their cameras, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Final Thoughts
To convince new shooters to choose Panasonic over the much more popular competition, they needed to create a camera that was objectively better than what is currently on the market, and that's what they did. In almost every category, the S1 II is the current king of hybrid video cameras. It has better ergonomics, better hardware, better resolution, better stabilization, better ISO performance, more features, and more customization than the competition. The L mount ecosystem and lens selection are far more robust than I realized. Face detect autofocus actually works now... but the other major feature I use, spot tracking, at this point does not work. Depending on how you shoot, you may not even care about this feature, but I use it all the time, and it would be very difficult for me to give it up.
Even still, the list of advantages this camera has over the competition is gigantic and anyone looking for a hybrid video camera should at least consider the Lumix S1 II.
