Panasonic DMC GH1 12 1MP Four Thirds Interchangeable Lens Camera with 1080p HD Video

With the GH1, shooting incredible photos is only part of the fun. You can also shoot beautiful, richly detailed movies in Full HD at 24 frames per second, or smooth HD movies at 60 frames per second in AVCHD format with continuous auto focus.The GH1 gives you more creative freedom. It lets you adjust the aperture and shutter speed any way you like when shooting movies. Aperture control is convenient when there are several subjects at different distances and you want them each to stand out. Changing the shutter speed brings special effects to movies, which is especially effective when shooting fast-moving subjects. Creative movie mode gives you a wider range of expression to explore, and lets you shoot movies with full manual control.The GH1 also comes with the high-quality stereo sound of Dolby Digital Stereo Creator, the global standard for superior audio recording. The stereo microphone on the upper body records dynamic, true-to life stereo sounds that bring out all the power of your HD movies.

User Ratings and Reviews

5 Stars A Film Maker’s first DSLR
This is my first DSLR, and I mostly got it to record better video footage on my vacations. So far, I’ve been completely satisfied with the product. For all you film makers out there, let me just quickly note a few things for you:

-The microphone port is not standard, so if you’re using an external mic make sure you grab the adapter

-AVCHD is very annoying to get into your editing software. Premiere Pro CS4 has specific options for this, but many programs are fussy. If you plan to bring your footage into after effects, you’re going to get weird flickers and artifacts.

Regardless, it’s worth these little annoyances because the photo is so gorgeous. Plenty of settings to alter and adjust, and the depth of field during shooting is great. Just make sure to get big SD cards (at least class 6), because you’re going to need them.

5 Stars Best hybird in the price point
For those who argue that image isn’t as good as dslr is mainly due to the kit lens that is definite below average in low light, other than that it shine most other area.

The image quality can be excellent as good as DSLR, the camera definite over expose like canon dslr, you might need to adjust a bit or do post processing. the 720p avchd can produce very high quality smooth hd video that easily beat quality of those hd program. is about 14-15mb bit rate show in ps3.

I original interest going for Canon 7d, but try it and felt is way too heavy for me and i am worry if drop damage might much greater. gh1 body itself isn’t that cost compare to 7d. since the lens aleady sold for $850 My friend has t1i, he was suprise that my camera outperform him in many situation not just video but image too. his camera produce far more noise pictures and video. The camera share many similar setting as Panasonic FZ-35 which i am very famaliar with. panasonic is seriously score homerun this year in eletronics, from tv now to camera they really stand out.

I try several software for video edit with avchd, power director is by far the easiest and fastest to convert and can direct upload to youtube in 720p save me about 5 times the actual size.

If you had ps3 avchd is not problem, you can view and even copy to your ps3, i use ps3 slideshow to play my image and usse some mp3 make very nice experience.

Pro:

Light Weight (with the kit lens is about same weight as Canon 7D body)

Flip Screen

100% EVF

Pretty fast fps at non flash photos

flash is the same as DSLR

Swap lens (might need adapter)

Silent video focus

60 seconds expose which most DSLR don’t had.

Accurate whiter meter even indoor.

External mic

best internal mic in hybird camera

nice slideshow with music function and hdmi output

1080/60i can do 24p with software and 720/60p very smooth hd record

AVCHD and Mov format option (ACVHD use 3 times less space than Mov)

Excellent battery life, my friend T1i battery went dead while I still has 2 bar left use about similar time.

Excellent menu that is very well inform, there’s pdf too for easy search.

Can achieve similar depth of field as DSLR

Very fast focus at object

Cons:

Kit Lens does poorly in indoor situation you would need tripod for longer expose time.

EVF view suffer if the lens don’t do well in low light

You can’t use most third party battery

Camera menu lack function definition.

Could had include better software.

Some micro 3/4 lens too pricey and often out of stock.

Lack of markening should had include cheaper option such as with other lower cost lens or body only to make more public appearing.

2 Stars Defective Lens Mount
Like many other folks, I received a unit with a defective lens mount. The lens twists back and forth by a substantial amount. I am returning my camera.

Did a little testing while I had it. My background is as a cinematographer and coder of digital imaging software. First and foremost, the four thirds format with interchangeable lenses blows away all current video cameras, including those costing $5000. Not only does the larger sensor give better control over depth of field, it changes the geometry of what you shoot, giving you a much wider field of view without the signature “video” look. I will never buy another video camera with a 1/3 or even 2/3 inch sensor again. Of course this is not unique to the GH1. There are several large sensor DSLRs on the market now.

The flip out, fully articulated monitor is super handy. Every camera should be this way. Why would anyone want to squat down and twist their neck to take a simple low angle shot with a regular fixed monitor camera? It seems obvious. The monitor is incredibly bright and sharp.

The zoom on the GH1 kit lens is bizarrely stiff, which makes you twist the whole camera to zoom when filming.

In the category of dumb things from the past that should have died long ago, the full HD 24p mode is encoded as 60i with pulldown. Your footage will look terrible if played back directly, or you must use software to remove the pulldown. Even with pulldown “removed” you end up with visible interlace ghosting due to the fields being encoded separately. Furthermore, pulldown wastes bitrate, since it basically splits each image in two and compresses them separately, even though they are almost identical images. Result is lower quality images with more compression artifacts for the same bitrate. As it is, the image quality at 1080 is barely sufficient, has trails lasting 1-2 frames at times.

The 720 mode can only be 60p, and has no option for 24p or 30p. Weird, since most people would generally want to shoot at 24p, unless they were filming sports or slow motion. Including 24p and 30p modes would allow for less compression and higher image quality for the same bitrate.

I noticed in photo mode, the monitor has some auto-gain feature, so you don’t actually see the photo you are about to take. Very annoying. I couldn’t figure out if it could be disabled.

In automatic modes, like auto-iso, or aperture priority, the camera does not display the choices it is making. It just displays blank. So you have no idea what you are getting.

The digital zoom feature is backwards, for filming at least. The image is already being reduced from the sensor’s 4K resolution to 1080 or 720. You would think digital zoom would crop out the center of the 4K image, which has tons of extra resolution. Instead digital zoom crops out the center of the 1080 or 720 image, giving you an ugly, super low res, soft, blocky, useless image.

The default sharpening level of “zero” gives you a heavily sharpened image with strong halos and artifacts around edges. Setting sharpening to the minimum (-2) appears to still force you to take some sharpening. Sharpening is an anathema to good post production image processing.

The noise reduction smears the chroma channels, introducing significant artifacts along edges. For example, if you film text on the page of a book in good light, it will appear to be covered with colored smudges. Turning it all the way down improved my images significantly.

The aperture adjusts in discrete steps when filming in shutter priority mode. The resulting sudden “steps” in brightness make it useless for any serious work. A shame, since this is normally the best automatic mode for filming if you are not going full manual. Also, I could hear the lens changing aperture, a sound will be audible to a mic on a boom in especially quiet environments.

The autofocus snaps very quickly when filming. It would be nice if this could be slowed down so as not to be so abrupt and to feel more natural.

I witnessed some pretty serious aliasing, suggesting their downsampling algorithm is not so good. For example, if you film tiny christmas lights from a bit of a distance, and pan slowly, you will see individual lights literally appear and then completely disappear, and then appear again.

Having a choice between mjpeg and avchd is awesome. If they would add mjpeg2000, you could get much, much better images for the same bitrate than mjpeg.

Finally, it would be super cool if camera makers would start offering wider aspect ratios, like 2:1. 16:9 is great, but with all those extra pixels in the 4K sensor, why not give filmmakers some of the typical movie aspect ratios to play with? Forcing them to crop in post waste the incredible resolution of modern cameras.

Overall, I must say that if Panasonic addressed the issues above, this would be an amazing camera. An incredible step forward in the video market, which is astonishingly lame generally.

Hope this is helpful! Sorry about any typos

5 Stars Finally, a “Legacy” MF lens enabler, from a great company!
I’m a 30 year former “Kodachrome”, “Ektachrome” then Fuji film user, that has directed TV commercials, and done advertising/editorial photography first in San Diego, then (late 1980s- Los Angeles). I’ve been enjoying HD video

30fps with a point & shoot LUMIX DMC TZ5 Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5K 9MP Digital Camera with 10x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Black) for “behind the scenes” and “teaser” videos, and have been waiting

for the GH1 to hit the USA.

I’m amazed, and overwhelmed at the user friendly controls, screens, and have been enjoying using my many exotic Canon FD Aspherical/”L” lenses for stills, and “Feature” quality HD video/audio.

You will be hearing a great deal about this camera, and I’ll be sharing my work and probably doing workshops in the future.

Congrats, Panasonic, Amazon, Pros, and all consumers, because it’s affordable!

3 Stars Average picture quality and construction….
Without elaborating too much I’ll just say I was mostly disappointed.

Primarily I was annoyed at the sloppy lens mount which twisted/clicked everytime I zoomed…Started out at about 1/32″ play and increased to 1/16″…Then I started receiving lens connection errors…

The autofocus was back focusing and even manually adjusting for that the resolution was just average for a $1500 camera…Even in RAW…Obviously I had a somewhat duff camera but with reading many reviews and some of them mentioning the loose lens mount I decided to abandon any further testing and just send it back…

Because of the lens problems I didn’t bother with any videos as this aspect of the camera is secondary to me…

I did really like the rubberized body,the articulating screen and the VERY bright/sharp EVF…For a non DSLR that view is Superb in this stage of EVF development…I also like the whole 4/3 concept but I’ll wait until a GH2 and try again…

kd

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