Micro Four Thirds ergonomic champ

I've been a amateur mirrorless camera shooter ever since they first came out and have owned 6 different Panasonic, Olympus, and Sony models. I primarily used them with legacy lenses for still photography, but I purchased the GH-5 in order to concentrate on video for awhile. I've only had it for a 3 or 4 weeks, but can give some initial impressions. This is a big camera, much bigger than my Sony a7ii full-frame, but it is perfect for my big hands. Ergonomically, it is the best camera I have ever owned. It has 10 programmable function buttons that are nicely spaced out and easy to identify while your eye is at the viewfinder. It also has two programmable control wheels, a joystick, and a dial control, so you can set this beast up exactly how you want it for very quick operation, no matter what type of shooting you are doing. Then you can save those settings in 5 different configuration memories. The viewfinder is the best I've seen and a big improvement over the a7ii's, which I never liked. The fully-articulating touch screen is also a big deal from a functional standpoint, especially for video. Manual focus legacy lens shooters will like this camera. It's very easy to assign the focal length to ensure proper stablization; and focus peaking and the ability to rapidly move the magnified focus box around the screen with the joystick makes getting an exact focus very easy. It has a 30-fps 6K still photo mode (6000 x 3375 pixel images) for action capture. One of the few things about this camera that I don't like is a bit of shutter lag in this mode that forces you to anticipate when to shoot. It doesn't seem to affect the single shot modes. Another thing I don't like is that the jpegs seem a little soft. The RAW files, on the other hand, are excellent and require very little editing. It's odd because other than the softness, the jpegs and RAWs look very similar ... much more so than any other camera I've owned. I suspect that Panasonic does some very nice default processing on the RAWs. Battery life is good, but not great, so buy a couple extra batteries. I've had good luck with Wasabi batteries. They function as well as OEM and maintain their performance for at least the 2.5 years or so that I keep a particular model. The camera has a lot of modes that use internal processing for things such as post-focus, focus stacking, and multi-shot sharpness and noise reduction. I haven't tried them all, but what I've seen so far is impressive. The shot of the Christmas lights below, which is straight out of the camera, was hand-held using the Intelligence-auto mode. It automatically took a burst of about 5-shots to produce this jpeg. Looks pretty good to me. That's about all I can say about the GH-5 at this point. I'll be posting shots to my Flickr photostream in an album dedicated to the GH5. If you like to check out my images, Google "Rick Bolin". My photostream will be among the first few hits.Read full review

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