
Phil Rhodes takes a close look at the $3199 full-frame mirrorless Panasonic LUMIX S1II and is impressed at what he finds.
You have to be fairly experienced now to remember a time when most stills cameras weren’t hybrid cameras. The term has been much used to describe things just such as Panasonic’s S1II, where the moving image features seem to have occupied just as much of the designers’ brain space as the stills. Those designers seem aware that the S1II enters a mature market with a range of massively capable options, and therefore crammed in features like a tourist jumping on an undersized carry-on before a two-week getaway.
Towards the higher end
The S1II is at the higher end of Panasonic’s Lumix range, a full-frame device with an L-mount. The wide adoption of the L-mount is a very good thing. The camera is seen here with the also-new Lumix S 24-105mm f/4 zoom, which, having been built for that short mount, is a compact and handy item given its spec. The S1II is the video-oriented option, so the L-mount is also compatible, via adaptation, with almost anything else from the world of moviemaking.
Storage is via SD card or CFExpress, or a plug-in SSD, though turning a compact camera into a hydra of accessories is often a shame. The faster options open up high-capability modes, and CFExpress is not an inexpensive format, so potential S1II owners will need to factor storage into the budget. Still, the capability is not wasted: some of the S1II’s more enticing capabilities are the high frame rates, up to 240fps in HD and 120 in 4K.
That’s enough overcranking to make a 90s music video director eat his Burberry cap in a fit of slow motion pique. The sensor which makes that possible is about 6K wide, sensibly eschewing sheer pixel count in favour of sensitivity and high frame rates. The design is interesting: the company describes it as a “partially stacked” design, which is something the world has been moving toward for a while. The idea is to construct the sensor in layers, keeping the processing circuitry out of the way of the light-sensitive elements. Although “partially” could cover a lot of bases, the march of technology is welcome.
Compact and capable
The shell is small but solidly constructed, with the lack of a mirror box making for a diminutive design. It still looks like a capable piece of equipment, with no less than four dials on top, including two with coaxial rotary selectors. Set things up right, and all the key things are at your fingertips in a way that some larger cameras actually can’t do.
So the S1II is a brawny little item in both spec and build, and little isn’t a bad term to describe it - the chassis isn’t tiny, but it doesn’t give Incredible Hulk the way the S5 did at first glance. The capability of all that hardware is revealed, particularly, in the huge range of sensor size and frame rate combinations. There’s almost too many, with some crafty menu options to manage them. Inevitably, the user interface is labyrinthine, but a competitive feature set is always going to have that consequence.
There’s Frame.io integration. There’s proxy recording, with LUTs. Users can shoot Panasonic’s V-Log brightness encoding and watch a normalised on the display. There are various levels of anamorphic desqueeze. None of this is new or special, but these are all very fine boxes to check for such a highly portable camera, and they reduce the number of boxes that we find Velcroed haphazardly to the average rig.
An embarrassment of features
As with the rest of the camera, there is almost an embarrassment of features intended to assist focussing, with magnification, edge-enhancement, absolute distance and depth-of-field displays. For those of us who aren’t intending to put the S1II at the centre of a camera department, meanwhile, autofocus will be key.
Panasonic was perhaps a little late to the world of phase-detect AF. There’s touch tracking of both faces and features, which makes focus about as easy as it is possible for it to be on such a big chip. The focus encoder on the 24-105 is not a 1:1 encoding and the acceleration might feel a little too flighty for some tastes, but again it does all the things it needs to do and a few more besides.
Picture quality
Pictures are always difficult to discuss objectively. V-Log works nicely (raw workflows were not tested as part of this review). The commonly available LUTs create pictures that are perhaps not quite as smooth, painterly, and downright cinematic as those from Canon or Fujifilm (the latter being something of a sleeper hit in colorimetry). Such a conclusion can never be anything other than subjective, though, and we are way past the point where there is more than enough highlight range and noise floor to create almost any imaginable look.
As with many 6K, full-frame cameras, there is a lot of picture, with plenty spare to correct exposure and framing mistakes (the IBIS is pretty good, too).
Conclusion: The price is right-ish
This is a very, very capable camera. The caveat, of course, is that the S1II requires the dedication of a moderately large pile of gold. At $3199 / £2899, it is priced to compete with higher-end options particularly from the likes of Sony; it’s more money than an A7s III. The comparison with a hypothetical A7S IV will be interesting. $700 / £400 can be saved by going for the economised S1IIE, although the improved sensor in the S1II seems worth paying for.
The stand-out here is the very complete feature set, bolstered further by today’s firmware release. To be like this at launch suggests some real application of effort from the engineering team. The question is really whether the beefy hardware and completionist’s feature set justifies the price. Certainly there will be people who need a camera to be everything to everyone; whether that works for anyone in particular is up to that person.
tl;dr
- The Panasonic LUMIX S1II is a full-frame mirrorless camera priced at $3199, designed with hybrid photography and videography in mind, featuring advanced video capabilities and a compact build.
- It sports an L-mount, ensuring compatibility with a wide range of lenses and accessories, while offering high frame rates of up to 240fps in HD and 120fps in 4K.
- The camera includes numerous features for focus assistance, including phase-detect autofocus, touch tracking for faces and features, and a complex menu system for managing various sensor size and frame rate combinations.
- Picture quality is impressive, with robust highlight range and noise performance, although the color rendition may not match some competitors like Canon or Fujifilm.
Tags: Production Review Cameras Panasonic LUMIX
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