Panasonic Lumix S9 Review – Full Frame Compact Winner For Creators

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Hi this Jay P. Morgan. And this is Kenneth Merrill. Today as The Slanted Lens we’re here in Japan, we’re in Osaka.

But not only in Japan, which I do absolutely love, but we just got the new camera from Panasonic, this is the S9, a 24 megapixel small version, vlogging camera from Panasonic. We’re pretty excited about it. Yeah, this is very similar to the S5 II which we love, but put into this smaller body. It’s still an L-mount, so you can use all of your L-mount glass on it, which is awesome. That really kind of sets it apart from other compact street style cameras that are out there. This camera is very, very targeted at content creators, people who want to shoot and then share their stuff online as quickly as possible. And Panasonic is trying to make it easy to eliminate the editorial step in between. So you can just go straight from your camera to sharing it on Instagram as fast as you want.

So they have come up with an App called Lumix Lab. That Lumix Lab App allows you to shoot and pair your camera with the app on your phone. So now you shoot images that can go automatically to your phone, or you can transfer them and you can make edits to them. You can put LUTs back and forth between the camera and your phone. Which allows you to shoot, edit and push it out. Well, they’re saying shoot and share. There’s no editing. But it allows you to be able to create content and get it out as fast as possible. They were claiming 30 seconds. We might put that to the test. Yes, we’ll see if our older, less technical, technologically savvy minds can do that.

But anyway, one other thing to note is the camera does shoot the open gate and open gate, that’s kind of a default mode depending on what you select. Well, we’ll get into that later. But with that open gate mode you can shoot for your 16 x 9 and your vertical 9 x 16 framing a little easier, which is nice.

One other thing to note is it does come in four different fun colors. I have the fun black and I have the fun blue but then Julene has a fun crimson red. And then there’s an olive green option which I would have liked but they didn’t have any. Yeah, there you go. So great different colors.

It really is meant to be a small camera. It is very small in your hand. We have a grip on it here from Small Rig which allows you to hold it a little better. But I think the genius of this camera is just that it is very small. You can carry it with you. It is very much a street camera, which allows you to shoot and be very stealth with it.

Great lenses, we have a small pancake lens here. They just announced this 26mm f/8 pancake lens, which is super fun and manual focus. And they also announced an 18-40mm f/4.5-6.3 lens that will be coming later.

It is also very small but has a little more versatility, autofocus and things like that. But you can still use any L-mount glass which is so, as you said, is really super important. So let’s break this camera down. Let’s see what it does. Let’s do some tests. Let’s see exactly how we can use it. And let’s get started. See what we can do.

Really fast, how much does it cost? Oh, $1,500, $1,500. So it is very competitive with the X100. It very much is. Which is a very popular camera. I think this is in the same category but has some advantages because you can change the lenses. You have just some advantages with this workflow that you don’t see in that camera platform. So let’s get out there and test it to see we got. Let’s do it.

A great thing about this camera is you have beautiful picture quality. It’s got the same sensor as the S5 II. So you just get a beautiful image as we’re shooting it yesterday you could see it. It was just gorgeous. It’s really hard to find a camera at this price point, $1,500 price point, that has a nice full frame sensor like this one does. It shoots phenomenal images.

I love the reds in these Panasonic cameras. The blues are super clear. It’s just really nice. Especially if you’re trying to get into a full frame camera for the first time. I don’t, again, I don’t think you can beat this for the price.

For the price point I think this is a great, great price point for a full frame camera. You should look at the reds in some of the umbrellas here of the Miko-san. Yeah, the Miko-san, Miko-san we shot her underneath the viaduct. It’s just beautiful color. I’ve always loved Panasonic color, this camera is delivering just like the S5 II did. So in that way it’s incredible.

But you obviously are losing out on some things that the S5 II has. So those begin with an EVF. Yeah, no EVF on this. You’re just relying on the back screen, which to me is kind of a big deal. I always shoot with an EVF. So it’s been a really hard adjustment for me. But to a lot of other people probably not. Especially the younger crowd. They’re used to shooting on their phone. And if you’re just, if this is your first more like professional camera purchase, if you’re trying to get into content creation and want something nicer and you’re used to shooting on your phone, you’ll be totally comfortable just using the back of the screen. And I think that’s the market, that’s the group that this is marketed to that are used to shooting looking at the screen. And that’s certainly something that, for a lot of people, it doesn’t make the big difference anymore. But so, but I do miss the EVF as well.

So there are some things ergonomically about this. It does not have this little ridge here which I have to have for my fingers to be able to have something to hold on to. This is a Small Rig kind of setup that went on here which allows me to have something to grip onto. That made a huge difference. So I can hold this camera really confidently and not feel like I’m going to drop it, like it’s going to slide out of my hand. You are missing a lot of buttons and dials that the S5 II has. Again, the S5 II is a much more, like professionally oriented camera with buttons for almost everything. Which is one of the things I love about it. With this, you’re going back to the more minimalist design. You have one wheel here on the top, and then you use the back wheel for selecting some settings on the fly. I do wish it had a third wheel here for your thumb to help with either the shutter or the aperture. It doesn’t have that. You have to rely a lot more on clicking this and then scrolling through the settings there.

So if you’re more of a tactile oriented person and you need all the dials, you might end up looking elsewhere. But for someone again, that’s shooting on a more minimal basis, or if you’re shooting like aperture or shutter priority a lot, this camera is going to work out fine. And I actually shot shutter priority a lot yesterday. And it was kind of fun to just treat it more like a point and shoot. You know, shutter priority, you set the shutter speed you want. And then just walk around and click to your liking. I know, I shot everything aperture priority. Really? Well, I want to choose the depth of field for the shutter, and then let the shutter go. You know, if you’re really into touchscreen, which so many people are, I mean, I work with a lot of students and my students will look at this camera, and they’ll just touch screen it to death and they won’t miss those buttons at all, you know. It’ll be hit the Q button, touch that, touch and go, you know. It’s going to be a different experience for them. And it’s not going to all be done here. I mean, you can do a lot of things with this wheel and that. But you can do so much with the touchscreen as well. And I think that’s really the interface. And this has made us to be able to be intuitive for a generation where touchscreens and no EVF is going to be natural way to use the camera.

That said and probably the last note on this, but the menu system is fully robust. It’s just like the menu from the S5 II with a few extra options for this camera specifically. But there is some crossover there where you’re talking to people who are probably just getting into a system this beefy, and they’ll have to navigate some complicated menus at times. I do want to just add, and we mentioned in the opener, but just to add the fact that it is an L-mount camera so you can change the lenses. I mean, I’ve got a 28-200mm on. Kenneth’s got a 20-60mm. They got the little 26mm pancake, you know. So, and there’s going to be others coming. There’s an 18-40mm that’s coming out. And Sigma has a great line of L-mount lenses that are very compact that are going to be perfect for this. And the Sigma will have that aperture ring on the lens, which really gives you aperture control with the lens. You can now assign this wheel up front for your shutter, which gives you some options. So having an L-mount and an interchangeable lens makes this camera way more useful than a fixed lens. Yeah, I think that’s super important.

Yeah, again, $1,500 is getting into, getting you into a beautiful front full frame lens, interchangeable lens system with L-mount lenses, which are all really great. I think it’s a good option for the price point and really an underserved market for people that need something a little more robust than say an X100 S. Yep.

One thing we’d like to talk about is the stabilization, which of course, Panasonic has the best in the business. By far the best in the business. When the S5 II was released the stabilization was amazing. And this camera shares the same technology. You see it live right now as we’re walking. It’s just beautiful. It’s so smooth. We compared it to Canon and to Nikon. No one compares to the stabilization we’ve seen with the Panasonic cameras. In fact, with this camera you can kind of, there we go, we’re going to jog and stabilize. Yes, we’re going to jog all the way back because it’s lunchtime. And we want to go eat. Do you think this is actually working that well? I don’t know, I’m curious, probably looking really great. As any jogging footage with a handheld camera would look, better than any camera would look. Actually, probably is better than any other camera. Oh, I’m sure of that. So we’ll probably get run over by a bicycle here as we cross the street. Good thing, you got that little thumb grip there isn’t it. I know that thumb grip does kind of save it. I think it would be impossible to do without it. I agree. So stabilization is pretty amazing.

So really the genius of this camera is a quick workflow that allows you to shoot, not have to edit and to post, which means you’re using LUTs. So for photographers LUTs is probably a concept they don’t understand. It’s a preset, basically. It’s a preset, you can apply to your image in camera. Which means you don’t have to edit it, immediately send it out to your phone and you can post it.

Now they’ve got a really nice setup for using this. They have a LUT button on the back of the camera that gives you immediate access to all of those and you can load 39 LUTs up front. And the way that I see this working, it will take a little bit of work on the front end. I imagine if you’re a content creator, you have a bunch of presets you love. You take those in Photoshop, you export a LUT from Photoshop, which is a feature they already have. You load them into the app and then transfer them to the camera. So it’s a few steps. But once they’re there, the benefit is you are shooting in, you’re shooting the images that you’re going to deliver. You don’t have to do any editorial afterwards. You can expose for that LUT that you’re going to use and then just load them back onto the Lumix Lab App and then they’re immediately ready to share.

So this morning, I was shooting the sun coming up and I’m looking at the scene. And I’m just switching from different presets, LUTs on the back of the camera in stills and also in video. I’d hit one that was really built around V-log, which is a 640 ISO. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be in 100 ISO. So I picked the ones, I had one called window, 100 ISO. So I like to look. I can shoot my still images, I can switch over to video. I have a video there, there was a crush, kind of a cine look. I really liked the way that was looking with that lighting situation in the morning. I played with that, shot some of those and then just immediately can send that to your phone. You can post it immediately. So it’s a really good system. And I think they’re doing something innovative here that other manufacturers haven’t really touched yet, because we’re just so used to shooting, editing, and then posting. And again, they’re trying to take the editing step out.

So it turns your camera a little bit into a phone. Yeah, a little bit, almost, a little bigger though. Bigger than your phone, slightly larger. And a 24 megapixel full frame sensor, which is a little nicer than your phone.

So to go with this camera, Panasonic has announced this 26mm pancake lens. This thing is super small and lightweight. I actually thought it was like an adapter. It’s like a lens cap. And it looks like lens cap. It actually doesn’t have a lens cap. So that’s worth noting. It is manual focus and a fixed aperture of f/8. So it’s a very interesting lens in that it is super lightweight, super compact. It keeps this camera very, very compact because you can drop in your pocket. It is manual focus. But it’s f/8, which gives you a lot of depth of field. With the peaking you can see where your focus is at. Which is a great way to use it. You can also punch in so you can see what’s in focus. But it’s a very inexpensive lens. It’s very rudimentary.

I will say the things that I wish were different about this lens is I wish it had more than just one lens marking. It currently only has an infinity symbol, which isn’t even at the end of the range, by the way. So watch out there. I wish I had more lens markings for the focus. Frankly, I wish it had autofocus, but they were really trying to make this as light and compact as possible. So if you’re looking for something you can just throw on and have ready, maybe set it to the right focus and then hold it out in front of you to film yourself, if that’s, if you’re doing basic stuff like that this might be lens for you.

So here’s what I would do if I owned this lens. What I would do is I would, at my house, I’d set up some objects at 10 feet and five feet away. And I would actually take a sharpie or something and mark the lens. I would focus in on those and make sure they’re super sharp. And then mark that point on this lens. Because if you can add your own little manual marks to this, it’ll be a lot easier to shoot with on the street really quickly. Because then you can walk by someone and just kind of snap, say where they’re about six feet away, snap to that point on your lens and shoot without having to look at the screen. So at f/8 You can probably hit that pretty easily if you have those marks because f/8 is a lot of focus. Yeah, yeah, that probably makes sense.

So the S9 really is built on the fact that you can shoot all your video in open gate which gives you the option to go in and crop later for deliverables. It’s nice because then you have the full width and the full height for all of your video. And then you can crop either in Lumix Lab or what other, whatever other editing software you’re using. If you are planning to just shoot, send it to Lumix Lab, crop it and send it on Instagram, you are going to have to frame everything in the dead center for 9 x 16. You’re going to have to work right to the center. You really are. And that’s, you see that a lot these days where people are working vertically in the center. You can move it around when you’re really working out of the center.

But given that open gate gives you the ability to crop in gives you a nice image that way. But also it has that light version of the MP4 lite. Yeah. And that has a much lighter data rate than the other codecs that they’re using. But you are limited to basically one setting on that. It’s MP4 Lite shoots 50 megabits per second, which is decent, but it’s only going to do 30 P or 25 P if you’re in the PAL setting on the frequency.

And it’s 4k. So no 6k, No Full HD, no 24 frames. You’re very limited to that. I do wish they had a 24 frames setting at the very least. I don’t understand that choice. But maybe that feels like an easy firmware update. But the whole idea of that workflow is a codec that is really compressed enough that you’re not getting large files.

It’s really made to create something, you get it on the web, whatever your application is, and not huge files you have to store and deal with. It’s not, it’s not over shooting and then cutting things down. It’s just shooting for exactly the application. And it’s really meant to be used with those built in Real Time LUTs. Because with that data rate, you’re not going to be able to take V-log and transform it into something else very elegantly on your phone. So you want to bake in whatever LUT you’re using, and transfer it to your phone and then post it right away. Yep. So that’s the open gate. That’s really kind of what’s foundational for most of the things you’re going to have with this camera.

So the Panasonic S5 II had a really fun function called Real Time LUT. Which is super useful if you want log you can put a LUT on top of it. Oh yeah, super useful, especially for like when we shot the episodes in Japan last time we were here. I shot everything with this really nice V-log LUT already applied. So I didn’t have to grade everything by hand. But it still had all the dynamic range that V-log has.

But now they’ve upgraded that functionality in a few ways. The first way is that you can load 39 LUTs into this camera, as opposed to 10 into the S5 II. And they’ve also given us a little LUT button right here on top, which allows you just to scroll through these things really quickly. You can just look at each LUT. Look at the situation you’re in going, I think warm sky is it. Actually it’s not. But I think the best LUT here is the one called window. Is this a shameless plug for your window pack. And of course, Retro 709 is not bad. But the really nice one is called Japan Skyline.  A new LUT by Jay P Morgan. It looks just like window. There’s some nuances in there.

What’s nice about these is you can design LUTs inside the Lumix Lab App, and you can tell it what the baseline picture profile is. So, I can snap a photo in a standard picture profile on this camera, load it into Lumix Lab, tweak it a little bit to my liking, create a LUT out of that, and then tell it this LUT is based on standard. Now when I load that LUT into here, it will actually automatically change the base picture profile as I select the LUTs. So, for instance, this one is based on V-log. So you’ll notice the base ISO for this LUT is 640 ISO. But if we change the LUT to Japan Skyline, that’s based on standard, so the base ISO is 100 ISO. So it does change your baseline.

It changes whatever you built your LUT on. It’s going to change it and that is for those settings. I really feel like this is, in a lot of ways, just replacing picture profiles, which I like. Because I think LUTs have a lot more flexibility. They’re a lot easier to access, especially with this awesome little button. I mean, it is cool that you can toggle through these and find a LUT that works for what you’re doing right now. But you can stack them right, put more than one LUT on. Yeah, if you actually go into, if you set it to one of the my picture profile settings under picture profile, which is separate from Real Time LUT, you can stack two LUTs on top of each other.

And another functionality of the camera has is you can dial in the opacity of a LUT. I honestly actually don’t know what that’s for. Because I feel like if you, if you’ve designed LUTs that you like you’ve already set them to look the way you want to. I don’t know why you would dial that back. But I suppose if you’re using someone else’s LUT, maybe it’s a little too punchy, a little too contrasty or something for the scene, maybe you want to pull it back just a little bit. But really the genius of this, the thing that works for this is the fact that you can, with this LUT button, get right on here and you can just go through and find a LUT that works for you. You can create LUTs in the app. You can then import into the camera so you have these different looks. And that gives you the option to be able to select LUTS really quickly. Same with stills. It’s important to note for still photographers who maybe don’t understand the concept of LUT is basically a preset. It’s a preset of color, contrast, sharpness, all those kinds of things you’ve created in the app that you then import into the camera. So if you just substitute the word LUT with preset, then that’s exactly what it is.

I will say the difficulty I have with this is, I feel like photos are always the environments are always so different, you’re going to end up grading differently. It’s hard to find a LUT that kind of works every single time. But if it were me, what I would do is I would create a few LUTs based on general circumstances like sunny exterior, cloudy exterior, interior, whatever and then you have a few go to LUTs that are going to get you close to the look you generally like in those circumstances. Another thing I would also look at is if you’re a big film buff, which I know a lot of people are, a lot of people who are using like the X100 series love the film simulations. So you could actually take your Mastin labs film emulators, create a LUT out of those in Photoshop and just bring all of those film emulations into this camera. I actually think that’s probably the best application of this. If you want that kind of look it’d be awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a look at LUTs on the S9.

So there are two digital zoom features in the S9 and the first one we’ll show you is a simple crop zoom. Now this is basically just a digital crop. It’s definitely a digital crop is what it is. But what is nice about this is you can go in and set it and you can tell it the minimum file size you want. So this is a 24 megapixel sensor, which frankly would not be my starting point for any sort of digital cropping.

If it was a 50 megapixel, sure, it’d be a much different story. But at least you can decide whether it’s 12 or 6 megapixels. For some posts that’s going to be plenty. Yeah, exactly. If you’re posting to Instagram, you might be able to get away with 2.5. It seems small to me. So small to me. 6 megapixels would probably, would make sense. So if we select a six megapixel minimum file size, and then we back out of this menu, we turn this on, the 28 millimeter end of this lens, we can actually use the touchscreen here and zoom it into a 51mm.

No further, it keeps going further. So this, the wide end of this lens turns into a 55 millimeter, because of the crop zoom. We’re on a 28-200mm, so this is going to turn into, like it becomes a 396 millimeter at the other end. Because you’re essentially using a quarter, just cropping in to a quarter. Now that feels like maybe a useful feature if I’m shooting on the pancake, 26 millimeter lens, but I want to have tighter framing, maybe I use the 12 megapixel setting and get a 50 out of it. Or even that new lens they have coming out the 18-40mm, was it 18-40mm? Yeah, that’s perfect, great for that lens, because that could turn into an 18-60mm or it gives you just enough reach to make that into the portrait lens.

Now what’s really fun is if we turn crop zoom off, we go to the hybrid zoom setting. Now we’re going to set this to display a composite focal length. What this is going to do is as we zoom in on the lens, it combines the physical zoom with the digital zoom to create a seamless zoom through the entire range, all the way up to 396mm. That’s really, that’s crazy.

So yeah, you’re combining the two. So when we’re like at 28mm, we’re really, it’s at 28mm. Yeah, but when we go to 50mm it’s already using the digital. So this is 56mm. Now, it’s already cropping in a little bit. Yeah, we go to 100mm. It’s cropping into 134mm for it. Yeah, like if you had this feature on a really large sensor, that’d be pretty cool for sports kinds of things, what have you. Oh, yeah, totally.

Now, if we switch it to video mode, what’s really fun about this mode is it sets the limit for the hybrid zoom at the recording resolution. So this is a 24 megapixel sensor that we’re recording in 4k, which is less than 24 megapixels, which means at our wide end, it will be effectively a 309 millimeter. So it gives us a little bit.

So it gives us yeah, an extra, you know, 50% more in terms of focal length. But we’re not losing any resolution for our final deliverable. Seems to still be 4k even if it was 309mm. Yeah, so yeah, that’s 50% more. That’s significant. It’s still 4k. And again, it just gives, like you can do these really fun long zooms, you know. If you bought this camera with that kit lens they announced that turns your kit lens into an 18-60mm, which is really great range for content. You can turn that on and off, and that changes that into like two different lens choices, really.

I find this really interesting when it comes to video, because I think that makes a lot of sense. You’re not really, well you are losing some quality as you punch in, the noise is going to get a little bigger, you’re not going to have quite as much dynamic range, but you’re staying 4k throughout. When it comes to stills you really just are now shrinking the megapixels. In which to me, I mean, you can always crop in later, which is fine.

Yeah, I feel pretty similarly about it. I remember when I first got the a7S the OG one, and you could do full frame recording or crop recording and I would actually shoot, I was shooting events at the time. I would shoot entire events with one lens because I could have a 50mm and an 85mm in one thing and just a quick couple clicks and it’d be going back and forth. So I’ve always kind of liked that cropping in feature for video because you don’t need all the resolution. With photo, the Leica Q2 and Q3 do this. They are very high resolution sensors and they have a fixed 28 millimeter lens. So it’s actually really nice to have a super compact camera that can effectively have multiple focal lengths and you’re compromising the resolution. But if you can stay above, you know, 20 megapixels you’re still in good shape. With this sensor it’s only 24 megapixels to begin with. I’m a little less inclined to crop in at all. Yeah, when in photo it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Because you can always crop in, in the app whenever you’re posting. You have all those options when you go to post. In video it makes a lot of sense. I think it’s really interesting. It’s an interesting application for content creators. I think it’d be a great tool because it’s going to give you a range with a lens that gives you more options, less gear you have to haul, it just makes it easier to work.

And think about it in those terms, thinking of this as truly an entry level camera, you get this camera, you get the 18-40mm, which is what we recommend for this. And you’re set to go for a lot of different things because of features like this that allow you flexibility.

We been shooting the 28-200mm on this, which has been pretty fun. Because it just went to 309mm in the video mode and still in 4k. So, all right, great features, something to look at and understand. You just need to set it up and know how to use it. Once you get used to it I think it really can be really useful for you.

So let’s wrap this up. I have a good sense of who this camera is for. Who do you think this camera is for? Well, Panasonic is obviously marketing this for content creators. And I think that is on the mark. I mean, they’ve designed all these feature sets into the camera that are kind of unique, and they are geared towards people that need to just, like get the stuff onto their phone and post as quickly as possible. I do think it’s for newer content creators. If you’ve been in this a while, if you’re like us, Jay P, I mean, we need something that’s more robust, we’re doing a lot of different things. And this doesn’t quite have the feature set or the ergonomics for that. But if you’re coming from a phone, if you have basically been making stuff on your phone for a year and you want to buy your first nice camera, so you can up your game. Then this is going to be a good choice. I see that as the market. I see, especially because I work with so many students, I see someone who wants a nicer camera, but they want a small camera, they’re really not wanting to commit to a large platform. They want to be able to shoot and edit and post or shoot and post really quickly. I see this camera being that. It’s a great walk around camera when it comes to shooting any kind of street photography and those kinds of things because it is so small and compact. I see this appealing to a market that really wants smaller cameras, they want smaller lenses, they’re really not into big anymore. It’s so funny to me because I feel like all of a sudden we’re back to the small point and shoot cameras that we kind of evolved away from. But now we’re coming back to, but they are small point and shoots. It’s a full frame sensor, beautiful sensor, but it’s a small form factor, but a beautiful image.

Yeah, I think that the issue you run into with bigger cameras is they’re just kind of a pain to carry around. So do you can pair this with the small sigma prime or with the 18-40mm lens or the 20-60mm even. It’s a light compact package you can take anywhere and then you can shoot your content anywhere. I will say the one drawback for content creators with this camera is recording limits. If you’re shooting in 6k you’re limited to 10 minute segments. If you shooting in 4k, you can shoot 15 minute segments and then HD is 20 minute segments. But you’re not going to be shooting events or long form things. It’s not an interview camera. Quick kinds of things. You can, if it cuts at 10 minutes, you can just start rolling immediately afterwards. So it’s not going to like burn out, at least as far as we know. We haven’t tested it in, you know tests. I would guess you would just continue to shoot.

You can continue to shoot. But I think really it is a camera that is made for quick interviews, quick video pieces, some great stills and getting into it right, I mean we are talking to 60 second content. So yeah, I think that’s the market. But I do see it as a camera that a younger generation is going to gravitate to as they’re still photography or their video camera, because it does have great codecs. It’s got the ability to shoot great videos. So I see that being a market that’s going to do really well for this camera. I agree. Alright, so there’s a look at this camera. You get to choose a color you want and keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’!