Panasonic GH5, a truly classy camera
The Panasonic GH5 is a detachable lens camera with an MFT (micro four thirds) 20Mp sensor that is highly thought-of in the vlogging and YouTube community as a superb, all-around video solution for producing high quality, 4K and Full-HD video content.
After using the GH5 for nearly six weeks, and mainly focusing on what I know best, stills photography, I think it’s a good choice for those who want a quality hybrid camera that shines in video quality and features, but also offers something for photo enthusiasts.
However, if you’re only interested in stills, then the GH5’s video prowess will be wasted on you.
You can record video beyond the 29.59-minute time limit that many other cameras have. Also, the GH5 is one of the few cameras out there to support 4K video at 60fps, bit rates up to a whopping 400mbps at 4K 25p and HDR recording.
I received my review GH5 with version 1.0 of the firmware onboard, but didn’t realise this until halfway through my testing. I updated the camera to the latest version 2.2 and this brought a lot of improvements, fixes and additional features including the ability to lock the display button, which I kept accidentally pressing.
Both the rear screen and EVF are stunningly clear and sharp and I had no problems seeing either during daylight shooting. The rear screen is fully articulating and can swing a full 180-degrees out to face you for selfies and vlogs. You can you also change the brightness, saturation, contrast and red/blue tint to your liking.
The touchscreen is really sensitive, in a good way, but when I first started using the camera the focus area kept moving to the top right of the screen. I thought at first there was a flaw, until I realised my nose was touching the screen, changing the focus point. Thankfully, you can turn touch completely off, or just turn off touch AF, which is what I did.
Image stabilisation with the Leica DG 12-60 f/2.8 lens is amazing in combination with the in-body stabilisation, which also makes this a good camera to adapt fully manual vintage lenses and still have stabilisation.
The GH5 has excellent focus peaking, that highlights the areas in focus making manual focusing much easier. The one area that didn’t impress me at first was the auto-focusing system but this improved when I updated to 2.2, albeit still not as good as other top end cameras I’ve tried.
The GH5 body is well built and is weather sealed. It has five custom function buttons; all the dials feel great and the overall ergonomics are good.
The grip is incredibly comfortable and the camera feels solid and secure to hold.
There are dual UHS-II SD slots with options to fill one card and then the other when the first is full, or save photos on one and video on the other, or jpegs on one and RAW on the other.
You can also save and restore camera settings to the SD card, which is great.
There’s lots of stills features packed into the GH5 including time lapse/animation and HDR.
Bracket modes include focus stacking where the camera can take a custom number of photos (up to 999) and incrementally change the focus point for each shot.
This is a technique used by landscape and macro photographers where they stack a series of shots and combine them into a single photo that’s in focus from foreground to background.
The camera doesn’t do the combining in body, but this is easily done in PhotoShop or Lightroom later.
The GH5 has a silent mode, using the electronic curtain which is ideal for taking photos in environments where you don’t want to be noticed.
There’s also 6K and 4K shooting modes where you take a video clip and extract 8MP photos (4K) at up to 60fps and 18MP (6K) images at up to 30fps.
There are various options to this shooting mode, but I settled on the start/stop method which means you start recording when you press the shutter and stop when you let the shutter go.
You then scroll through the images on the rear touch screen to effectively browse through the images to find the perfect shot.
This works really well and, although the images are not as good as a standard still shot, the flexibility more than makes up for this.
You can process RAW photos in the camera without a PC which is interesting. This gives you full control over the unprocessed images so that you can apply things that are automatically applied by the camera to jpegs.
Overall, the Panasonic GH5 is a pleasure to use, but it is bigger and heavier than any other micro four thirds I’ve used.
The UI does come with a steep learning curve but there’s such a wealth of features, especially for video shooters, most won’t mind.
Panasonic GH5: €1,929 (body only); and €2,259 (with 12-60mm F2.8-4 lens L-Kit).
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