Panasonic Presents the New GH2

Panasonic has just unveiled its replacement for the Lumix GH1—you guessed it—the GH2. To hang onto its place at the top-end of the manufacturer's range, The GH2 has been loaded with new functions, many of which are taken straight from the G2. It's also got a brand new sensor.

The new sensor boasts 16 effective Megapixels. However, like the GH1, but unlike Panasonic's G and GF cameras, the GH2 has a multi-aspect sensor. This means it's bigger than a 4/3"-format sensor, measuring approximately 14 mm wide instead of 13 mm, and with 18.3 Megapixels rather than 16 Megapixels. This allows the camera to gain width when switching to wide picture formats (3:2 and 16:9). The field of view therefore remains constant no matter what aspect ratio you select; in particular, wide angles remain wide in video mode. The sensor also features analogue-to-digital converters, which should keep noise under control and push up the usable sensitivity.

Need for Speed

As the new sensor can handle 50 frames per second at 1920 x 1080 pixels, it can record 1080i Full HD video at 50 fps (frame rate: 17 Mbps) or 1080p Full HD video at 24 fps. The latter option, with a frame rate of 23 Mbps, should provide better picture quality and make post-editing a little easier, as deinterlacing is tricky business for most editing software. However, Full HD footage is recorded in AVCHD, and will therefore require a powerful computer to be handled properly. Alternatively, for those of you with less-powerful computers, there's a 720p HD video mode at 60 fps, or a 720p HD mode at 30 fps, both of which record in Mjpeg. This should be easier to handle than AVCHD. Finally, the burst mode now stands at 5 fps in maximum resolution.

Another new feature brought by the upgraded sensor is that the GH2 receives 120 frames per second when focusing. The autofocus system therefore gets information twice as quickly as in the GH1, which should make focusing much quicker. Although previous G-series cameras were already very good in this field, a GH2 prototype we played around with was certainly much quicker than the GF1 we tried it out alongside.

Small Improvements

The rest of the changes are fairly minor. The GH2 has been treated to several of the basic features found in Panasonic's G2, notably a touchscreen. The electronic viewfinder has increased in size for improved magnification in 16:9 format (video mode). However, it's still an LCoS system, which isn't quite as pleasant as the impressive LCD in the Olympus Pen E-P2.

Note that you can use the HDMI output in shooting mode, which is particularly useful for video monitoring. However, there's still no audio output for monitoring the sound while it's recorded (built-in stereo microphone and microphone entry socket only). You'll therefore have to make do with a VU metre.

On the whole, the GH2 looks like a reasonable update of the GH1. We're keen to put its brand new sensor to the test, and we'd especially like to see whether those 3.75 µm photodiodes help boost sensitivity.

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