New Panasonic GH5 Official

[Steve Bleasdale]

Good points Noa however today's wedding I needed auto focus badly, the bride walked down the isle so quickly it was unreal and the Auto focus footage followed her brilliantly on the 80d. I would have struggled manually as the safety net little hfg30 camcorder switched off for some reason! So my only footage was spot on from 80d. Anyways all to our own I have no doubt all will be good with gh5 it does look awesome and a few niggles will be sorted. I may get the gh5 anyways as waiting for canon 6dii will be ages and I need another camera and that's the best around at moment and another c100 is to expensive ! Gh5 at that price great guns.

[Ron Evans]

The GH5 auto focus is fine if you turn OFF the Custom AF settings, set the area size for AF on the target and you can also move this while its recording with the joystick using your thumb. In this mode it performs as good or better than any of my Sony camcorders ( which occasional like to decide for themselves what to focus on !!!) There are also examples of this approach on the WEB but I guess problems are more newsworthy. I normal shoot in the theatre so will be in manual focus but playing with the GH5 in the last week outside I have used this approach of setting the auto focus size to a small box, Custom AF OFF and in this mode it works great.

[Steve Burkett]

Originally Posted by Ron Evans

The GH5 auto focus is fine if you turn OFF the Custom AF settings, set the area size for AF on the target and you can also move this while its recording with the joystick using your thumb. In this mode it performs as good or better than any of my Sony camcorders ( which occasional like to decide for themselves what to focus on !!!) There are also examples of this approach on the WEB but I guess problems are more newsworthy. I normal shoot in the theatre so will be in manual focus but playing with the GH5 in the last week outside I have used this approach of setting the auto focus size to a small box, Custom AF OFF and in this mode it works great.

Certainly Panasonics auto focus isn't as good as Canon or even some Sony cameras. It's a week link in an otherwise excellent camera and perhaps the biggest issue to be addressed for future upgrades. That said, I think it's been blown way out of proportion. It's not as if Panasonic touted huge developments in that area; they didn't make any promises and I didn't expect to be relying on AF for key moments.

Whilst good AF is useful, I feel some rely on it too much. Canon's AF may not hunt as much as much for focus, but it doesn't always lock on the right subject. I've seen plenty of videos made with Canon DSLR where focus wasn't accurate. Still, with a lack of focus peaking, I can't fault Canon DSLR users from relying on AF.

No camera is perfect, but I can forgive a poor AF when I have 4K 50p, dual card slot, focus peaking, 5 axis IS, 10 bit 4:2:2 4K and a tonne of useful video features, all for a price below £2000. Is there room for improvement, Yes, but then I could say that about any camera.

[Noa Put]

It's not as if Panasonic touted huge developments in that area; they didn't make any promises and I didn't expect to be relying on AF for key moments.

Actually they did and that is what caused all the commotion, check out below videos:

This one starting at min 33

YouTube (Short URL)

And this one starting min 6 (reporter says at a certain point - around the 8 min mark ("how is the autofocusing compared to that from canon" and the guy answers "it's going to be one of the best out there")

YouTube (Short URL)

[Steve Burkett]

Okay never saw that - I really only went by the press release, which didn't make much of the AF to be honest. So the AF backlash is largely their fault. Or at least the fault of some of their marketing people. Thankfully I hadn't got my hopes raised prior to getting the camera to be too bothered by AF not being that great. Though if someone tells me something is going to be the best there is out there, I tend to think of it as sales pitch than tech talk anyway.

[Noa Put]

I didn't know about these either until someone send me these videos, it doesn't look like a simple salespitch to me as they made it sound like it was failsafe, when you tell a reporter that the camera doesn't get confused at all in autofocus then you can expect that info to be picked up by a lot of vloggers who will trash the camera afterwards which eventually happened. I"m guessing they had instructions to make it sound a lot better then it actually is not realizing what consequences that would have. One good thing came out of it though and that is Panasonics promised to improve the autofocus probably with future firmware upgrades.

[Ron Evans]

I think including the Custom AF for video was likely a mistake as it is far too easy to get poor results with playing around with those custom settings. With 225 point continuous AF, and Custom AF OFF , the GH5 is about like my Sony camcorders if about 10% slower to lock. ( gauged by looking at the peaking ) It has the advantage over the camcorders in that the areas used by the AF can be set and also moved around realtime too on the touch screen or with joystick. The smaller the area selected of course the more consistent the result. AF continuous is not something I will use in my application and touch focus either on the LCD screen or the WiFi app work great.

I think it is always important to choose a camera for the features you need at the price your prepared to pay. For me it was UHD60P, dual cards slots, full size HDMI, remote app with touch focus and exposure controls and the ability to get a choice of lenses. The GH5 meets all of these.