The only advantage the GH1 enjoys in this respect would be in situations where you need continuous recording without monitoring the camera. If you double-tap the record button on the 5D it will stop and re-start with less than a second break in recording. I think it would be a pretty rare subject you'd shoot where there wasn't at least one second you could lose every 10-12 minutes. For long runs you just need big cards, 32Gb will give you over 90 minutes of footage.

So for long recording jobs, you have to tap the thing before the 10 minute limitation expires, and do so repeatedly over and over?

That's adorable.

Um....no....not everyone is experiencing this. Some people yeah....but not all.

As a brand new GH1 owner (as of 4pm yesterday) I can vouch for the scary streaking (even plaid! vert and hor in some cases). I'm currently letting it run a 'burn in period' (fresh battery and card and let r go for as long as it will go). To see if that does the trick like others have stated.

I'll report back when I'm through.... I'm praying that it goes away because I was testing the camera last night with a switar 26/1.1 and the low light results were really impressive (banding ignored). IF the banding 'burns off' I'll be one very happy camper. If not.... It will severely limit how I can use this camera!

Let us know the status.

It does seem to have improved after about 3 hours of solid use. It's not totally gone but harder to pick up on unless your watching for it under iso640. Still can be observed @ higher iso in scenes that lack detail. So it seems that giving it run time holds some water.

Banding mostly shows up in slight underexposed swaths in a scene (like dim lit walls). It seems to have a tough time handling this. If there is lots of detail in the scene it diminished greatly at higher iso (or possibly masks it well).

I'm feeling better... just need to stay conscious of it. 'workable' at this point.

Thanks for the scoop. If I get one, I'll probably let the thing run overnight.

=]

I tend to avoid projects that require long uninterrupted shots (they're as boring to shoot as they are to watch) so it really has little impact for me when shooting. For interviews I'm actually getting in the habit of tapping the button after every answer because it's nice to have each question in it's own clip and makes for a better workflow than when I used to let an interview run continuously on tape. Like I said, it's maybe a hassle for event videographers, but this clearly isn't the camera for that type of thing anyway so I don't see it as a big issue.

When I do interviews, sometimes the answer goes longer than 12 minutes, especially if it's a back-and-forth.

Also, it interrupts flow, something interesting could happen in that split second between question and answer, and I'd rather deal with one file per interviewee than multiple files per interviewee.

Any further update? Did it come back or go away some more?

well I'm not totally sure if it's actually diminishing of if I'm just starting to understand how to best use the cam... ;-) The good news is that banding can be avoided...

I'm basically finding that underexposed areas can be trouble as you approach the iso640 range. So it's actually better to go to a higher iso and minimize the underexposed areas by slightly overexposing and beat the image back in post if needed. In general this will diminish the banding. It's a tricky cam in low light but the results when handled right are quite amazing.

Thanks Jay.