I love my new Lumix G9 II. I previously had a G8 and two OM-1s. I primarily bought this camera to do videos, and it is a lot easier to do them on the G9 II than on the OM1. First of all, it has people detection. OM Systems OM-1 can detect animals, but not people. This ruined my last video when violin bows rose up into the video of the conductor, and stole the focus away.
The G9 II has a gazillion video modes, but strangely the internal mic will not to 24/96. It took me a long time to track the reason for it down. OM-1 at least tells you why a setting is unavailable. It is only available on the G9 II when using an external mic.
The other strangeness that I have not solved is that the audio tracks from the internal mic are not a stereo pair. They are separate tracks and must be combined in post processing. Also, the blank tracks for the other (allowed) stereo input are recorded as blank tracks, or at least they appear so when I import into DaVinci Resolve 18. So, there are 4 audio tracks in all.
In DaVinci Resolve Fairlight I have to link tracks 1 and 2, and delete 3 and 4—a useless extra step.
I really like the ability to (initially) assign a function to a button or dial with a long press. But if a function is already assigned, you must use the menu.
And speaking of the menu, they are 3 layers deep with hundreds of options. The manual is 832 pages long (!), and reading it is not for the faint of heart. At least, color is used in the manual PDF file. Only a useless "starter" manual comes with the camera, and only a long link on start guide gets you to the real manual. Google was useless when I tried to find it.
I took my G9 II on a three-week trip to New Zealand and Australia.
Here are some additional thoughts.
- It is a lot heavier and bulkier them my OM Systems OM-1
- The extra 5 megapixels really made a difference, especially when I leveled the horizon of about half my images.
- It has no panorama mode!!! I had to use my Pixel8 Pro, which probably made them better than the Lumix would have.
- Focus peaking kept turning off every few minutes! This was not listed as being fixed in the 2.0 firmware that I just installed.
- It rained a lot and seemed to survive getting wet.
- The 2.0 firmware install process (when I got home), using the camera and Lumix Sync on my phone was awkward to use, and never finished. (But when I tried to install it manually, I found that it had been installed.) The phone and camera need to be connected via WiFi, but the phones WiFi will not connect to the internet, so the firmware download was over cellular data.
There seems to be no way of reporting a bug to Panasonic, except (maybe) calling on the phone.
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