High-res hybrid: Panasonic Lumix DC-S1RII initial review

The Panasonic Lumix DC-S1RII is the company’s latest high-resolution full-frame mirrorless camera, now beefed-up with 8K video capabilities and improved autofocus.

Key features

• Full-frame 44MP dual gain CMOS sensor
• Up to 40fps continuous shooting with pre-burst capture (e-shutter only)
• 8.1K/8K video at up to 30p
• 5.76M dot viewfinder
• Flip-out and tilt rear screen
• ProRes 422 and ProRes RAW capture
• Capture to CFExpress Type B, UHS II SD or external SSD
• Multi-shot high res mode up to 177MP
• 32-bit float audio via optional XLR 2 adapter

The S1RII will be available from late March with a recommended retail price of $3300.

Index:

• What’s new
• What’s new for video
• How it compares
• Body and handling
• Initial impressions
• Sample gallery

What’s new

New sensor

Rather than the 47MP used in the original S1R, or the 61MP chip used in Leica’s SL3, Panasonic has opted for a slightly lower resolution but faster sensor for the S1RII.

It features dual conversion gain on which, as usual on Panasonic cameras, you can manually select which of its two readout modes it uses. Panasonic doesn’t always disclose when it’s using BSI technology, but in this instance it has confirmed it.

Autofocus

The S1RII represents the second generation of Panasonic cameras to feature phase detection autofocus, with the inherent depth awareness that this brings. The company says it’s significantly improved both its subject recognition and its tracking algorithms in the new camera, to bring its performance closer into line with the best of its peers.

The S1RII has algorithms trained to recognize the following subjects:

• Human
• Animal (Dog, Cat, Bird)
• Car
• Motorcycle / Bike
• Train
• Airplane

We’re told it should be quicker at finding a subject and better at continuing to track it, even if, for instance, the subject turns away from the camera or is partially obscured. As before, you can choose whether the camera homes-in on specific details, such as the helmet of a motorbike rider, the nose of a plane or the eyes of an animal. Selecting the more precise focus position can lower the system’s responsiveness to smaller, faster-moving subjects.

Cinelike A2 color mode

The S1RII gains a new ‘Cinelike A2’ color mode, in both stills and video modes. It offers a very gentle response, somewhere between the flat, DR-prioritizing Cinelike D2 and the punchy, ready-to-go Cinelike V2 profile.

Panasonic says the A2 mode’s color response stems from work they’ve been doing in recent months. And it’s perhaps worth considering which partners Panasonic has been working with, recently, to guess at the significance of the letter ‘A’ in the name. Unlike the camera’s Leica Monochrome mode, any connection isn’t made explicit.

Real time LUT

The S1RII gains the Real Time LUT function we’ve seen on recent Panasonic cameras, letting you create and upload color and tone-modifying profiles in format with a workflow that’s already widely supported across the industry. The S1RII allows you to load up to 39 LUTs onto the camera, with the option to combine two LUTs with varying intensity, if you wish.

Additional LUTs can be created or downloaded via Panasonic’s Lumix Lab app.

False color

The S1RII becomes one of the first stills/video cameras to include a false color display option. This is a feature common in the video world, giving a mono preview with certain brightness levels highlighted in different colors, to help you recognize which bits of the image are clipped or near clipping and which areas are exposed as mid tones or at a level appropriate for light skin tones. This display can be used in boths stills and video modes.

Capture One tethering

The S1RII becomes the first Panasonic camera that can be shot, tethered, from Capture One, the popular studio software. We’re told any decisions about whether to expand support to other models will depend on customer demand.

What’s new for video

The 44MP sensor means the S1RII has slightly more horizontal pixels than necessary to deliver UHD 8K (7680 x 4320) footage and a fraction short of what’s needed to capture the DCI 8K’s 8192 x 4320 resolution. Instead it offers what Panasonic called 8.1K (8128 x 4288), which conforms to the same 1.89:1 aspect ratio as DCI footage.

The degree to which the sensor resolution is suited to 8K capture is unlikely to be coincidental, and the S1RII offers the kind of extensive video feature set that you might expect from the company that brought us the GH series, rather than the pared-back list of options the original S1R brought.

It also includes everything you’d expect from Panasonic: the option to set exposure in terms of shutter angle, waveforms, vectorscopes, filtering or custom lists of video modes, four-channel audio and 32-bit Float audio via the optional XLR2 accessory, support for anamorphic lenses and a tally lamp to let you know you’re rolling. The attention to detail goes beyond the addition of a big red button on the front.

Video options:

The S1RII can also shoot Full HD (1920 x 1080) footage at any of the frame-rates and crops offered in UHD 4K mode, with the additional ability to capture 120 and 100p footage from the APS-C region.

Dynamic Range Expansion

The S1RII gains a DR Expansion mode, letting you capture an additional stop of highlight information in high-contrast situations. This can be activated in any of the movie modes at frame rates up to 30p, and can only be applied when shooting V-Log footage (where the response curve can easily accommodate different levels of DR capture).

This is not the same system as the dual readout DR Boost function in the company’s 25MP Micro Four Thirds camera. Instead it moves to a higher bit-depth readout, meaning there’s a rolling shutter cost to engaging it. It also boosts the minimum available ISO, to prompt the use of a lower exposure, to capture that additional stop of highlights.

Open gate shooting

At launch the S1RII will be able to capture 6.4K footage from the entire 3:2 region of its sensor, downscaled from full-resolution capture.

Open gate shooting lets you choose and adjust your crop during post production. It also makes it possible to frame wide and then take both landscape and portrait video crops if you’re trying to deliver to multiple different output platforms.

5.XK at up to 60p, 4K at up to 120p

Like the S5II models, the S1RII gives you the choice of 1.89:1 DCI 4K capture or 16:9 UHD 4K, or 5.9K or 5.8K versions taken from the same capture regions. All four are available as 10-bit footage, with 4K encoded with 4:2:2 chroma precision and the 5.XK modes in 4:2:0.

Footage up to 30p is taken from the full width of the sensor using the full capture resolution, with a slight crop in to give 60p. 4K (in both flavors) is available at up to 120p with the addition of a further slight crop. Line skipping is used to deliver these 100p and 120p modes.

DCI and UHD 4K can also be captured at up to 60p from an APS-C region of the sensor.

Tellingly the rolling shutter rate in DR Expansion mode is consistent with the rate of 14-bit stills, which suggests it’s based on 14-bit capture, explaining Panasonic’s claims of greater dynamic range.

In turn, the 60p output’s rolling shutter is consistent with the 12-bit stills readout rate. This stongly implies that the standard 24, 25 and 30p modes, which are slower than this but quicker than 14-bit mode are taken from 13-bit capture.

In addition to the conventional MOV compressed footage, the S1RII also lets you capture various resolutions in either ProRes 422 or ProRes RAW formats, both of which can either be recorded to the camera’s internal CFExpress type B card or to an external SSD. ProRes RAW (with a choice of HQ or standard compression levels) is taken from a 1.31x crop of the sensor, whereas the ProRes 422 (again HQ or Std) is derived from the full-width 8.1K capture.

Forthcoming attractions

As usual for Panasonic cameras, the company has already given some details of features that are still being worked-on for the camera, and which it has promised will come in later firmware updates.

At launch the S1RII can capture open gate video footage at 6.4K resolution, but we’re told 7.1K and 8.1K (native resolution) will be enabled in a later firmware update.

Similarly, the S1RII can currently output footage at up to 8K over HDMI but will gain the option to output a Raw data stream in 8.1K or 7.2K resolutions, at a later date.

How it compares

The new, more compact S1RII arrives in a market where you can choose between the high resolution Sony a7RV or pay more for the likes of Nikon’s Z8 and Canon’s EOS R5 II that are both high resolution and fast. The Panasonic occupies something of a middle ground: offering some of the speed of the faster cameras (a higher peak frame rate but with more rolling shutter), but at a lower cost than Canon and Nikon’s Stacked CMOS cameras.

We’ve opted to include the Canon EOS R5 II in this table, but the Nikon Z8 ends up looking very similar in terms of areas of strength, if you were to substitute that in. We’ve also chosen the DSLR-shaped a7R V from Sony, rather than the smaller, less expensive a7C R, because the larger model more closely resembles the Panasonic in terms of form factor, viewfinder quality, shutter options and screen articulation. But if size and price are your biggest concerns, the a7C R is in the running.

Despite being comfortably less expensive than its immediate peers, the S1RII’s specs are competitive across the board. And while its video exhibits a fair bit more rolling shutter than the Stacked-sensor Nikon and Canon models, it significantly out-performs the Sony.

The a7R V’s rolling shutter rate of 38ms means it can’t deliver 8K/30, whereas the Panasonic can shoot 8K 30 and do so as fast as 24ms. This is respectable but not as impressive as the ∼13 and 14ms that the EOS R5 II and Z8 provide, respectively, from their much more expensive sensors.

Much of whether it’s actually competitive, for both stills and video, will come down to whether the autofocus improvements are as significant as Panasonic promises.

Body and handling

The S1RII uses a body based on the smaller S5II series, rather than the more substantial design of the first-gen S1 series cameras. This leaves it both smaller and lighter than its predecessor.

It has the internal fan from the S5II, with two small exhaust ports on either side of its viewfinder hump. This doesn’t give quite ‘GH series’ recording reliability, but still allows the S1RII to record for extended periods.

However, while the body itself is similar in size to the S5II, it has a deeper hand grip, making it more comfortable to use with larger lenses. It maintains a row of three buttons along its top plate, immediately behind the shutter button, but omits the top plate display that the Mark 1 had.

Other losses in the move to the smaller body see the S1RII offer only a single function button between the mount and the hand grip, and the replacement of the two-position switch at the lower corner of the front panel by a large red [REC] button (whose function can be customized).

The S1RII also goes without a flash sync socket, but gains a dedicated Stills/Movie/Slow&Quick switch. Moving the exposure modes to the right of the camera allows the drive mode to be promoted to the top of the left-side dial, making room for shooting mode to occupy the switch underneath. Both mode dials have toggle lock buttons.

The removal of movie mode from the exposure mode dial in turn provides room for five custom positions on the exposure dial, each of which can be customized separately for stills and video custom settings. Position 5 on the dial can be used to access custom banks 5-10, if you wish, giving you a total of up to ten photo and ten video custom setting sets. Thankfully the camera’s settings can be saved to a memory card and duplicated across cameras.

Rear screen

On the back of the camera, Panasonic has adopted a similar screen layout to the one Panasonic used on its explicitly video-focused S1H: a fully articulated rear screen mounted on a cradle that tilts up and down. This means that stills shooters can use the tilt mechanism if they want to keep the screen on-axis (and can flip the screen to face inwards for protection, when stowing the camera), but video shooters can extend the screen out and tilt it away from the mic, headphone and HDMI sockets while shooting.

Battery

The S1RII uses the same 15.8Wh DMW-BLK22 battery as the S5II, a significant reduction compared with the original S1R. Despite this, it achieves a CIPA battery rating of 350 shots per charge if you use the rear screen and 300 via the viewfinder. The usual caveats apply to this number: most people get many, many more shots out of a camera than the CIPA rating (between two and three times the rated figure isn’t unusual). To put it in context, 350 is a respectable figure and shouldn’t leave you caught out during a busy day’s shooting, but it doesn’t have the confidence-inspiring duration that Sony’s a7R V offers.

A new DMW-BG2 battery grip is also available to fit the S1RII. It adds a second battery in the grip, and is designed to allow hot-swapping of batteries: the external battery is used until the battery door is opened, at which point the camera switches to using the internal battery until a new battery is inserted in the grip. The grip also allows the camera to use both batteries simultaneously, for high power-consumption combinations such as capturing high bit-rate video to an external SSD.

Initial impressions

The S1RII is an interesting proposition: replacing a camera we get the impression didn’t exactly fly off the shelves. Panasonic has done a lot to broaden its appeal, making it smaller, faster, more video capable and, notably, less expensive.

The easiest to spot changes are on the video side of things: Panasonic pitched the S1R as a photographer’s camera, so the decision to make the S1RII more of a hybrid sees even more of an expansion in video capabilities than we’ve become used to over the past few years.

The S1RII’s sensor seems genuinely capable of delivering video, despite its high pixel count and the lack of Stacked architecture often used to speed up readout. Despite its much higher pixel count, the S1RII’s main 8K, 5.XK and 4K modes exhibit comparable rolling shutter to the widely-used 24MP full-frame sensor, and with a promise of better detail and dynamic range capture. This means it can also deliver 4K/60 with a minimal crop and without the need for line-skipping.

Wedded to this underlying capability are all of Panasonic’s usual video features, developed for the GH series of cameras, so it has the feature set and well-polished usability that’s not always present when video gets added. For instance, if you decide you want to shoot 5.9K ProRes 422 / 24 for the bulk of your project but want to shoot some 4K/60 or 4K/120 for some slow-mo cutaways, you can add these two modes to “(My List)” to quickly swap between them, rather than having to switch from ProRes to MOV capture and then find the modes in the 18 pages of quality options those two codecs cumulatively give.

You can then set the camera to report Shutter Angle, so that you maintain an appropriate shutter speed as you switch frame rates, without the risk of forgetting to reset it when you switch back. It’s not quite a full-frame GH7, but it’s closer than you’d normally expect from a high-resolution body.

The S1RII is smaller than its predecessor but still finds room for a good level of control points without them becoming too small or too cramped. There’s a customizable ‘Lock’ switch on the left of the camera to prevent accidental changes of settings.

Even more than usual, this risks overshadowing the improvements made on the stills side of the camera, because the S1R already had a very solid stills feature set, so there’s less room for dramatic improvement. We weren’t overly impressed by the sensor of the S1R, so we hope to get the S1RII into our studio in the next few weeks to check for improvements in that regard. The smaller, lighter body is likely to be of benefit to some photographers, whether they’re landscape shooters lugging the camera to a picturesque nowhere or a wedding shooter using it for hours on end.

But, whether you shoot stills or video, it’s the promised autofocus improvements on which the S1RII is likely to stand or fall. The previous camera used Panasonic’s depth-from-defocus system that could deliver good results but was often disconcerting and distracting to shoot with. The new camera promises an improved version of the phase-detection system introduced with the S5II. If it really is faster and more dependable, the S1RII starts to look very interesting indeed. Our initial impressions are mixed: when it locks on it seems really tenacious, but there are other occasions on which it fails to focus on anything, to a degree we’re not used to seeing in modern cameras. We’re really hoping this can be addressed in firmware.

On paper, the S1RII promises to be an affordable option for someone looking to capture high res photos and high-quality video. We’re already out using the camera and will report back on its real-world performance as soon as we can.

Sample gallery

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