GX8, GH5s, GH6, S1H Panasonic cameras comparison video. Low-light and dynamic range.

I've made heaps of short films with the GX8 and was slow to upgrade. Even when I upgraded in 2019, I resisted full-frame and chose the GH5s. Now in 2022 at work we have a GH6 and a full-frame S1H and it begs the question; how much of a step up are these cameras and will it make me want to own one myself to replace my older cameras.

The first test is at night filming a skyline under clouds to test low-light ISO performance and the second test is during the day with some clouds visible to test the dynamic range. One thing I knew for sure was that all 4 cameras, even the cheap GX8, are extremely sharp and produce real 4K images so I'm not testing resolution here.

To test ISO performance all cameras shared the same Panny 10-25mm f1.7 lens for m43 and the 50mm f1.8 for the S1H. All were at a shutter of 1/50, with lens wide open at 1.8. Because the m43 cameras were sharing the same lens all 4 cameras were not running at the same time therefore I had to deal with a changing sky from shot to shot. It's still conclusive enough for me but understand it could have advantaged one camera over the others.

During the day test I was able to record with all cameras at the same time but the lenses used were so different that did affect composition and sharpness. Cameras have different base ISOs so I stopped down the daylight using shutter speed, so gone was the 180 degree shutter rule for the sake of capturing fast. I was going for the best "digital negative" on each camera whatever the settings were.