Panasonic Lumix S1R

amazon Panasonic Lumix S1R reviews

One hundred eighty-seven megapixels was the figure that immediately came to mind when asked to list specifications about the full-frame Panasonic Lumix S1R. It’s not in itself the most significant fjord for most photographers, but it’s certainly the most interesting. What makes this camera stand out from other camera systems? Oh, there are plenty of things. Most, though: 187 megapixels.

it’s not going-measurement add-on; S1R has feature 187 megapixels. This is due to a technique called stitching eight exposures between each to have a small high-resolution 47-mpixels sensor move left and right by half a pixel and combine it into one image (it requires tripod). This quadruples the spatial resolution while covering full RGB color information at every pixel position for more accurate color, skipping Bayer filter design limitations. The resulting raw file is over 300 megabytes.

If I have a practical complaint regarding the high-resolution mode, then it is not possible to shoot with flash. Some cameras do have a burst mode that allows you to program a delay between each exposure so the flash or studio flash will have a chance to recharge before the following burst, but there is nothing like that on the S1R. Panasonic could add this by firmware, though not-so-much. For now, however, the absence of that feature would be probably very important in reducing the potential of the S1R for studio photographers who might have really wanted to use it.

Practicality, that’s the real problem. Just like cars want horsepower they’ll never use, the high resolution mode on the S1R seems to be just a really expensive party trick for the wealthy photography enthusiasts that want Something to brag about at the camera club back home. It’s not something that most people are going to really need, and likely isn’t going to be used very much-even by professional photographers.

Panasonic jammed technology in the S1R, fighting against all odds to show itself as a top player.

Is there any real world application? Like macro shots on the circuit board. Or maybe reproducing big works of art with colors as pixel-detailed as you’d get in close-up photography. Or there might even just be uses for which we don’t even have to yet venture to think would be found or invented by a photographer.

As with anything else, there are many great things about this camera. But if you’re not into resolution, you can pay much less with the standard Lumix S1 and still get most of the great features of the S1R. It’s $2,500, has a 24MP sensor, has better video specs, and is identical to the S1R. It also has its high-resolution mode that turns those 24 megapixels into 96—not too shabby.

Design and handling

The transitive bridge built around the Leica L mount is what defines the Lumix S1R, along with the S1, as Panasonic’s first full-frame camera. A pretty solid offer, really. With a sturdy, weather-sealed body, an enormous electronic viewfinder, and SD and XQD card slots, the S1R is bigger and heavier than you would expect from a DSLR professional model in terms of direct access control. The price is more than the mighty Nikon D850 DSLR also at 2.25 pounds-it weighs much even more than that. In fact, it weighs more than the mighty Nikon D850 DSLR – and costs $200 more than when it was originally released.

So, the S1R is not much of a competitor to the other two high-resolution, full-frame mirrorless cameras that cost hundreds less: Sony’s A7R III and Nikon’s Z 7. Panasonic seems to have elevated this class of cameras-or tried to-and wants to appeal to working professionals who haven’t yet made the switch from their DSLRs to mirrorless ones.

It was simply audacious. Cameras are indeed heavy to carry; still, the professional shooters have not given the Lumix brand the kind of weight that they so easily bestow upon Canon or Nikon. Maybe because of this, with the S series, Panasonic has really thrown its weight behind technology, doing everything to back up its claims as a serious player. Panasonic has also introduced a new professional repair service division to rival the likes of Canon, Nikon, and Sony.

There is no doubt that the Lumix S1R feels more professional than other mirrorless cameras. The large handgrip is reassuring, although not very comforting for those with small hands. Most of the control layouts work effectively with the location of their buttons, dials, and levers-there’s always a few exceptions, like the power switch that awkwardly sits behind the shutter release button instead of encircling it, as on the Lumix G9 configuration. The customization possibilities are virtually endless, allowing you to set the camera up to your liking.

To assign a function, hold the button until the custom settings menu pops up in a screen display. No scrolling through the menu to determine which icon goes with which button anymore (though the revamped Panasonic menu system does make this process visibly easy).

Press the button if you want to quickly cycle through the autofocus modes, ISO settings, or white balance presets. This button can, of course, be held while you turn one of the command dials to change it. However, surprisingly, it feels much more natural to quickly tap ISO three times to raise it, rather than have to manipulate two different controls.

It is these small touches that give the S1R a refined user experience that I consider to be a step above any other full-frame mirrorless I’ve used. But, again, none of this is unique to the S1R: the less expensive S1 has the same layout and control design.

Features and Specifications

While high-resolution mode is the headlight, the S1R takes many technologies a step beyond the competition. The EVF, using an OLED panel, comes in at 5.76million pixels-a million more than the best-specified EVFs from Canon, Nikon, and Sony. The pixels are all but unperceivable, even when reading the small lettering of the metering display. It also boasts a gigantic 0.78x magnification and a frame refresh rate of 120 Hz.

S1R is also provided with 6K and 4K photo modes at 30 and 60 fps, respectively, providing the option to extract a still frame of the perfect moment captured. This initiates the Post Focus feature, where each frame is captured with a different focal distance allowing easy adjustment of the focus at a later date or focus stacking to produce increased depth of field.

Like the S1, the S1R uses a 5-axis sensor-shift stabilization system working in tandem with lens-based stabilization to provide 6 stops of shake-reduction. (This is the same system that supports high-resolution mode.) It is a good system, though not as good as the Olympus OM-D E-M1X, which boasts 7.5 stops of stabilization.

What this means in practice is that you can handhold down to 1/10th; there is a catch, though. As 47MP means very tiny pixels, the blurriness is more apparent than you would notice on a camera of lower resolution. Keep your shutter speed faster than you think you will want to if you want to fractionally make use of them all, otherwise, your image will appear not perfectly sharp when looked at 100 percent.

Panasonic controversially chose phase-detection autofocus over DFD technology.

For such a high-resolution camera to maintain continuous shooting of up to 9 frames a second (or 6 with continuous autofocus) is quite impressive for the S1R. Probably the same review from the lower-resolution S1, where Panasonic might have decided to keep the same shutter-speed setting on both models and let the S1R fill its image buffer faster. In our tests, we racked up 32 RAW photos in a single burst at 9 frames per second before the camera slowed down. Compare this to 75 RAW images with the S1. These tests were done on a high-speed XQD card.

When it comes to video, S1R and S1 are the first full-frame cameras capable of 4K video recording at 60 fps. All video is recorded from 1 sensor (1.09x) of the sensor. 4K/30p has a maximum recording time of shy of 30 minutes, while 4K/60p is limited to 10 minutes. Considering the lack of cropping and time limit in 4K/30p (1.5x crop in 4K/60p), the S1 would make a better option for shooting video. The S1 may also receive V-Log and 10-bit 4:2:2 recording via a future paid firmware update, features not available in the S1R.

Part of that weight can be attributed to the big 3,050 mAh battery. That’s twice the battery capacity in my Fujifilm X-T2, but S1R’s battery life is hardly any better, rated at just 360 exposures. Rain or shine, that high-resolution EVF must be eating into the battery, but still, that rating seems low. For sure, in real life, performance would definitely be much better – I was halfway by the time I logged around 250 shutter releases, so you should expect something like 500 upwards. (The camera also boasts Power Saver mode, which jacks up your battery life to over 1,000 exposures, though I didn’t test it.)

Autofocus: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Panasonic has made quite the uproar by adopting directional detection phase-detection autofocus, all at the expense of its Depth from Defocus (DFD) technology. Phase detection is much closer to being proverbial gold for autofocus because it knows whether the image is in focus or out of focus and whether it is in front or back focus. Therefore, it knows whether to turn the lens forward or backward to effect focus and speed up the whole process. The whole idea is generally not having a focus hunt, which happens in slower contrast detection.

The DFD uses contrast detection, but Panasonic has done some voodoo magic to improve the performance of that. It basically goes from a reference point and does very fine back and forward movements in focus. It looks at how things blur, compares it with all possible blur patterns at a given time aperture, focus distance, and focal length profile of the lens stored in the camera, and comes up with a conclusion of blur, and this is done at 480 frames per second in the S series on the DFD. That means all the keys and information for the camera to adjust focus in the right direction work, just like phase detection.

When I first tested these pre-production versions of the S series cameras, there was an indication that they generally struggle to find focus whenever they perceive a very dim (that is, a blurry) position. This problem seems to have been solved by the final production software because it did not appear in any of my tests for this review.

That’s a great sensor. The only real reason to pay $3,700 for the S1R is to save over $2,500 for the S1.

Not that DFD didn’t have its bugs, though. In the video, there’s this constant switch in focus adjustments that just distracts the breathing of the image in continued autofocus especially with the off-focus highlights.

In still pictures, bushes have DFD magic, but they can still hunt focus, and on rare occasions, it can take a number of seconds to find its lock. There are many times that I missed the shot for the reason. This problem is rare and cropped out at random times with no apparent cause; it is left to play very unsafe for people working in uncontrolled environments, like press photographers and wedding coverage.

This is unfortunate because S1R’s auto-focus performance is indeed special. Face and eye detection will work from far further away than some of its relatives like the Canon EOS RP, and while they can occasionally misjudge an object as a person, they do work at much greater distances than some of the competition when judging by actual test results. When it’s working properly, DFD will be as fast as phase detection. It might be almost capable of seeing in the dark, with sensitivity as low as -6 EV. That figure may sound suspect, but I tested it indoors with all the lights off, closed curtains, and it did not skip a beat.

Image quality

There has, as of yet, been no support for external RAW editing and so imported the S1R RAW files into Adobe DNG to be opened in Lightroom. If an official RAW support comes, the image quality could be slightly changed, but for the moment, almost all of them look awesome. However, I am not sure that the images taken in that high resolution are quite rightly converted because some of the DNGs that are 187MP are appearing somewhat strange like having jagged edges while the other images appear perfectly fine.

Panasonic chose DFD over phase-detection because the latter could introduce a “bandwidth pattern” under high-noise conditions or whenever the exposure settings are overly extreme during post-processing. The S1R has no such issues, and the RAW files look very clean. The detail and color can be recovered from the darkest areas of the image while creating moderate noise even with the Exposure and Shadow sliders turned on in Adobe Lightroom. That equivalent is a very good range of dynamics, which counts importantly for landscape photographers but proves useful in those other scenarios where one must capture detail through a great tonal range from highlights to dark shadows.

The picture looks even cleaner in high-resolution mode. A typical photo taken with ISO 400 will show some very minimal noise, while the same image taken in high-resolution with an ISO setting of 400, almost no noise will be detected. Even so, it has a ceiling of ISO 1,600 under high-resolution modes.

It would be a very nice sensor, paying $3,700 only for the S1R, and it actually costs above $2,500 just for S1. But then the S1 sensor also took us by surprise. At the very least, it was shown to be on par in terms of dynamic range, with even better noise levels thanks to less number but larger pixels.

Both sensors are devoid of optical low-pass filters, which increases the sharpness but does come at the risk of some increased moiré effect, a rainbow-like false color sometimes evident when very fine samples are captured. Of course, rare examples would show through on the S1 but never on the S1R. The possibility of it protecting itself from anything is its high pixel resolution that could resolve finer details in the sample.

Moiré is most commonly seen in clothes since it is primarily caused by the patterns in the subjects, thus giving the S1R a postcard edge in portrait and fashion photography. (For still life subjects, simply using high-resolution mode on either camera would greatly reduce the chance of moiré.)

In-camera processing from Panasonic is also pretty decent. Saturation and contrast are well under control, and JPEGs look good out of the camera. The Portrait profile is great for skin tones, which are really tough to recreate by hand in post with RAW files.

where can you get a Panasonic Lumix S1R online

Panasonic LUMIX S1R Full Frame Mirrorless Camera with 47.3MP MOS High Resolution Sensor, L-Mount Lens Compatible, 4K HDR Video and 3.2” LCD – DC-S1RBODY: Buy it now

Panasonic LUMIX S1R Mirrorless Camera with LUMIX S 24-105mm f/4 O.I.S Lens – Open Box: Buy it now