@itimjim i see no difference between bias or not very well executed, as it was a subjective test, just by setting the cameras one way or another by eye immpression, you are getting a bias,

if there was or not an economic bias, well, that statement can be as it cant be, i dont care really, as there is no way i can know for sure, so his shootout will remain for me as his shootout, nothing more, a valuable opinion, but not an absolute truth or whatever...

hahahah @kazuo thats becuase you are thinking only from your reality, at least i have no real possibility to test bigger cams

@Elenion, any chance you would be so kind as to explain your Cineform curve process a little further? Much appreciated, thank you.

The best part of this test is that you and me don't have to pay a single cents to watch it. PB decides to do it with his own time, money, contacts and effort to keep everybody happy, informed and entertained. WTF are we complaining about?

@kholi, it is ok, I did not take it bad at all. As you can see I posted something about the same time as yours. I was just talking that people have the right to be disappointed, if one parameter or the other is not as what they thought. For me DR was the only thing that I could not quantify with the gh2/hacked. Because I knew it was sharper, nearly no moire/aliasing to degrade the image etc but the DR no comparison or test. I always find people bashing it on forum saying that it has lower DR etc without any test/comparison/footage to back it up. On the net suffice to say something 100 times and it becomes reality. At least now we have at least some... ok, if not far from perfect comparison.

Unfortunately I don't have any pro camera like the EPIC to use and compare to the gh2 personally and found a personal opinion. Which make these kind of test valuable to me. If you read my post above, you will see that if you look and test (even on so lowly compressed format) the gh2/hacked compares much more favorably in terms of DR to most of those cameras.

Now for your question about DR and ISO, normally it is true that as higher you go the DR will decrease. But the gh2 is benefiting from true downscaling/binning which as with noise tend to make things better. If you look at testing site like DXOmark you will see two DR value, the native DR and the one they have standardize of a 8 megapixel camera. Noise is the same, that is why when you use the ETC mode the image is noisier, because it is just cropping a 1080p at 1.1 pixel level of the sensor and you are not getting the benefit of downscaling/binning. Everything is relative, the DR will decrease but not as the same rate than in photo mode.

@whiterabbit
No correction, i just changed the way the image is rendered (in fact this is realtime). No loss in quality, you just squeeze all the latitude of the coded picture in a flatter container.
This is SiLog, not a much extreme curve, with Rspace space you get an even flatter picture.
PS: I don't know if we are offtopic, i think that this is just a useful part of the conversation.

it is only a test:
which also says nothing - absolutely nothing - absolutely unnecessary for me
and
Philip Bloom is a Canonman (sklave!?)

@CraftyClown
It's just that some people sound so deflated that the GH2 doesn't have 20 stops of latitude and might or might not fall a tad short of a $9,000 camera.

>Disappointing that the GH-2, in this test is 9.

My comment is regarding how the GH-2 fared in the test. I'm not disappointed in the camera for my uses. I just hoped in a side by side comparison, the hacked GH-2 would have been closer to the top of the cameras tested for contrast and DR.

Dynamic range test question: If you shot the same exposure on different cashmere. Then brought a frame into post. If you raised or lowered the exposure by one EV or stop, and counted how many stops before you see clipping in the histogram or Photoshop "show clipping"

there seems to be a lot of dynamic Range tests, but are almost always a subjective result.

Are all these opinions being based on the 9 jpegs on the site? With all the artifacts, poor resolution and wild differences in exposure, contrast and color, how can anyone tell anything about these cameras?

jspatz is correct.

Take a look at the FS100 shot #8. It does not look that good. colors are muted and skin tones are blotchy from compression artifacts. Does this one shot tell the whole FS100 story, no way. So the same goes for all of these different camera one frames comparisons.

Just look at kholi's shots above. It's a lot cleaner and looks great. Now if this frame was included in the mystery game of - guess which image belongs to a camera - , this would be a very different story. Everyone would be praising the GH2. Don't go by one shot.

BTW, the whites are clipped on the GH2. Now, the come back would be this was intentional in order to not underexpose the shadows, but look at the 7D sample below, whites we not blown out, and the shadows are even more crushed.

I would of been interesting if Philip had used smooth with all -2 settings. Nostalgic is a "pushed" look with the GH2. I'm surprised this was the chosen setting.

Nonetheless, it's only one sample.

Kong,
I thought the same thing regarding the smeared compression look of many of the other samples. It's not pretty.
The D7000 suffers from compression artifacts and makes the skin tones looks blotchy.


I certainly believe Philip has a lot more to show.

Here are three reasons I preferred No. 9. I would add, and I'm sure many have already done this, that I carefully calibrated my monitor. First is, without thinking about any technical details, the image just looked better than the others at "prima vista." OK, I could be fooled by extra contrast, etc. But the GH2 leaves a vivid first impression, no matter how it does it. And first impressions are important.
Second is the level of detail. Everyone, or most people, have a a superfine layer of fine hair on their skin. If you look at the model's shoulders, the GH2 resolves some of that detail. And that is super resolution--impressive. Many of the others just give you a cottony blur at the skin edges. Mushy.
Third, I thought the color of many--not all, but many--of the others was off (and this is why I double checked my monitor). There could be a million reasons for that, but there it is.
As far as the blacks and dark parts of the models hair being crushed, this happens all the time, and it is also present in the C300 video. IMHO, the GH2 is dialed up one notch too far in contrast, or the shot is very slightly underexposed. Instantly and easily fixable. There must be about a full stop of exposure variation in the test, depending on how each camera "sees" the subjects, and part of this is probably due to the lights in the background.
What I'm saying is, dynamic range is important, but contrast is no biggie. Dial it down, then bring it up in post if needed. At ")", the GH2 Contrast is too much, but we knew that anyway. At -2, it is OK, and we knew that too. Exposure is touchy, we knew that as well.

Preference is subjective. I just happened to prefer that single frame, although I liked the "nonsubject" part of the C300 image: smooth and not grainy. Others would prefer other frames, and it is only one test in a series. The boat in the harbor, the C300 seemed to resolve more detail. We will wait and see. But as far as the first test goes, I for one am not planning on buying a different cam.
Until the next test.