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Out-of-camera 80MP JPEG using the Panasonic G9’s high-resolution mode. Lots of detail, and some strange-looking pedestrians.
Panasonic Leica DG 12-60mm F2.8-4 | ISO 200 | 1/500 sec | F4 |
New to Panasonic’s G9 flagship is a high-resolution mode, which shifts the sensor by half-pixel increments eight times, and generates an 80MP final image. As with similar technologies from Ricoh and Olympus, it’s not necessarily recommended for scenes with moving subjects in them. But we wanted to see if we could make it work.
You’ll notice in the above image, the pedestrians are sharply ‘ghosted’ in the foreground; this is due (obviously) to the eight exposures being taken, but also partially the 1/500 sec shutter speed. What if we purposely chose a slower speed, so that they would blur more naturally into each other?
These are only initial findings on a gray Seattle day, but we’ve got some interesting results.
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Panasonic Leica DG 8-18mm F2.8-4 | ISO 200 | 1/30 sec | F8
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For this situation, in order to get a proper exposure without either an ND filter or stopping down to diffraction-inducing levels, I figured I’d give 1/30 of a second a try. As you can see, there’s a little ‘repetition’ around portions of the pedestrians in the foreground and across the street, and while there’s lots of detail in the scene, you may want to just use the normal 20MP file for this one.
What if we go with a little longer of a shutter speed, though?
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| Panasonic Leica DG 8-18mm F2.8-4 | ISO 200 | 1/8 sec | F8 |
This looks to our eyes to exhibit some improvement. We overall found that a shutter speed between 1/4 sec and 1/8 sec gave a reasonably natural look to the average pedestrian in motion – of course, for faster and slower moving objects, you’ll have to adjust accordingly. Do take note, though, that there are some interesting colorful streaks in our moving subjects, and a reduction of resolution in static objects that can be seen behind them.
If you’re thinking about an even slower shutter speed, once you get down to 1/2 sec or so, pedestrians largely just disappear from your frame, leaving barely a shadow for you to notice. Of course, this could be an advantage if you’re wanting to eliminate people from your photos, without necessarily needing an ND filter and a 30-second exposure.
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There were some people on these stairs, I promise.
Panasonic Leica DG 8-18mm F2.8-4 | ISO 200 | 1/2 sec | F8 |
We tried an even longer exposure to see if we could get the motion artifacts to ‘disappear’ with subjects moving fast enough across the scene, but we still could see some – check out the car taillights and the ground surrounding them in the below image. The rest of the image, predictably, shows good detail, but once you start inspecting the areas of motion too closely, the image starts to look a little strange. That said – you’d probably have to have someone point it out to you to really notice it in real life.
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| Panasonic Leica DG 12-60mm F2.8-4 | ISO 200 | 1.3 sec | F4 |
In any case, the high res mode on the G9 is something we want to continue to look into as we progress with our review. Raw support is coming shortly, and we’re looking forward to examining the Raw files from both real-world shooting as well as our test scene.
For now, we’ve added these images and their corresponding ‘normal’ 20MP equivalents onto the end of our existing image gallery for you to inspect.
Scroll to the end of our sample gallery to see our updated high res images
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Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
