**A Hands-On Review of the Panasonic Lumix S1R and S1**

As I held the Panasonic Lumix S1R and S1 in my hands, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity. Both cameras are large and bulky, with the S1R weighing in at around 630 grams and the S1 tipping the scales at approximately 590 grams. The weight and size may not be ideal for travel or handheld shooting, but as I began to use both cameras, I realized that Panasonic's focus on ergonomics and form factors is truly commendable.

The S1R and S1 are remarkably comfortable to hold and use, even when compared to the Sony SL. This was largely due to the intuitive design and thoughtful placement of controls, which allowed me to access all necessary features with ease. The camera's grip also helped to reduce fatigue during extended shooting sessions, a common issue I've experienced with other cameras. While both cameras may not be ideal for travel, Panasonic has clearly prioritized user experience over portability.

One area where the S1R and S1 truly excel is in their autofocus systems. Panasonic's implementation of dynamic image stabilization (DIS) is impressive, particularly when compared to competing cameras like the Sony SL. This technology allows for smooth and quiet video recording, making it an excellent choice for vloggers or content creators. In addition to DIS, both cameras also feature advanced autofocus capabilities, including face detection and eye tracking.

However, I must mention that Panasonic's autofocus system is still not without its limitations. While it performed well in certain situations, such as tracking subjects or detecting faces, it struggled in others, like focusing on distant objects or changing lighting conditions. It will be interesting to see how the firmware updates address these issues and improve the overall performance of the camera.

Another feature that caught my attention was Panasonic's 6K photo mode, which allows for high-speed continuous shooting without blackout. While this may not be ideal for RAW file shooters like myself, I can appreciate the convenience it offers to content creators who need to capture a burst of images quickly. Unfortunately, this mode is limited to JPEG only, and I would have liked to see some additional options for fine-tuning the image.

Lastly, Panasonic's Pixel Shift technology, which allows for up to 180-megapixel images from the S1R, was an interesting feature to explore. While it works beautifully in static environments like landscapes or studio portraits, its performance suffers when moving subjects are present. This highlights the importance of careful planning and composition when using this feature.

Overall, I'm excited about the potential of the Panasonic Lumix S1R and S1, and I look forward to putting them through a thorough test and review process. Whether you're a professional content creator or an enthusiast looking for high-quality cameras, these bodies are certainly worth considering. By exploring their features, capabilities, and limitations, we can get a better understanding of what they have to offer and how they might fit into our own workflows.

**Conclusion**

As I concluded my time with the Panasonic Lumix S1R and S1, I couldn't help but feel that these cameras represent a significant leap forward in terms of image quality and user experience. While there may be some minor drawbacks or areas for improvement, it's clear that Panasonic has prioritized innovation and creativity above all else. With continued firmware updates and support, I have no doubt that these cameras will continue to grow and evolve into truly exceptional tools for photographers and content creators alike.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back last week was an extremely travel intensive week I flew to Brooklyn for the Sony release of the one hundred and thirty-five millimeter portrait lens literally boarded a red-eye flight after that event and landed in Austin Texas at about 3:30 in the morning by 7:30 in the morning I was getting ready to go to the Panasonic event for the s1 in the s-1 our Panasonic were gracious enough to invite me out to get a hands-on preview for you guys on these and before I get into this I do want to have a little bit of a disclaimer these cameras have not been released yet in the current firmware that they're on is about 0.7 it needs to be 1.0 and it's a little bit of a peeve of mine because there's lots of people with hands on complete reviews well the camera's not finished yet so that being said there's no access to RAW files some features may change or get improved on Panasonic felt it was ready enough so I did want to at least tell you that before we got into this this is a hands-on and it's a bit of a preview so you guys can see what this camera does the other thing that I want to talk about is this I greatly appreciate Panasonic including me on this event it really is an honor to be invited that being said I had one day to use the camera was about seven or eight hours with lunch in there somewhere I shot as much as I possibly could most of the stuff was set up Panasonic wanted to ensure that we got the maximum use out of the camera and didn't ignore features that were on there which is fine I really wish I had another day or two to use the camera on my own to really put it through its paces and to be able to tell you guys if it really is something that fits in my workflow or not but I'm gonna guess best I can on that but I just wanted to be very clear on how much time I had with the cameras well that being said I am very impressed I've been a big champion of Panasonic cameras for a while now this is my GH five I use this all the time and as much as I love the Micro Four Thirds cameras there are limitations and so when it was announced that Panasonic we're going to do a full-frame version of these I was really stoked and I don't think I was that disappointed it is an impressive cameron I want to get into some details but first I want to give a shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com if you need a website Squarespace have you covered with an all-in-one solution for building beautiful websites portfolios or even an online store you don't have to know any code to understand how to use Squarespace it features a wonderful award-winning drag-and-drop interface you go over you pick a template you customize it till your heart's content yet your fonts your colors your custom layout if you decide Squarespace is right for you I can save you an additional 10% on checkout if you use offer code AOP once again that offer code is AOP and when you have a special shout out and thanks to the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the arts of photography I want to start out by giving you my overall impressions of the s1 and the s-1 R I did get to use both the s1 is a 24 megapixel full-frame camera and the s-1 R is it full-frame also coming in at 47 megapixels so you have a standard resolution that's probably more optimized for things like video and then you have a high resolution if you want really big still images if you were a big fan of the Panasonic system as I am you will feel very at home on the s1 and the s-1 R I've loved Panasonic for a number of years now as I mentioned I used the gh 5 a lot I got to use the g9 for about a month last year and was really impressed with that camera as well and one thing that I think Panasonic has had a hard time with over the last few years is that the Micro Four Thirds sensor has become somewhat dated there's only so many megapixels you can get on there it's not backside eliminated I think they've run into a little bit of wall with the technology on that and so one thing I can say about panasonic is a huge compliment is along with Sony I think those are the two companies that are really good at this but addressing a problem in finding a workable solution for that so when the g9 was announced it comes out with this incredible dual is system on it now you do also have dual is on the g h5 it works even better on the g9 and it is incredible it's probably the best image stabilization that I've used on any camera the reason they put that on there was to deal with low-light performance so you know you can't drive the is so very high without losing picture quality and introducing noise into the picture so what can they do to make it so you can use lower ISO swill they introduced this brilliant dual is system that same system carries over to the s1 and the s-1 R and it's still incredible but the difference is is that you have a new sensor now it's full-frame and you don't have the low ISO issues in fact this camera performs very beautifully right up to twelve thousand eight hundred again I haven't seen the raw files I'm just telling you what I've seen based on the movie files as well as shooting JPEGs and I had all the noise reduction turned off on the camera in fact Panasonic asked us to turn it off they were so proud of the noise levels in this camera it really is outstanding what's great about it now is because you had that great system that was introduced with the g-h five and the g9 it carries over into the full frame so now you have incredible image stabilization but you don't have it there is a necessity anymore for high ISO performance it makes it a very versatile camera image quality on both of these cameras is absolutely outstanding just as I expected it would be the color rendition the contrast everything is absolutely gorgeous there are three wonderful lenses that are being introduced with this system I got to shoot on all of them we had a number of situations set up to shoot in I did some portraits we did some still life work we did some stuff where we could play with the pixel shifting which gives you about a hundred and eighty megapixel image when all is said and done it really is outstanding and I also want to note that these images that you're looking at here I do not have access to the raw files because this is pre-production firmware so these are all JPEGs that are coming straight off of the camera with no editing done whatsoever and another interesting thing about this is I mentioned earlier we did turn off all the noise reduction functions in the camera so even in low light even in long exposure the light painting stuff that we did this is a 15 second exposure and these images look gorgeous right off the card and I was really impressed low light performance for me is the amazing feature of this camera because this is something that we really haven't seen on Panasonic's up to this point I was able to use everything up to twelve thousand eight hundred and it's all very usable it's really impressive what this camera will handle in terms of ISO performance so we should talk about the elephant in the room which is autofocus and this is an area that panasonic has really struggled in over the years having said that using these cameras I think this is the best autofocus that I've seen on a Panasonic camera to date they've made a lot of changes with this but the one thing that they've really struggled with is their depth by D focus autofocus system is contrast based and so a couple years ago when Canon introduced dual pixel autofocus most camera companies started using hybrid systems of autofocus which use contrast detection autofocus points with phase detection autofocus points and the reason you use the to contrast autofocus gets you a lot of accuracy whereas face detection gets you the speed and so using those in tandem gives you a much improved autofocus system now there is a downside to this because the face detection autofocus points literally is a layer that sits on top of the sensor and there are some lighting conditions there all but if you have like a strong backlight or lights coming in a certain direction it is possible that you will see the phase detection autofocus point so you can see these will rainbows on the image Panasonic have been very staunch that they are going to avoid it for that reason and so they have stuck with that by D focus it is contrast only and it's like I said it's the best I've seen on a Panasonic camera to date it is very usable in most situations so with the s1 and the s-1 are there is an additional processing layer for autofocus now what's interesting about this this is the technology that drives what they're calling AI or artificial intelligent autofocus it defines object recognition animal recognition there's improvements with face recognition as well as eye detection and it works really well and what's kind of cool about this system is because it requires more power to operate within the processor I think that Panasonic are in a situation now where where they can make improvements to the autofocus and issue them as firmware updates so while on the one side you may see this as well it's still not perfect autofocus Panasonic may have done something very right here and only time will tell but if we are able to get updates and we really are employing machine learning into autofocus this is something that can be applied to your camera after the fact in a firmware update and while all the other companies found a quick solution Panasonic may very well have found a better solution in the end and let's talk about ergonomics when I first picked up this camera I was under the impression that it was really gonna be massive I've heard other people say that it was described to me as a really big g9 and so I picked this up and it's a little big but it's actually fairly easy to use and I made a comment to one of the Panasonic reps and I said you know I like the fact that you made a camera that's a lot lighter than the Leica SL now I did a review of the Leica SL on this channel and my biggest complaint about that camera is that its massive it's really heavy it's really bulky it's like a big brick of aluminum and it just didn't feel really good to use and he made the comment back to he says it's really not I can't remember which cameras actually heavier but they're within a few grams of one another and so it really is amazing what a little bit of thought into ergonomics and a little bit of form into the body does as you grip it this was a very comfortable camera to use compared to the SL even though apparently they're about the same size now when you start using this all day it does become a little bit heavy in the end but one thing that I found very beneficial is that you can you that way to your advantage when you're hand-holding shooting video you're just not shaking as much removing is much because you've got to support the camera a little more and for stills I think it worked pretty well too now having said that if you're the kind of photographer who really wants to travel like these probably won't be the bodies for you I think it's cool though that Panasonic decided we're not going to worry about making a small camera we want it to do certain things so for instance bringing over the image stabilization from the g9 micro four-thirds is a much smaller sensor as you go up in size on sensors everything becomes exponentially more difficult to do and so you have really four drivers in this thing anything most of the body is taken up with the dynamic image stabilization for the Ibis on that camera but it works really well and there's another side effect that you have on that for still shooting in that it is a very quiet camera even using the mechanical shutter it's still kind of almost rangefinder territory and I found it really nice that it was a comfortable camera even though it was big and it was actually kind of silent so if you're shooting in a sensitive type of situation it works to your advantage so is this the perfect camera that panasonic has dropped well there's still some complaints that I've got they are very my new - the first is pretty obvious because I talked a long time about it but it is the autofocus system I think that this is possible that Panasonic can work this out and I also think it's possible that in the long run they may have been really smart about this and it's gonna be one of the best autofocus systems on the market once it matures we'll have to wait and see what time will tell us on that the other two things is we also have to carry over a 6k photo mode which basically it's Panasonic's way of dealing with high-speed continuous shooting so it is blackout free but essentially what it's doing is it's shooting a 6k burst movie and then you can pick stills from that and shooting them at 60 frames a second and so while that's an okay solution it's not my favorite and it's not ideal you're not gonna get RAW files from that it's gonna be JPEG only it's probably a good solution for a lot of people but I think that is some room that they could improve on and the other thing that I questioned is the pixel shift technology where you can get the up to 180 mega pixel image from the s1r and basically what it does is it takes 8 8 images and shifts the sensor around so you end up with a really high res image and well I think that's kind of a cool thing to brag about on a spec sheet in reality it's really gonna be limited to still life shooting if anything moves in that image it doesn't work even though they do have technology to pick stills that are less motion than others I think that's still a little bit spotty so if you want to shoot landscapes or something that you would need a high megapixel high resolution camera for it's not gonna work if you have any wind and you have trees moving and so those are some small improvements that I think they could work on but I'm serious I am nitpicking on those I'm really excited about these two camera bodies I want to use them more and what my plan is is once this cameras released them and see if I can get a loaner unit and do a proper review for you guys where we can really take it out and do some shooting I think it's one thing to be in a controlled environment where by shooting the same thing and you're using a lot of default modes on the camera versus really exploring what the options are but I'm really excited about this camera I'm really dying to see how it works when I can like get into it and like just the settings better and I'm really once again I want to thank Panasonic for having me out it was pretty awesome if you have any questions drop me a comment I will see you guys in the next video until then laterwelcome back last week was an extremely travel intensive week I flew to Brooklyn for the Sony release of the one hundred and thirty-five millimeter portrait lens literally boarded a red-eye flight after that event and landed in Austin Texas at about 3:30 in the morning by 7:30 in the morning I was getting ready to go to the Panasonic event for the s1 in the s-1 our Panasonic were gracious enough to invite me out to get a hands-on preview for you guys on these and before I get into this I do want to have a little bit of a disclaimer these cameras have not been released yet in the current firmware that they're on is about 0.7 it needs to be 1.0 and it's a little bit of a peeve of mine because there's lots of people with hands on complete reviews well the camera's not finished yet so that being said there's no access to RAW files some features may change or get improved on Panasonic felt it was ready enough so I did want to at least tell you that before we got into this this is a hands-on and it's a bit of a preview so you guys can see what this camera does the other thing that I want to talk about is this I greatly appreciate Panasonic including me on this event it really is an honor to be invited that being said I had one day to use the camera was about seven or eight hours with lunch in there somewhere I shot as much as I possibly could most of the stuff was set up Panasonic wanted to ensure that we got the maximum use out of the camera and didn't ignore features that were on there which is fine I really wish I had another day or two to use the camera on my own to really put it through its paces and to be able to tell you guys if it really is something that fits in my workflow or not but I'm gonna guess best I can on that but I just wanted to be very clear on how much time I had with the cameras well that being said I am very impressed I've been a big champion of Panasonic cameras for a while now this is my GH five I use this all the time and as much as I love the Micro Four Thirds cameras there are limitations and so when it was announced that Panasonic we're going to do a full-frame version of these I was really stoked and I don't think I was that disappointed it is an impressive cameron I want to get into some details but first I want to give a shout-out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com if you need a website Squarespace have you covered with an all-in-one solution for building beautiful websites portfolios or even an online store you don't have to know any code to understand how to use Squarespace it features a wonderful award-winning drag-and-drop interface you go over you pick a template you customize it till your heart's content yet your fonts your colors your custom layout if you decide Squarespace is right for you I can save you an additional 10% on checkout if you use offer code AOP once again that offer code is AOP and when you have a special shout out and thanks to the folks at Squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the arts of photography I want to start out by giving you my overall impressions of the s1 and the s-1 R I did get to use both the s1 is a 24 megapixel full-frame camera and the s-1 R is it full-frame also coming in at 47 megapixels so you have a standard resolution that's probably more optimized for things like video and then you have a high resolution if you want really big still images if you were a big fan of the Panasonic system as I am you will feel very at home on the s1 and the s-1 R I've loved Panasonic for a number of years now as I mentioned I used the gh 5 a lot I got to use the g9 for about a month last year and was really impressed with that camera as well and one thing that I think Panasonic has had a hard time with over the last few years is that the Micro Four Thirds sensor has become somewhat dated there's only so many megapixels you can get on there it's not backside eliminated I think they've run into a little bit of wall with the technology on that and so one thing I can say about panasonic is a huge compliment is along with Sony I think those are the two companies that are really good at this but addressing a problem in finding a workable solution for that so when the g9 was announced it comes out with this incredible dual is system on it now you do also have dual is on the g h5 it works even better on the g9 and it is incredible it's probably the best image stabilization that I've used on any camera the reason they put that on there was to deal with low-light performance so you know you can't drive the is so very high without losing picture quality and introducing noise into the picture so what can they do to make it so you can use lower ISO swill they introduced this brilliant dual is system that same system carries over to the s1 and the s-1 R and it's still incredible but the difference is is that you have a new sensor now it's full-frame and you don't have the low ISO issues in fact this camera performs very beautifully right up to twelve thousand eight hundred again I haven't seen the raw files I'm just telling you what I've seen based on the movie files as well as shooting JPEGs and I had all the noise reduction turned off on the camera in fact Panasonic asked us to turn it off they were so proud of the noise levels in this camera it really is outstanding what's great about it now is because you had that great system that was introduced with the g-h five and the g9 it carries over into the full frame so now you have incredible image stabilization but you don't have it there is a necessity anymore for high ISO performance it makes it a very versatile camera image quality on both of these cameras is absolutely outstanding just as I expected it would be the color rendition the contrast everything is absolutely gorgeous there are three wonderful lenses that are being introduced with this system I got to shoot on all of them we had a number of situations set up to shoot in I did some portraits we did some still life work we did some stuff where we could play with the pixel shifting which gives you about a hundred and eighty megapixel image when all is said and done it really is outstanding and I also want to note that these images that you're looking at here I do not have access to the raw files because this is pre-production firmware so these are all JPEGs that are coming straight off of the camera with no editing done whatsoever and another interesting thing about this is I mentioned earlier we did turn off all the noise reduction functions in the camera so even in low light even in long exposure the light painting stuff that we did this is a 15 second exposure and these images look gorgeous right off the card and I was really impressed low light performance for me is the amazing feature of this camera because this is something that we really haven't seen on Panasonic's up to this point I was able to use everything up to twelve thousand eight hundred and it's all very usable it's really impressive what this camera will handle in terms of ISO performance so we should talk about the elephant in the room which is autofocus and this is an area that panasonic has really struggled in over the years having said that using these cameras I think this is the best autofocus that I've seen on a Panasonic camera to date they've made a lot of changes with this but the one thing that they've really struggled with is their depth by D focus autofocus system is contrast based and so a couple years ago when Canon introduced dual pixel autofocus most camera companies started using hybrid systems of autofocus which use contrast detection autofocus points with phase detection autofocus points and the reason you use the to contrast autofocus gets you a lot of accuracy whereas face detection gets you the speed and so using those in tandem gives you a much improved autofocus system now there is a downside to this because the face detection autofocus points literally is a layer that sits on top of the sensor and there are some lighting conditions there all but if you have like a strong backlight or lights coming in a certain direction it is possible that you will see the phase detection autofocus point so you can see these will rainbows on the image Panasonic have been very staunch that they are going to avoid it for that reason and so they have stuck with that by D focus it is contrast only and it's like I said it's the best I've seen on a Panasonic camera to date it is very usable in most situations so with the s1 and the s-1 are there is an additional processing layer for autofocus now what's interesting about this this is the technology that drives what they're calling AI or artificial intelligent autofocus it defines object recognition animal recognition there's improvements with face recognition as well as eye detection and it works really well and what's kind of cool about this system is because it requires more power to operate within the processor I think that Panasonic are in a situation now where where they can make improvements to the autofocus and issue them as firmware updates so while on the one side you may see this as well it's still not perfect autofocus Panasonic may have done something very right here and only time will tell but if we are able to get updates and we really are employing machine learning into autofocus this is something that can be applied to your camera after the fact in a firmware update and while all the other companies found a quick solution Panasonic may very well have found a better solution in the end and let's talk about ergonomics when I first picked up this camera I was under the impression that it was really gonna be massive I've heard other people say that it was described to me as a really big g9 and so I picked this up and it's a little big but it's actually fairly easy to use and I made a comment to one of the Panasonic reps and I said you know I like the fact that you made a camera that's a lot lighter than the Leica SL now I did a review of the Leica SL on this channel and my biggest complaint about that camera is that its massive it's really heavy it's really bulky it's like a big brick of aluminum and it just didn't feel really good to use and he made the comment back to he says it's really not I can't remember which cameras actually heavier but they're within a few grams of one another and so it really is amazing what a little bit of thought into ergonomics and a little bit of form into the body does as you grip it this was a very comfortable camera to use compared to the SL even though apparently they're about the same size now when you start using this all day it does become a little bit heavy in the end but one thing that I found very beneficial is that you can you that way to your advantage when you're hand-holding shooting video you're just not shaking as much removing is much because you've got to support the camera a little more and for stills I think it worked pretty well too now having said that if you're the kind of photographer who really wants to travel like these probably won't be the bodies for you I think it's cool though that Panasonic decided we're not going to worry about making a small camera we want it to do certain things so for instance bringing over the image stabilization from the g9 micro four-thirds is a much smaller sensor as you go up in size on sensors everything becomes exponentially more difficult to do and so you have really four drivers in this thing anything most of the body is taken up with the dynamic image stabilization for the Ibis on that camera but it works really well and there's another side effect that you have on that for still shooting in that it is a very quiet camera even using the mechanical shutter it's still kind of almost rangefinder territory and I found it really nice that it was a comfortable camera even though it was big and it was actually kind of silent so if you're shooting in a sensitive type of situation it works to your advantage so is this the perfect camera that panasonic has dropped well there's still some complaints that I've got they are very my new - the first is pretty obvious because I talked a long time about it but it is the autofocus system I think that this is possible that Panasonic can work this out and I also think it's possible that in the long run they may have been really smart about this and it's gonna be one of the best autofocus systems on the market once it matures we'll have to wait and see what time will tell us on that the other two things is we also have to carry over a 6k photo mode which basically it's Panasonic's way of dealing with high-speed continuous shooting so it is blackout free but essentially what it's doing is it's shooting a 6k burst movie and then you can pick stills from that and shooting them at 60 frames a second and so while that's an okay solution it's not my favorite and it's not ideal you're not gonna get RAW files from that it's gonna be JPEG only it's probably a good solution for a lot of people but I think that is some room that they could improve on and the other thing that I questioned is the pixel shift technology where you can get the up to 180 mega pixel image from the s1r and basically what it does is it takes 8 8 images and shifts the sensor around so you end up with a really high res image and well I think that's kind of a cool thing to brag about on a spec sheet in reality it's really gonna be limited to still life shooting if anything moves in that image it doesn't work even though they do have technology to pick stills that are less motion than others I think that's still a little bit spotty so if you want to shoot landscapes or something that you would need a high megapixel high resolution camera for it's not gonna work if you have any wind and you have trees moving and so those are some small improvements that I think they could work on but I'm serious I am nitpicking on those I'm really excited about these two camera bodies I want to use them more and what my plan is is once this cameras released them and see if I can get a loaner unit and do a proper review for you guys where we can really take it out and do some shooting I think it's one thing to be in a controlled environment where by shooting the same thing and you're using a lot of default modes on the camera versus really exploring what the options are but I'm really excited about this camera I'm really dying to see how it works when I can like get into it and like just the settings better and I'm really once again I want to thank Panasonic for having me out it was pretty awesome if you have any questions drop me a comment I will see you guys in the next video until then later\n"