For the record, there is absolutely no rhyme or reason for the video you are about to see. It's purely random tests with the new Panasonic Lumix LX100 4K compact camera. Here's some very important notes about the video.
It was incredibly bright outdoors and the LX100 'NEEDS' an ND Filter. Unfortunately i'm traveling and the only one I could pick up was a very (very very) cheap 43mm Variable ND Filter. So if you see dark corners, or loss of sharpness, that's not the LX100. Yes i'm sure this really skews the results, but I seriously would not be able to have shot anything without one. I consider today to be just a big learning curve with the camera.
I tried shooting a variety of things, brick and roof tiles (testing aliasing), I shot people, I shot wide, I zoomed in, and I tested closeup macro. White balance was set to auto but you can tell it shifted quite a bit through the scenes. The extreme night shots were done at ISO 2000. This got pretty grainy, so you may want to keep things down under ISO 1600.
I was testing both manual and auto focus in video mode so you may see the camera hunt for focus at times. That could be me doing it manually, or sometimes it was the camera doing it. Focus peaking is available, but it's actually pretty subtle and sometimes didn't show up at all. Everything in this video was shot handheld - no tripods. I did at times use a PNC Pistol Grip, but that was it. The image stabilization on the lens worked pretty well despite my shaky hands.
4K Video Resolution
Here's another set of video clips [Uploaded in 4K resolution] I shot with the same cheap ND Filter the next day. I'm still using the Natural color profile with the settings turned down and adjusted the curves to bring up the shadows and push down the highlights. Make sure to watch it in full 4K resolution if you can.
Anyways, don't take the quality of these videos as a standard for the Panasonic LX100. The camera performs far better than what I was able to do in these random tests. It certainly takes some getting used to as there is no dedicated video mode. I also periodically ran into issues where I could not see how my aperture and shutter speed settings affected the image until 'after' I hit the record button. Basically you change your settings and think it's properly exposed until you hit record and then all of a sudden it goes dark. I believe there's some type of 'real-time preview' setting in the menu, which i'll have to dig for. Hopefully tomorrow i'll be a little more prepared and get better and more consistent video samples.
I was also amazed at the speed of wireless live view monitoring and controls with the Panasonic Image App. Maybe I haven't used it in a while, but it seems to be faster than with the GH4 when I first used it. Examining the video shot in 30p, I concluded that it was just 2 frames behind the camera's feed. The camera has 0 frame lag from what's actually happening 'live'.
Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX100 - via B&HPhoto
