Panasonic GH5 vs. Sony A7sii

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Watch more here: http://bit.ly/AA_Watch

Sony A7s ii - http://amzn.to/1TsF95J

Sony 16-35mm f4 Lens - http://amzn.to/1ToMn9y

Sony 55mm f1.8 Lens - http://amzn.to/1ToMpy4

Panasonic GH4 - http://amzn.to/1GJjb7N

Panasonic GH5 - http://amzn.to/2pzMQf1

Panasonic 12-35mm f2.8 Lens - http://amzn.to/1FRE9kc

Panasonic 100-300mm Lens - http://amzn.to/2kW8nvc

Rode Videomic Pro - http://amzn.to/1p2a9JT

Manfrotto 502 Video Head MVH502AH - http://amzn.to/1nhkBrF

Manfrotto 055XPROB Tripod - http://amzn.to/UKa55r

Glidecam 2000 HD - http://amzn.to/WUpTEv

We've filmed in places like Yellowstone, Yosemite, Japan, and many more places while backpacking and camping. Here's our take on how our cameras perform their jobs when out in the wild.

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All of the musical compositions or arrangements and footage in this video are original, and were composed, recorded, and captured by Andrew Lin, Bryan Lin, and Robby Huang

Original content and music is copyright Adventure Archives (c) 2017

Tags: panasonic gh4,panasonic gh5,gh4,gh5,sony a7s,sony a7s ii,sony a7s 2,sony a7s mk 2,sony a7s mk ii,a7s ii,a7s 2,a7s mk 2,a7s mk ii,gh4 review,gh5 review,a7s review,a7s ii review,sony a7s ii review,gh5 vs a7s,comparison,best camera,best vlogging camera

Video Transcription

today I'm going to be doing a real-world dual review of the Panasonic gh2 I shoot an outdoor show on this YouTube channel have done 11 episodes of the gh4 9 episodes with the a7s2 in addition to over 500 vlogs on my personal channel in one episode with the g-h 5 today only be discussing the G h5 and a7s2 but I'll be basing a lot of this off of my experience with the gh4 so similar to the G h5 before we begin I'd also like to note that this review is purely for video features I don't take souls with either camera with the exception of time lapses so if you want to cut to the chase and just hear what you should pick if you absolutely can only get one of these cameras it comes down to one thing you need extreme low-light performance in the shallow depth-of-field you can get from a full-frame sensor if these two features are make-or-break for you then you have to pick the sony there really is no choice otherwise the g h5 is a better camera in just about every way both cameras produce fantastic video in most lighting conditions but I shoot an outdoors show and I am much more concerned with how well the camera facilitates me getting good shot quickly and efficiently on the first try in real-world conditions and in this regard the g h5 beats a7s2 hands-down but before i go more in depth let's take a look at these two cameras so you can see how I came to my conclusions now since I do think it's the most important consideration when comparing these two cameras let's talk about the low-light performance and shallow depth of field the a7s2 has a full-frame sensor which primarily gives you two benefits the first is it's very easy to get a shallow depth of field take this shot we did in our Yellowstone episode it's so easy to get a shallow depth of field like this shot and it's beautiful this was at F 1.8 on the Sony 55 millimeter and I love the way it looks the other benefit of a full-frame sensor is the low-light performance this camera performs so well in low light it almost feels like it's a night-vision camera for this shot of the Northern Lights from our algonquin episode it just would not have been possible without day 7s - this was a once-in-a-lifetime shot that you literally cannot put a price on it would not have even been visible with the gh 5 in most other cameras or take this shot of the car and the star is taken from our Monongahela episode being able to film the stars in real time is something we only dreamed about for years or take a look at the opening shots from our Wain episode shot entirely in the dark the image is amazingly clean and you can actually see what's going on this type of shooting just wouldn't be possible with any other camera in this price range this is the defining feature of the a7s2 and it's the most important consideration when choosing between these two cameras so the Panasonic gh2 Micro Four Thirds format which is about 1/4 of the size of a full-frame sensor this affects both depth of field and low-light performance you'll still be able to get the same shallow depth of field it's just a little harder and more inconvenient so that's not a huge deal but definitely something to keep in mind especially when you're deciding what lenses you want to buy as well additionally with the sensor that's small your low light performance is just not going to be as good there's really only so much noise reduction and image processing you can do to clean up an image here you can see a shot from our Yosemite episode shot on the gh4 at F 2.8 at night it's certainly still usable but it's nowhere near the clean image you can get from a7s2 Michael four-thirds does have one advantage though which is that you can get incredibly close to your subject even without a macro lens this shot from our Red River Gorge episode was shot with the 12 to 35 millimeter lens literally inches from the subject this allows us to get all sorts of great close-ups of mushrooms bugs in all of our other footage with just one lens there's no need to have a separate macro lens like we would on the sony a7s - now that we know where the two cameras stand in regards to their low-light capabilities and sensor size let's talk about actually using the cameras this is where I'm going to explain how I think the gh 5 is a better camera in just about every way so since we are an outdoor shows and we're out backpacking for 3 to 4 days let's start with battery life so on the Left we have an a7 s2 battery and on the right we have a gh 5 battery just looking at the physical size of the batteries you already know the gh 5 battery will last significantly longer in our experience we can get through almost an entire day of shooting with just one official panasonic battery with the sony official batteries we're lucky if we get through the whole day using less than 3 we do have third-party batteries for both cameras and while neither lacks as long as their official counterparts the gh 5 batteries also last much longer the a7s2 eats through batteries to an extremely frustrating degree there have been many episodes where by the end of the trip were cycling through depleted batteries to try and squeeze just a few more shots out of them so you might think well why don't you just bring more batteries for one thing we have to carry everything when we're filming our episodes and any additional weight is more than a little unwelcome for another thing charging so many batteries before every trip is a hassle I'd rather not have to deal with the g-h five winds in battery life hands down next up let's talk about the screens and viewfinders the GH five has a flip screen while the a7s2 has a rear screen that articulates up and down additionally the gh five has a touchscreen which we'll get into in a little bit as someone who doesn't shoot in controlled environments where you can have an external monitor the screen that is bright and visible even in daylight and can flip to all sorts of different angles is crucial the gh 5 screen is very bright and the screen flips to every angle we could need especially to the front so if we don't actually have someone operating the camera we can still check to see if everything's working it's also really helpful if you shoot vlogs the a7s2 screen you just have to hope that everything was set up right and nothing goes wrong mid shot like it running out of batteries and yes the battery life is that awful on the a7s2 so I'm mentioning it again but even if a 7s2 screen did articulate and flip to the front it's just not bright enough it's almost unusable in daylight additionally if you shoot in 4k which we do you can't actually adjust the brightness when it comes to screen the gh 5 wins as well quick addendum however the viewfinders on both cameras apart neckline they're both sharp and since you look into the eyepiece their brightness doesn't matter so much even in sunlight the gh 5 I will say has the slight edge in quality but it's not such a huge advantage that it's something I would miss when using the a7s2 so this next category is going to cover a lot of things but in general I'm talking about the ergonomics and ease of use of actually using the cameras let's start with something you do all the time focusing I'm not going to talk about continuous auto focus on either camera that much because honestly they're both not great the gh 5 does have many settings that I haven't experimented with too much so the possibility remains it could actually be better but it wins in the manual focus Department anyway so let's talk about that first there's a physical switch to go from manual to autofocus the a7s2 relies on a button that you inexplicably have to press twice just to get it to switch focusing modes and that's not even the default setting which requires you to hold the button to switch back and forth between manual and autofocus that sounds like a niggling complaint but when you're trying to get a shot quickly it's anything but anyway when you're manually focusing the gah 5 focus ring is very precise and the focus speaking is very helpful when you start to pull focus the image punches in and magnifies with a very sharp image to help you grab focus the focus Peaks are very accurate and you can tell what's in focus even though I believe both cameras use fly-by-wire focusing the a7s2 focus ring almost has some sort of weird acceleration and focusing never feels accurate and you can forget even trying to pull off a rack focus smoothly additionally when the image punches in on the a7s2 it's so pixelated that I'm really confident that something is even in focus and the focus Peaks give so many false positives but you can only be sure something is actually in focus by going back and forth a couple of times until you find the highest density of focus Peaks the gh 5 also allows for touchscreen focusing which is absolutely fantastic I didn't realize how much I missed it because our gh force touchscreen has been broken for a while now I've been using the a7s2 for so long I've gotten used to not having it but to be able to just touch right where you want to focus is amazing so for focusing the gh 5 wings again next up is button placement and ease of use again this is another tale of two cameras so to speak with the gh 5 being well thought out intuitive and quick well the a 7 a 2 is cumbersome unintuitive and even inconsistent let's take a look at what the gh 5 does and why I wish the a7s2 did it as well first off you can record with the shutter button something inexplicably the a7s2 is incapable of you can set record to one of the custom buttons but this also uses up a custom button the gh 5 even has a separate record button that it's nice and easy to press the a7s2 has one but not only is it terribly placed it's indented so it's hard to press the gh 5 has dedicated white balance and ISO buttons to things I use all the time the a7s2 requires you to put these on shortcut buttons

which I will add there are not enough of and the wheel buttons aren't exactly hard to press but they aren't convenient and feel imprecise the gh 5 has a dedicated button to switch between the viewfinder and screen or to toggle the viewfinder sensor on and off the a7s2 in contrast requires you to search through the menus there's other niggling things like turning focus Peaks on and on on the gh 5 that can merely press a shortcut and it will toggle through the different focus peak options while on the a7s2 I have to press the focus be cuttin and then use the directional inputs to select the lungs I want and then press Enter it's just cumbersome and not well thought-out furthermore the menus are really bad on the a7s2 I've been using this camera for a year and a half and have shot over 500 videos with it and I still have trouble finding things the gh 5 isn't much better in this department but I will say that the menus are more fast and responsive but using a touchscreen makes it much quicker and more pleasant than the slow unresponsive clunky menus of a7s2 the a7s2 also hides one really important feature to me behind this slow and clunky menu into time-lapse mode you actually have to pay 10 dollars for a sort of in-camera app to be able to do time lapses at all and the interface is slow in pain pack loading it up takes forever making any change this takes forever and you can only doom the screen while it's taking pictures you can't actually turn off the screen to save battery life

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ugh five on the other hand has time-lapse built-in and you just flip the shooting mode to time-lapse you can very easily change the settings as pressing the menu button instantly takes you to the time-lapse settings if you'd also pause the time-lapse at any time by pressing the F in one button something you can't do on the a7s2 additionally while this isn't crucial or anything you can make a video of your time-lapse in camera after it finishes and even delete your time-lapse photos to save space and new to the gh 5 over the gh4 you can put in a second SD card and save any time lapses to that one to help with organisation a small but welcome addition and I don't know exactly what this falls under but the a7s2 has a record time limit of 29 minutes of continuous shooting for professional shooting especially for interviews this isn't a nightmare the gh 5 has no such limitation fortunately some awesome user actually made a hack that removes the time limit on the sony a7s 2 and i've used it many times then it works great though in this case the battery will be your biggest roadblock to recording for long periods of time this limit is in place for Sony to avoid paying tax on what classifies as a video camera but it sucks that they aren't willing to absorb that price for the sake of their customers adding onto organ omits and ease of use the a7s2 actually wins in one category which is lin's removal with a7s2 the lens removal button is placed where your right hand compress it at the same time that you're holding the camera and you can easily take the lens off with your left hand the gh 5 on the other hand has a lens release button on the left side and you have to do this awkward dance to get it off while still holding the camera we switch lenses quite often and the camera isn't always on a tripod so this is actually a consideration for us one final note is that the gh 5 is weatherproof i've looking forward to see if sony claims the a7s2 to be weatherproof but I found a definitive answer I will say though that on one of our particularly rainy episodes such as this one in Wayne the a7s2 screen died on this final shot of the episode while the gh4 kept going strong we were able to get it repaired under warranty fortunately but it did break now the touchscreen eventually broke on the gh4 a few episodes later probably from additional rain so it's not perfect but I will say from my experience I would trust the gh 5 survive in the rain over the a7s2 so the gh five wins in organ omits and ease of use it feels like they really listened to what people actually need in a camera and it's very well designed the a7s2 feels like it was made by an engineer making sure you could actually do everything the camera needs to do but with no thought of the actual user experience so next I'm going to talk about video quality and video features probably less so than you're used to in other reviews my reasoning is that both of these cameras produce absolutely fantastic looking images with picture profiles color grading and lenses your experience can vary so much that I'm not going to say that one is better than the other in addition I'm not good at color grading setting up picture profiles or maximizing dynamic range so I don't feel qualified to make judgements on either cameras color dynamic range or anything like that I'll leave that to other much more qualified youtubers to help you make those judgments to my eye though they're both fantastic so you really can't go wrong either way Oh in OneNote about the 10 bit 4 - 2 on the gh 5 like I said I don't color grade besides adding saturation to unnatural levels so maybe it could help me but I don't really know how to use it and as of the time of this review it's broken in Premiere so I won't talk about it anyway that being said there are some key differentiators probably the biggest one being that the gh 5 can do internal 4k 60 frames per second whereas the a7s2 maxes out at 4k 30 frames per second and for our purposes we use quite a bit of slow-motion so the gh 5 4k slow motion was a very welcome addition it looks stunning and the results from our episode in New River Gorge were absolutely

outstanding the a7s2 can do 1080p 120 frames per second but it looks a little ugly

it also crops in on the image fairly significantly you can see here from our Clifty wilderness episode how it looks not great but still passable the GH 5 can do 1080p 180 frames per second and here's what it looks like at 180 frames per second both cameras have a stabilized sensor and they work well on both I have had an issue with a7s2 where it almost locks in after a second especially when I'm on a tripod I'm not sure if that's a bug of my camera but as long as I know about it it's not a big deal because I just keep that in mind when I'm shooting the gh 5 has the edge here though because it actually allows the lens and the sensor to stabilize in tandem they call this the dual is system while it's not going to work miracles it does look great additionally the gh 5 has an electronic stabilizer that will crop the image in a little bit and give you an even more stabilized image I imagine I won't be using this on the channels videos because we generally bring a glidecam but it'd be great for vlogs and other handheld footage in the end though we generally use the a7s2 with this 16 35 millimeter on a glide cam and it produces great results as you can see in our Yellowstone episode here so one final note on the quality of the videos from these two cameras I actually prefer the way the gh 5 image looks I don't know what it is or if it's just my settings but there's something about the quality of the motion that I just really really like with the gh 5 now as I mentioned before I am NOT by any stretch and expert on color rating or picture profile tweaking so it's possible you can get the a7s2 looking like the gh 5 but in my experience I just like the way it looks better than the a7s2 out of the box but your mileage may vary in that regard depending on your skill and taste and one final note in my experience the gh 5 seems to have a much better auto white balance than the a7s2 so finally there are a few more miscellaneous considerations first up is sound quality I use the rode videomic pro on both cameras and both of them sound great and have workable e low noise floors the a7s2 does get a slight edge here but they both sound good this is what it sounds like talking into the GH five and this is what it sounds like talking into the a7s2 next up is weight inside one nice thing about the micro four-thirds format is that the lenses are much smaller and lighter this 12 to 35 millimeter lens on the g h5 is a hulking beast on the a7s2 with sony's 24 to 70 millimeter the g h5 is heavier without a lens though and honestly they're both super heavy with the lens so they both kind of suck in this department additionally these lines of cameras seem to be getting bigger rather than smaller the g h5 is bigger than the gh4 and the a7s2 is bigger than the original a7 s not a great trend but everything else is getting better at least and one last consideration before we go to the conclusion price the g h5 is 700 dollars cheaper than the a7 s - that is no small difference I bought the g h5 at $2,000 with a used 12 35 millimeter lens for $500 so a total price of $2,500 the a7 s - I bought for $3,000 plus 1200 for the 16 to 35 millimeter lens for a total of $4,200 now those lenses aren't equivalent so that's not exactly the same but just camera price alone is $700 different now for me I also use these cameras for professional use so they're tools to make money also I just cannot put a price on the fact that $4,200 allowed me to capture the Northern Lights well in this case technically 3800 since I was using the 55 millimeter F 1 point 8 I bought for $800 this is something I literally could not have done with the gh 5 so even if I had saved the money I would be without a shot of the Northern Lights in conclusion both cameras produce some fantastic looking visuals the a7s2 has obvious and clear advantage and low light but it lags behind the gh 5 just about every other way I think you really have to look at what you need in the camera and what your budget is honestly for me if I could only have one of these cameras despite all its shortcomings I'd probably still get the a7s2

the low-light performance is that miraculous but in my past year and a half of daily use it's been nothing but a pain using the camera I've dealt with it but it's just a poorly designed camera but if I were going into a shooting situation where I didn't know the lighting conditions I bring the a7s2 because I know I would be just fine no matter what the lighting is but since I do have both I would rather use the gh five nine times out of ten it is a better screen that is a better battery it is better ergonomics and ease of use it's just a better camera to actually shoot with the gh five is a fantastic camera that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to anyone shooting video

the a7 is - I would almost call a specialty camera that can make miracles in low-light but it's almost like a goosebumps novel or something be careful what you wish for because you have to deal with all of its baggage like it's a terrible scream bad user interface and short battery life so who Wentz I'll let you decide but for my purposes I bought both the gh 5 will get 90% of my usage and the a7s2 will get the other 10 I hope this review has been helpful feel free to leave comments below and I'll try to get back to you and also feel free to look at all of our episodes to see how the a7s2 and the gh4 which is the GH 5's predecessor look in action in general tripod shot so the gh4 glide cam and low-light shots are the a7s2 if you like what we're doing feel free to support us at patreon.com slash adventure feel free to give the video a like and subscribe if you're not already thank you very much and good luck on your decision

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