The new king of low-light? Video-centric Panasonic GH5S arrives, gets its first real-world field test

posted Monday, January 8, 2018 at 2:45 PM EDT

Big news, low-light and video fans: The movie-centric Panasonic GH5S just landed, it looks like it could be a contender for the low-light throne and we've already posted our first real-world field test!

The GH5S looks a whole heck of a lot like the GH5 which precedes it, but look closer and you'll see major changes in its imaging pipeline. The result is a camera which is less of an all-rounder, and more tightly focused on two specific niches: videography, and low-light photography including astrophotography. With half the resolution of the GH5 at around 10.2 megapixels, the GH5S nevertheless packs in plenty enough pixels for high-quality 4K video. And with pixels that are almost twice as large as those of the GH5, the GH5S is a low-light specialist, hungrily devouring photons and yielding much cleaner results.

But if you're considering the GH5S as a still-shooting alternative to the GH5, there are certainly some potential drawbacks you'll want to be aware of, most notably the subtraction of the in-body image stabilization system. For the full story on what's new and what's not, watch our introductory video and read our first real-world field test! We also have beta versions of our laboratory First Shots for your pixel-peeping pleasure, as well as for comparisons against the GH5 and others now stocked in our Comparometer.