Panasonic Lumix S1: A timelapse photographer's review.

So with most of my work postponed and meetings down the drain, I’m going to start my timelapse blog which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Let's kick things off with The Panasonic Lumix S1. 

NB: Any links to products you see will be Amazon Affiliate links.

On paper, this camera is a true feat of what is possible right now in camera technology, even over a year later, nothing has been announced or released in its price bracket that can come close to rivalling it for features and price.

I’m a nerd at heart, I tinker with anything and everything to get any last drop of performance out or changing tiny details that make my life just that tiny bit more efficient. I do love spec sheets and rumours, any time the Canon R5 gets mentioned I get a tiny nerdgasm over its incredible specs (I hope they’re true).

However, as someone who needs this year to be my breakout year into full time professional timelapse photography, I also need the gear I buy to work flawlessly and give me the best features I can get for a good price. There’s no point in buying a “4K” camera if there’s a 2x crop on it, like the Canon EOS R, or it records in a crap codec, like the 1DX MK2.

I’m going to mention Canon a lot in this review, as I bought the S1 coming from an entirely Canon background. The S1 is now my A cam, my 7D MK2 is my B cam which replaced my 6D, and my 6D replaced my 600D which served me for 6 wonderful years whilst I was learning. Going to a new manufacturer from 6-7 years of Canon shooting was a big step, as I knew L mount glass is way more expensive than EF mount, plus it’s a brand-new platform. For someone who needs to properly justify their purchases at this point, it was a big jump.

So has it been a match made in heaven? Or have I been smitten by a jealous 7D MK2? Let's take a look.

The Specs:

As I’ve said, on paper this is a killer camera for around £2000. It’s got a 24.2MP CMOS sensor, which gives image files of 6000x4000 in 3:2. The 5.5 stops of IBIS is second to none, and when paired with any S series lenses which offer lens stabilisation, that goes to 6.5 stops which is both amazing and unparalleled.

What isn’t so impressive is the autofocus. Panasonic has opted for a Contrast Detect AF system in the S1, It’s not a huge issue for timelapse photography however for moving towards or away from a subject for a hyperlapse it can become an issue at night. For a £2000 camera, I would have liked to see a more modern phase detect system. The Contrast AF isn’t *bad*, most of the time it is near-instantaneous, however, that is usually in bright daylight or under studio lighting. In a dimly lit setting it hunts like there’s no tomorrow and at night time in a city it rarely gets it perfect.

Other features include dual card slots, one SD and one XQD (more on this later, suffice to say the SD card slot isn’t great…). The EVF and front screens are brilliant, the EVF in particular is tack sharp and makes it difficult to go back to a DSLR style optical viewfinder. Panasonic claims 9FPS shooting, which is true if you don’t use any kind of AF, with any AF mode on that drops to 6FPS which is quite low, it’s not a sports camera though so I can forgive it. If you need higher than that you can use the really useful 30 or 60FPS modes which gives you a two-second burst of 30 or 60 frames. It gives you a 6K video to pull out frames from so you won’t be able to shoot 60fps RAW, but it’s a welcome feature.

 In video mode, it can do 4K 24/25/30 internally with no crop, this is a huge deal for videographers and even me who does commercial shoots on the side. 4K 60fps is available with an APS-C crop, I can deal with that for slow-motion stuff. A paid upgrade is available for £179 which enables 10bit 4:2:2 recording internally up to 150mbps, enables V-Log and some extra features like waveforms and LUT support. I won’t be going much further than this on the video side as this is a timelapse blog, there are some links below to more in-depth video reviews.

Build:

The build of the Lumix S1 feels amazing. By no means is it a small mirrorless camera. It is a statement when you bring this out, everything about it screams big, professional camera. Whilst I was in Berlin I met up with Michael Tomas from London Viewpoints who shoots with a Nikon Z6, that was the first time where the sheer size of the S1 was put into context. The Z6 looked like a beginner point and shoot compared to the S1.

This has a mix of advantages and disadvantages. To me, I prefer a camera that I can be a bit rough with, so if I drop it or have to run to a shot and it hits a tree or a wall, I still want it to work. The S1 feels like it would handle that with ease just like my Canon cameras, whereas I would be more cautious with a Sony or Nikon mirrorless, and maybe miss shots because of it. The sense of “go anywhere, do anything” when shooting with it is priceless.

The main issue with a camera this size is clearly weight. It is heavy just by itself, and the L mount lenses don’t help either, the body alone weighs 1kg, and the lenses are constantly 200-400 grams heavier than options from Canon or Nikon. Or with their 50mm option, the Canon 50mm F1.4 USM is a mere 290g. The Lumix S Pro series 50mm F1.4 is an astounding 955g! Trust me when I say you feel the weight VERY quickly.

The weight is one issue, the next is how totally conspicuous you look when using the thing. There’s no way in hell you could convince a security guard that you’re just a hobbyist when you’re somewhere that might require a permit, it looks *too* professional.

The screen is a bit weird for me. Sure it’s better than a flat screen, but the very odd and over-engineered way it flips out is okay but not great. Plus the ribbon cable is exposed when it is flipped out, not great from a build perspective.

The shooting experience:

Okay, how does it perform in the real world? Short answer: I can’t give you one. Let's start with the first shoot.

As I’ve said, I’ve owned the S1 for four months at the time of writing. I think this is a good amount of time to test the camera and to see what issues crop up, making a review a week after it’s released never fills me with confidence. 

I got the camera in early December, and about a week later I was off to London for some unrelated work, but I brought my gear with me as I’d have 1-2 days of downtime to test it and see what I could come up with. The timelapse modes in camera are fantastic, you can set an interval down to 1 second and up to 99 minutes and 59 seconds, and shoot up to 9999 images if you so desire. The way to switch modes is well thought out, it is a multi-dial underneath the main rotary dial, so you can quickly switch in and out of timelapse and still modes. It will also save your previous settings once the sequence is completed. You can, of course, use a 2.5mm TRS external remote to trigger the camera if you don’t want to use the internal interval timer.

The secondary dial makes it easy to change modes.

Other timelapse-dedicated features include a start time mode, this allows you to set a specific time for the timelapse to start, and once your sequence is over it will give you the option to build a 4K video in-camera! This is great for time-critical shoots, or if you want to quickly check if the shot turned out good, it takes barely 2 minutes to render the sequence. This is on top of keeping the RAW images.

There is a stop-motion feature, which includes a feature where it will overlay the last image you take on the screen called Sheer overlay. This is amazing for shooting hyperlapses to get the framing exactly the same between shots and gives the stabilisation software a better chance of smoothing it out first time.

The auto-exposure levelling is brilliant, there are drawbacks, you can only set the lowest shutter speed to 1 second before it starts ramping ISO, you’ve got to set the ISO to a manual limit depending on what you’re shooting. This comes from experience and testing so it’ll be a few days/weeks before you work out what the ideal settings are. But this is a tradeoff that I’m prepared to take for the speed and convenience of an automatic holy grail, for 99% of day to nights I no longer use LRTimelapse, it’s that good.

So whilst shooting, there was no fault with the camera, the menus are intuitive, coming from Canon menus a week earlier I found it easy to make the switch. The problems start with post-production.

From London I pretty much went straight to Malta for a week's holiday/shooting, I didn’t have a chance to look at the files from London before I went. If I did I would have noticed a few frames with corruptions. One frame out of the sequence would inexplicably have coloured bands across the image, destroying that image and making the images before unusable, as there would be a jump in time if I removed that file. This was anywhere from 30-100 images lost due to this.

So I was shooting Malta with a camera I had no idea was malfunctioning, as the errors only happened on import, the image review on the camera made it seem like there was nothing wrong. The files were bad as soon as they were written to the card, importing via a card reader or USB made no difference, and no RAW converter like Camera RAW, Lightroom or Capture One could rescue them. It happened on two brand new 128gb Lexar cards, and on a 64gb SanDisk I’ve had for years with no issue.

Okay then, I’ve got a bad camera clearly, this is obviously a fault from the factory, it’s well under warranty so I’ll just contact Panasonic and either get a repair or replacement. Easier said than done.

I must have spent 3 full working days over a month to get this sorted, from contacting Panasonic and from their advice I spent hours updating the firmware, different cards, different lenses(!?). And as it only happens once every 2000 frames or so, it was very hard to replicate. I still don’t know if it was frame count or sequence count which triggered it. Even the files it affected were random.

Clearly a glaring issue, and I wasn’t about to spend hundreds of pounds on CFexpress cards, the whole point of having dual card slots is for redundancy, if one is already failing then there's no point, who knows what else could fail on this camera! Panasonic took ages to finally accept that it needs repairing, I would have preferred a replacement but they weren’t offering that.

It was up to me to contact the only repair centre in the UK to send it to them, Panasonic wouldn’t raise a case on my behalf, so I had to explain everything yet again to them. Finally, I get a repair number and I’m told to post it to them. I ask for a postage label, they don’t give them out. I ask Panasonic for a postage label, or reimbursement for the cost, I’m told their policy is not to reimburse postage costs.

For a fault that I didn’t cause, I now had to pay £30 to send it to them fully insured.  Their customer service is shocking, I’m not one of their Pro members as I wasn’t about to invest thousands of pounds in new lenses for a system that ruins my shots. Their only solution was to write to their head office and ask AGAIN for a refund on the postage, that's an hour wasted writing a letter and going to the post office.

On top of all this, they don’t give replacement units to tide people over whilst their camera is being repaired. The only way is to apply for a free loan unit as anyone else can, this left me with 1 and a half weeks without the camera I paid for and no help from Panasonic. Luckily I did get a loan unit and their lenses to try which I took to Berlin, the loan camera worked flawlessly.

I’ve since got my S1 back and it seems to be working now. They replaced the sensor and the motherboard, basically giving me a new camera. I can understand faults in new tech, but it's the way that the company deals with their customers when things go wrong that defines them, I’m sorry to say that their way of dealing with issues is totally inadequate, and seriously made me think about selling my S1 as soon as I got it back.

UPDATE 23/03: It’s not fixed. Halfway through a test timelapse it decided that my lens wasn’t attached properly and stopped the sequence, even though it was all locked in and I hadn’t touched it, not to mention the sensor came back dirty from DKAVS. Plus four more files have been corrupted on a known-good card, and it failed to create a timelapse video in-camera, instead deciding to freeze up and not respond. Panasonic support is still being very slow and I’ll update when I hear back.

UPDATE 12/08: Using SanDisk cards seems to have alleviated the corruption issues, but they’re only 64gb. Still no response from Panasonic though…

Let’s move on from my troubles, let's talk about image quality.

24.2 Megapixels doesn’t sound too impressive when cameras like the Sony A7R exist, but I think 24-26 megapixels is pretty perfect for timelapse photographers. 4K is the industry standard now, and the S1 can deliver very good 4K files, as it’s downsampling from 6000x4000 into a 4K timeline, it looks very good. Plus, the files aren't so huge you need an entire server room just to store the things.

If you want a higher resolution for stills, you can use the sensor shift function to get a 96-megapixel image, I’ve not used it much, and the couple of shots I tried with it didn’t blow me away, but take that with a grain of salt. It won’t be able to do 8K timelapses, but that isn’t a concern for me for the foreseeable future.

Oh and dust. DUST! The S1 is my first mirrorless camera, and every time I take it out I need to blow stubborn dust from the sensor. Why all mirrorless cameras can't just close the shutter when it’s off is baffling, I don’t think I’ve ever cleaned my old 6D’s sensor.

The RW2 RAW files seem to be made of magic, however. The dynamic range you can salvage from highlights or deep shadows is super impressive, without losing detail or introducing much noise.

You can see examples on my Instagram here!

Conclusion:

So, should you buy the Lumix S1 for timelapse photography? For £2000 it is the best photo/video hybrid currently on the market. For me, the ability to shoot 4K video and great timelapses in one camera was the main reason I bought it. However, with the severe issues I’ve had, (these issues aren’t just limited to me, join the Lumix S1 Facebook group or the Lumix Reddit for other stories very similar to mine) and the absolutely shocking customer service I’ve had the misfortune to receive, I can’t fully put my backing behind the S1. Panasonic is marketing this to professionals, they also have to provide a professional level of service, 3 days of unpaid work sorting issues with your gear is huge when you’re self-employed.

 When it works, it is an amazing camera, but it is Panasonics’ first full-frame mirrorless camera, with a very young ecosystem and lens selection. The S2 will be worth it in the next couple of years, and hopefully, their customer service will improve by then too.

Buy the Panasonic Lumix S1 here: https://amzn.to/34xNuPu