Panasonic GH5 First Shots: A pre-production model of Panasonic’s new flagship 6K-shooting camera arrives

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by William Brawley

posted Tuesday, February 14, 2017 at 5:30 PM EST

Hold onto your hats Micro Four Thirds fans, there's a new flagship in town! Panasonic's long-anticipated GH5 is here, at least with pre-production firmware, but we've received the green light to post First Shots anyway. Pixel peep away! But, just note that final image quality could potentially change between now and when the Panasonic GH5 hits the store shelves.

Offering a welcome resolution boost from the 16-megapixel chip of its predecessor, the new GH5 is centered around an all-new 20MP Live MOS image sensor without an optical low-pass filter as well as a faster, much more powerful Venus Engine image processor. Not only should the camera be capable of sharper, higher resolution photos, but higher ISO performance should be better with more natural, more intelligent in-camera noise reduction processing.

Of course, on the video side of the equation, the new 20MP sensor and faster processor give the new Panasonic GH5 some pretty incredible specs, such as 6K video AND photo capture at 30 frames per second -- yes, that's 18MP still frames at 30fps. Plus 4K Photo at up to a whopping 60fps! Of course, that's beyond the scope of our First Shots series of lab samples images, so you'll have to bare with us until we get to try all these new features out in the field.

With our standard series of First Shots, we have a full range of test shots of our Still Life test target across the GH5's full ISO range, at both minimal and default Noise Reduction settings. And of course, we have both JPEGs and RAW files available for download, though we don't expect raw converters to work just yet with such a new camera.

So, are you ready to check out the image quality of Panasonic's new GH5 flagship? Head on over to our Panasonic GH5 Samples Page for all the images. To see how the camera stacks up against its big competitors, such as the Olympus E-M1 Mark II or the Sony A6500, compare our sample images side-by-side in our Comparometer.