Lsake
Active Member
Due to winter cash back and trade in deals I was able to upgrade to the S5II at almost no cost. I managed to get out with it on Saturday afternoon and can confirm the new auto focus system is noticeably better in AFC burst modes. The original S5 was always pretty reliable in AFS but sequences shot in AFC could sometimes miss. I took about 600 images and had very few miss focused shots, almost all the discarded images were due to them not being the best composition, or motion blur, or the subject escaping me, or just something other than missed focus. I was using the sigma 100-400 DG DN shooting deer and birds in quite bad English winter lighting conditions.
Looking at the images the ISO performance seems similar to the S5, which is to say very good, although there might be some noise reduction being applied to RAW files at higher ISOs. The colours are very similar to the original and dynamic range seems on par.
one thing I did notice was that the new AF did not play well when I put the sigma 2x teleconverter on the 100-400mm. It began hunting, but in fairness the 2x converter meant using an aperture of f14 as the sun was disappearing behind the hills. I wasn’t even going to try the teleconverter due to the light being bad but spotted a little egret on the river as I was leaving.
one thing I made use of, and was quite impressed with, was the 30fps electronic shutter burst mode. With a buffer of 200 RAW images the shutter can be held down for quite a long time even at 30fps. For very small fast moving birds this mode is genuinely useful, I got a few images that the slower mechanical burst probably wouldn’t have picked up. Additionally, despite the S5II manual stating burst shooting can reduce colour depth to 12 bit, all the EXIF data seems to indicate the 30fps electronic bursts are still 14 bit.
below are some of the images from the afternoon:
Fallow Deer by Peter North, on Flickr
Little Egret by Peter North, on Flickr
Robin by Peter North, on Flickr
Long Tailed Tit by Peter North, on Flickr
Long Tailed Tit by Peter North, on Flickr
Goldcrest by Peter North, on Flickr
Charlecote Park by Peter North, on Flickr
Looking at the images the ISO performance seems similar to the S5, which is to say very good, although there might be some noise reduction being applied to RAW files at higher ISOs. The colours are very similar to the original and dynamic range seems on par.
one thing I did notice was that the new AF did not play well when I put the sigma 2x teleconverter on the 100-400mm. It began hunting, but in fairness the 2x converter meant using an aperture of f14 as the sun was disappearing behind the hills. I wasn’t even going to try the teleconverter due to the light being bad but spotted a little egret on the river as I was leaving.
one thing I made use of, and was quite impressed with, was the 30fps electronic shutter burst mode. With a buffer of 200 RAW images the shutter can be held down for quite a long time even at 30fps. For very small fast moving birds this mode is genuinely useful, I got a few images that the slower mechanical burst probably wouldn’t have picked up. Additionally, despite the S5II manual stating burst shooting can reduce colour depth to 12 bit, all the EXIF data seems to indicate the 30fps electronic bursts are still 14 bit.
below are some of the images from the afternoon:
Fallow Deer by Peter North, on Flickr
Little Egret by Peter North, on Flickr
Robin by Peter North, on Flickr
- Panasonic - DC-S5M2
- 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS | Contemporary 020
- 383.0 mm
- ƒ/8
- 1/320 sec
- Pattern
- Manual exposure
- 1.3
- ISO 1000
- Panasonic - DC-S5M2
- 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS | Contemporary 020
- 383.0 mm
- ƒ/8
- 1/320 sec
- Pattern
- Manual exposure
- 1.3
- ISO 500
- Panasonic - DC-S5M2
- 100-400mm F5-6.3 DG DN OS | Contemporary 020
- 383.0 mm
- ƒ/8
- 1/320 sec
- Pattern
- Manual exposure
- 1.3
- ISO 1250
Charlecote Park by Peter North, on Flickr