Camera test 50
Photography News | Issue 68 | photographynews.co.uk
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power. Or you can save a five- second burst as separate files with 4K Photo bulk saving. If you prefer, 4K bursts can be uploaded to the computer and there it will be treated as an MP4 motion picture file. In Lightroom, you can scroll through the burst and then export the frame youwant as a JPEG or TIFF file as normal – or you can save whole bursts as still files. With fast action or if your coordination is not up to it, the burst modes are a godsend and while eight-megapixel JPEGs is limiting in terms of editing and ultimate quality, it is more than adequate for most situations and for most users. At the seaside, I tried capturing gulls enjoying the strong breeze. I
With fast action or if your coordination is not up to it, the burst modes are a godsend
Verdict
Features 23/25 Very rich in features, but 4K video crop is a small minus Handling 23/25 Lots of actual and virtual controls make for sound handling Performance 23/25 Exposures very good, AF could miss on occasion. Value for money 24/25 Rates highly Overall 93/100 With impressive stills and video skills, the G90 has a lot going for it Pros Versatile monitor, solid build, image quality, good handling, 4K photo settings Cons Battery life, 4K video crop Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds cameras are popular for a very good reason. They perform well, are rich in great features and sell at decent prices. Its Lumix G90 is typical of what I’d expect from this brand and it is a fine camera with great potential.
Above With the Lumix G90’s good high ISO showing (ISO 1600 was used here), image stabiliser and soft shutter release, shooting handheld at slowish shutter speeds wasn’t too much of an issue
struggledwith the camera in normal continuous shooting mode, but 4K burst mode got me shots I couldn’t manage with normal shooting. You can see one of my gull sequences on the first pages of this review. I prefer taking control of focus zones, so I used single zone or pinpoint AF for stills and multizone or zone focus for video. With no focus lever, I set Fn10 (right push of the scroll wheel) to give me Focus
Area Set. One push and I couldmove the AF point around. Or use the touchscreen to move the AF point, while the camera is up to the eye. The camera’s AF was quiet, swift and responsive, generally performingwellwhentheconditions were good. However, it did seem to me less sure-footed and didn’t lock on when the contrast was low or with small subjects against a fussy backdrop, even when a single AF
point was in use. A helping hand, either by switching to manual or focusing on a nearby, more defined, part of the scene and then reframing the image was needed. Overall, the Lumix G90 was a fine camera to use, but with so many function options it took a while to set-up for my needs. However, there is lots of customisation potential for a camera at this price level and build quality is impressive, too.
Performance: exposure latitude
-1EV
Original image
-3EV
-2EV
0
+1EV
+2EV
IMAGES The exposure latitude of Raws from the Lumix G90 was found to be pretty decent. Underexposure and overexposure by 2EV still gave files that recovered very nicely
To assess how the Lumix G90’s Raws stood up to exposure abuse, I shot a seven frame at 1EV steps bracket of a sunlit scene. Then using Lightroom, I corrected the abused images. The metered correct exposure was 1/500sec at f/9. Underexposed shots recovered best, at least in terms of colour, contrast and tonality. This was at the expense of noise, which was evident at -3EV and got marginally better at -2EV. However, by -1EV the noise level was
basically the same as the correctly exposed shot, so the image looked clean and correctly coloured. With overexposure, noise is not usually the issue but high contrast and false colours can be an issue. The +3EV frame had burnt-out highlights and no amount of fiddling and editing in Lightroom could domuch about it. The results from the +1EV and +2EV frames were corrected with no fuss at all and the recovered Raws looked as good as the correctly exposed frame.
+3EV
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