New camera time, got a Panasonic S9 as a lighter version of roughly the same camera as the larger S1. It’s about 1/3 the weight but also light on features. There are the things you can appreciate are good for size and weight reductions like lack of viewfinder and second SD card slot. The screen was reasonable at framing shots but hard to check the focus. Now the auto focus is great on these camera and I’m sure with a bit of playing I’ll get the settings and experience to nail it right most of the time.

The harder restriction to understand is the time limit on recording video. You get between 10 and 20 minutes max recording depending on the settings. It really feels like it’s put in there just to make you consider one of the more expensive models. Not seen anywhere yet that explains why they have this limitation. Though they do stress that the camera might stop sooner if it overheats so I would presume there is overheating issues if used for too long. After all I think about 1/3 of the weight on the S1 is the cooling so you can use it continuously. It would have been nice if they could have at least had one video setting that would let you record as long as you want, even if it was 720p or ultra low colour depth to minimise heat generation. I guess they could add something like this with a firmware update…. But I doubt they will as they will be much more likely to do the S9 v1.5 in a year or two and hope people buy the upgrade.

If I read the manual right you can monitor the video via HDMI for about 10x the time. So am wondering if I throw a Raspberry Pi and video capture card into a box, can I record the video for longer? If so it really seems like a made up limit. Will certainly be investigating that a bit more.

Still as my plan is mainly to do little clips put together and I have the S1 too, it’s not too much if an issue for me. Still has the great image quality and is relatively easy to use. Will be my throw it in the bag ‘just in case’ camera for the near future. Still need to get a low profile lens to make it really portable.

So to test it out I took it to the seafront and headed down the England Coast Path which runs from Shoreham by Sea to Eastbourne. Not so much wildlife as it was the end of one of the hottest days of the year and I just missed low tide when the bird come down to feed. One day I want to jump on a bike and do the whole trail from Shoreham to Eastbourne.

On the video there are some nice shots of boats coming back to the harbour and some of a nice fat bee gouging on the sweet pollen. Shot quite a bit more but a lot of it did not hold the focus on the bee most of the time. Need to play with the focus setting for this sort of macro stuff. I love that the auto focus has detection for humans, animals and cars. Though it would be nice to tag a point and have that keep in focus. Maybe it has that already and I need to discover it.

The photo on the website were shot as jpeg and untouched off the camera. Though scaled down to more web friendly sizes. I’ll typically shoot on RAW + Jpeg so I can tweak them if needed or just post them up if the jpeg is fine.