Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The S1 RII contains the latest phase-correlation autofocus of Panasonic, which includes better subject recognition and tracking algorithms. S1 can detect RII people, animals (dogs, cats, birds), cars, motorcycles and bikes, trains and planes. In my test, the subject tracking system of Panasonic is just as good as you find in Nikon, Canon, Sony and Fujifilm. It was not necessarily the best for everything-for example, Nikon stands better for tracking of birds-but it is a solid autofocus system that does not miss too much.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
What I don’t like is not what it does it, but what it can’t do-that is, stop tracking a topic while in the subject-tracking mode. For example, if I want to play on the beach very early in the morning and stop for a second and shoot the sunrise, I can tap the screens on my sony and fujifilm and switch the focus on the horizon, to compose, shoot and go back to tracking the dog. To do this with the S1 RII I had to toggle the subject tracking first. This is not a huge hassle, it is not even a Deal breaker, but it is a bit head-scratching.
The rest of the time, I could see that S1 RII did a good job to track what I asked. Strangely, though, it has the most difficult time with humans. Sometimes in the crowd of people it will lose the matter, something that usually does not happen in my Nikon, Canon and Sony camera tests. Although Panasonic’s autofocus system is definitely faster and more accurate than the previous versions, it is not defective. I can’t find it at all (I still shoot a lot of manual focus lenses) but if you make a lot of sports or wildlife shoots, it may be appropriate to check it by renting.
Image
I have always liked the colorful presentation of Panasonic for its neutrality. It’s not warm, it’s not great, it’s almost completely in the middle. With S1 RII I only saw this place in the tune of my kids, who were looking a little pink in some illumination situations, but otherwise I found no color rendering odds. The dynamic range is very good. I have been able to lift shades on raw files 2-3 stops without even the need to deal with words.