my test was with a nikon 50mm 1.8, i seen it with all my lenses

my gh2 says made in china , the serial starts with WE1CA ..maybe they all have it,you just got to look for it i guess..just let me make this clear,that in real life situation shooting, with lighting etc, i dont think this will become an issue ..this might be an issue if your inside the house at night with kit lens and one light on only, you may than turn up the iso, i start seeing it at 1000 with underexposure ..

*Ian just replied to my video, he is saying it is a known issue with the early GH2's,but newer ones dont have this issue, anyone with a new GH2 can test this for us, thanks

Anyone got any idea how that might help a CMOS sensor?

@stefanos I plan on capturing the FPN at different shutter speeds and building my own AE presets to deal with it.

I've seen this horizontal banding on mine at 1000iso, 1600iso and 32000iso, but you really have to push the camera to achieve it. I shot a flatly lit white wall and a refrigerator and it does show when it is around 1 1/2 - 2 stops underexposed, but most of the time I won't be shooting these scenes. The amount of noise and ugly smears at 1600iso is a little disturbing though, but with something like Neat video, maybe it can be fixed. My camera was made in June 2011 so it is a fairly recent batch. I don't believe anything was fixed in newer batches and I believe all the cameras exhibit this behavior. You just have to know what to shoot and what to look for. I could be wrong, but unless someone who has experience and gets a replacement and puts it under the same level of stress, I'm going to stick to my theory.

I decided to shoot night street scenes with lots of people walking by with my 14-140mm at 1600iso and 3200iso. Generally speaking no one will notice the band. Occasionally, when someone with a light colored shirt passes by and I pause it, I can see this. But with typical scenes it won't be noticed, unless you like to shoot flat light colors underexposed that take most of the composition.

The two attached files show one with banding and one without banding. Both were using the same iso in the same scene (can't remember if it was 1600iso or 3200iso, but it looks like 3200iso).

sammy and sam_sickland, did you try shooting real world scenes and if so, does the banding show often?

*revision* I take it back. You don't have to really push it to see the banding. It will show like in the first picture when a swath of color is obscuring part of the frame. This sucks!

I did another test and shot a white pillow underexposed -2 at 3200iso. It was so easy to see the banding jump around when switching the shutter speed. It also had banding at 1600iso, but these examples from 3200iso are more pronounced. A little disappointed this time as it was really easy to get the banding without really trying. I suggest others to also shoot a white pillow or whatever in a dimly lit room to test.

I also got the banding when I pointed it at a large white plastic container that took 2/3 of the composition.

There was something weird. When I played with iA, and set it 3 stops underexposed, two vertical lines would come, meet and cross from top to bottom like a gyroscope when I tilted the camera. I don't know what this means, maybe algorithm problem that can be fixed in a firmware?

Mine was made in June, so anyone with the latest one that can test?

Ive also noticed lighting has an effect on it. Banding is much worse for me under fluorescent lights at 1/50.

Some quick tests comparing normal with ExTele mode clearly showed the fixed band in normal mode, but I couldn't spot it in ExTele.

The ExTele mode was clearly, much much noisier at 3200 ISO. I also tried at 800 and 1600. Subjectively I'd say that the 800 ISO ExTele has comparable to noise 3200 ISO normal! Put another way you could say that ExTele loses you two stops of light. Suddenly those old c-mount lenses aren't sounding nearly as good.

That's normal. Since Panasonic is doing much better downscaling than Canon's DSLRs (that's why we have less aliasing) they are obviously integrating pixels. This will automatically reduce noise too, even without any additional filtering. 1:1 pixel ratio will show the true noise of our GH2…

@No_SuRReNDeR Unless I'm very much mistaken, in the USA with 60Hz electric you should use 1/60 shutter speed under lighting. Either your frame rate or your shutter speed needs to be in sync with the electricity cycle.

@No_SuRReNDeR I think your fluorescent lights don't have a very high frequency ballast and are flickering at 120Hz (60 x 2).

Set your shutter speed to 1/60 and if your flickering isn't markedly reduced I'll eat my hat :)

@sam_stickland

Did you return your camera or have you been working around the banding? Have you updated to the new PTools with the high ISO unlocked? If so do you still get the banding? I do...it sucks, I have to set it to 1/30 or 1/25th shutter to get rid of it, it's such a pain, all that extra low light potential ruined by that little band!

I too have this at the exact same place. Don't think it's a sensor issue. I think it's a processing or interference issue, or bad programming. Even seen at EOSHD test at iso 12800 http://www.eoshd.com/content/5248/latest-gh2-hack-unlocks-stunning-iso-12800-with-film-like-grain So this lets me believe everybody is having it, but not everybody is noticing.

I hope it is fixed in the next firmware update. Without the band, GH2 would be stunning. It's a conspiracy!

On another note, I noticed a similar banding across the screen in the GF1, but lighter. It was more pronounced when recording with all UI elements visible on screen, like time left on card. But when I hid all visual elements, it became less pronounced. This weird behaviour let me believe there might be some high processing interference in the circuity. Maybe bad shielding?