Can a hack extend the contrast/dynamic range? Is there possibly settings/values in the bios that have yet to be discovered?

Well hopefully a new round of this shoot out begin's soon so everyone can have something new to argue about. Hopefully the next round Mr. Bloom will provide us with some animated GIF's to compare motion detail. Seriously I think we could all afford to lighten up! (-:

And more vid of the Chip Butties.

@PhilipBloom

I really appreciate what you and your team are doing, as well as commenting on here. I think some people on here failed to see what was that you guys are doing. Fun little camera tests. And I can see that you guys are having fun doing what you doing. This is what most of us buying camera is about; having fun, doing things that we wanted to do.

All those images looks great for what it is. I can guaranteed that, if you shoot a moving story with any of those camera, nobody gonna care what camera it came from.

In fact, I have a short story that I'm planning to shoot using an NEX-5 although I have two GH2's. The size and FOV is more suitable for what I wanted to do. I may use the GH2 though, since I think the NEX-5 crop in video mode giving comparable FOV to GH2.

Keep doing what you are doing. You can't please everybody, but the only person that matter is you :)

@Mimirsan I think that test like these are very important. Having seen the 1080p version of the screen grab even highly compressed jpeg the gh2 is only beaten in sharpness by the C300 and about equal to the F3, and beaten is a very very heavy word because it is nearly a tie. For DR I think that with the detail in the shadows and seeing the histogram it at least on a par to the other DSLR.

But lets say that the outcome was different, that the test showed that a Sony $ 5000 FS100 had better detail and much better DR. Some perhaps would have preferred the 6x times more costly FS100 to the gh2 because they would have concluded that the added cost would have been valuable for the gain in image quality. If the image no4 was the $5000 fs100, it would have been on my purchase list.

What this shootout tells me for now is that until I have at least $ 15000 to buy a camera, the gh2 is the best camera under that sum. How about that. Criticism is not a bad thing, if now we cannot criticize the gh2, that we shall always sing its gospel (and I do sing it a lot) then we will start to live in the fanboy system.

Attached updated table with @PhilipBloom 's confirmed results.

Okay guys sorry but lemme rant as ive nearly had enough I just cant take it anymore.
I think the only reason some GH2 owners get wound up over the bloomage shootout is that the outcome isnt going to be "OMG!!! The GH2 Is so awesome better than everything out there even the $3000 camera GH2 ROCKS MAN WOOO!"
Crying that its being shot wrong or overexposed or the shootout is deliberately uneven and biased just seems well...just typical and predictable.
Bloom is not the be all end all (Hes not blimmin Kurosawa...btw DONT get me started on his "critics" webisodes)...get over it and go and shoot stuff...y'know like what he does?
All the cameras are great you dont need a "shootout" by anyone to tell you what you use is good. Life is fucking short go do something with it!
So fucking insecure some GH2 owners are! Christ!
Sooooo sick of these fucking comparison videos! AAAAAARRRRrrrrrrgggghhhh!
*Goes for a pint* ;-)

Derek has it correct

I would say 99 percent of the stuff I see online is not double blind, and therefore has no real "perceptual" significance. It's just random net stuff. There's no question the GH2 takes good vid. What else do we need to know? I couldn't even tell my Olly 45mm from my Vivitar 55mm once I had deliberately shuffled the deck. At least in this case they did not pre-announce the cam IDs.

The only reason there is a kerfuffle is because they didn't pre-annouce the IDs.

If they had, the ensuing discussion would have been completely different, guaranteed.
However, whether the camera is "actually" better or just "seems" to be better is not the whole story. If you take a musician with five violins, one of which is a genuine Stradivarius, and the other four are really good copies, more often than not, a highly trained panel in a blind test will pick the copy as sounding better. But that isn't a "measurement", it is a perception. And the musician would prefer to play the Strad, even if it sounded inferior. I will sometimes prefer to use an old Leica or Zeiss lens, even if my Panny 20mm trounces it on edge sharpness and distortion wide open (which it does). I would prefer to play the Strad, but I would still *really* want to know which one really sounded better. Time after time, double blind tests come up with radically different results than those that are not. What is interesting about this test, is that different people preferred different images, I don't see a consensus emerging--before the results were announced--as to which one was better, or even which one was which. I don't actually care which one "measures" better, I'm not going the measure the final product, just watch it on a big screen.

I think half the board just committed Seppuku...

Are you sure, I see it but I can't relate to that. Can somebody ask for it because it would change a lot of thing. So from his post is it. Can't see the S-log F3 being one of the most contrasty image.

1 Sony NEX5N, Flat PP

2 AF100 AB-RANGE PP

3 C300 C-LOG

4. GH2 Driftwood Hack nostalgia and dialed down

5. 5Dmk2 Marvels Advance

6. 7D Marvels Advance

7. FS100 G-LOG A

8. F3 AB-RANGE

9. F3 S-Log

10. Nikon D7000 Flat

@mozes

look in the comment itself. It is this:

1. 5D MKII
2. NEX5N
3. AF100
4. C300
5. D7000
6. F3 AB
7. F3 S-Log
8. FS100
9. GH2
10. 7D