Some simple features that would help (not only) underwater enthusiasts:
"restricted focus range" - my older cameras all allowed to limit the auto focus to "non-near" distances, which is a very important feature if you need to focus in water that has a lot of particles in it that confuse the auto-focus.
"make all functions accessible from the menu" - while most camera owners enjoy having a multitude of knobs, every additional knob on a camera that is strictly required for the camera to be operable means significant additional cost and risk of leakage when building underwater housings. Thus, for an underwater user it may be a very good trade-off to access some seldom-used functions more indirectly via a menu, requiring less mechanical holes & knobs in the housing. This is also important for focus and zoom settings - which are especially difficult to address mechanically in an underwater housing. (Of course, the ultimate help for underwater-housing manufacturers is to just integrate a cheap infrared remote control receiver, which allows to access functions from outside a sealed housing without any mechanical holes at all.)
"automatic grey card use": When enabled, recognize a simple pattern that can be printed on a grey card, and when this pattern is detected in an image, use a custom white balance setting based on the greycard reading (for subsequent video and stills).
"do not make timed trigger and bracketing mutually exclusive" - I always wondered why the GH2's dial is created such that you cannot put the camera on a tripod and ask it to shoot an exposure bracket series 10 seconds from now.
But I guess, after all, the most obvious of all requested features are the ones that are also the most unlikely to be realized by any stubborn big corporation: Don't fuck your customers by dongling overpriced expendable accessories (like batteries). Don't cripple the camera to ridiculously low recording bit rates. Therefore, I am kind of sure that no matter what the GH3 will bring, it will take a lot of time and a firmware hack until any GH2 user will have a reason to actually upgrade ;-)
@RRRR I thought it just said to enable it, not where to do it. It has been a while since I got the message. :)
@thepalalias Isn't that how it is now?
@RRRR What if it only asked if you did not have that menu option checked? As in, if you check the option, nothing pops up at all. If you do not have it checked, then each time you try to shoot without a lens connected electronically, it asks "Warning: Lens not connected. Please connect lens properly or enable shooting w/o lens in the setup menu."
Not so fond of the idea of the camera asking if everything is ok upon switching between non native m43 lenses.. As it is now, it is one setting which needs to be selected once. Not an issue in my book.
If it's possible to have some kind of in-cam sync mode via external controller (phone, computer...) that would be useful for many, I'm sure!
If it would be possible to have a 1:1 pixel time limited (more than 1 second though! - f.i. 720p frame 24 frames / s for 20 seconds, 1080p frame for 14 seconds, 2.5k frame for 10, 4k for 8s) burst mode in a few different frame sizes that would be awesome. If possible with raw capture. Don't know what the buffer specs are so this might be a hardware specific request...
+1 For info descriptions of each option (whether always enabled or switchable on and off as an option).
I love Nikon Cameras, when you are in any part of the menu, you can press the info button and a short explanation of that speacific menu voice is explained with few line of text. An in-camera manual. This can be a good feature for beginners too.... or for people with short memory ....
Use the physical switches for changing focus, metering modes when in video mode. Why on earth are these menu options on the GH2?
I want a variable ETC mode kind of like Canon’s. I want it to always do a 1:1 pixel crop. However, when it is not a 1080p or 720p crop it will scale the output to one of those resolutions.
Basically it will allow us to use the new zoom lever that the G5 has to zoom the ETC from 1x-3.9x continuously. At 3.9x the output will be unscaled 1:1 720p and for 1080p modes it will be unscaled 1:1 at 2.6x.
I can’t imagine that this will be that hard to implement. Maybe it is a copyright thing? I actually think that the GH3 will come with this feature.
I guess in the end the 35-100mm F2.8 will accomplish what I want. Still would be nice to use this continuous ETC zoom with the 25mm F1.4 though.
Things I would like:
• Option to disable the distortion correction of Panasonic Lenses
+1 For Timelapse Timer with option to use Electronic Shutter and have Full Photo resolution
+1 For Optional Filmformat Framing Guides
+1 For Lower than iso 160
+1 For True 180º Shutter = 1/48@24p
+1 For zebras, highlight clipping and focus assist
+1 For programmable rack focus, to memorize A and B positions
maybe hardware related:
Live view and remote over USB to use as Stop Motion Animation Camera (like Canon and Nikon)
If Camera has orientation Sensor an electronic Horizon Level could be useful
Not sure whether anyone has already said, but - Make every zoom (both 4/3 and m. 4/3) parfocal via firmware, even (or particularly) in manual focus mode.
OK.
I'll add some remaining GH2 suggestions, after this perform two stage filtration to make final list.
What do you mean when you say you did it? You mean test patches that were never released?
Yep, during experiments with GH2 30p that was accessible only via such strange way and without audio.
@duartix said: "I'd also like to see the option to suppress audio altogether."
@Vitaliy_Kiselev said: Any reason to do it? It is very simple to do, really. I did it with patches. But I do not see the point.
When you are doing timelapses the bitrates are extremely modest. In these cases the audio bitrate has a significant parasiting effect ( up to 10% of total bitrate).
What do you mean when you say you did it? You mean test patches that were never released?
I personally dislike when they use names for formats, framerates and bitrates.. like HBR movie mode FS FH WGA WC TOILETTE.... the menu should just say: 1080p / 1080i / 720p / 60fps / 50fps / 30fps / 25fps / 24 fps / 25fps @ 1/2 speed slowmo (caputerd at 50, playback at 25) / 100Mbps / 50 Mbps / 25 Mbps... and so on for any format / fps mode... and compression mode. Let's talk simple....
It is not topic about your dreams, check first post.
@robbie75vr I did not want to limit our dreams :)
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