Help me decide whether I can live with the G7/G85 noise reduction

Just an update for anyone who searches this thread as to what I ended up going with. Here are my conclusions.

Noise reduction even at NR -4 on the Panasonic is unworkable when noise gets high. It is overzealous, to say the least. To each their own, nonetheless. No amount of tweaking picture settings can get around that. The Olympus OM-D EM-5 II that I ordered to compare was FAR superior with noise-filtering off. As one person said there could be issues with jpeg compression -- but I don't think so. It's true Olympus allows a lower compression rate, but I believe I can tell the difference between JPEG data loss and NR. The NR shows to my eyes at ISO 200 on up with the right lighting conditions (lots of darks). I think, though, all else equal, it's workable up to ISO 800 for an OOC jpeg. But you are losing a lot, still, in my opinion. The biggest area I constantly notice it in, even at ISO 200 is in the eyes -- they don't look wet or three dimensional, they look more flat and it's because of a sort of mosaic/watercolor type effect which you can see at 1:1. It also tends to make the roundness of the white iris be a bit blocky and inexact because it is approximating color information from surrounding pixels when trying to remove noise and thus blends together in a sort of geometric way the white and the iris.

As for absolute noise, even in RAW, M43rds are definitely noisier, and panasonic's tendency to sharp pixel edges, for lack of better terms (as compared to Canon's softer look) makes this more noticable, but I can handle the noise. For that reason I've decided to go ahead and work with RAW but bulk process. Unfortunately I'm on Linux and there is currently no support in Core Aftershot Pro for the G85 (but that will change eventually). So I am just keeping my RW2s for now and processing with other software temporarily.

With video the overall quality is very high such that the noise problems become less of an issue -- it is my strong suspicion that the NR is more modest as well, as I feel like my stills from a 4k video look less doctored, though still nothing like my RW2s.

With the Olympus camera I was extremely happy with the control it gave. If I was shooting stills I would recommend it over the Panasonic. The problems I had with it, for video, were (1) vastly inferior autofocusing [this could have been a firmware issue] and (2) very little detail. Inline with the DPreview review I also found that 1080p on the Olympus had far less detail than 1080p on the Panasonic -- it felt like upscaled 720p -- though it did have a nice look in its way. It also seemed to, at least with the picture styles I used, be over-contrasty and lacked dynamic range. Some of that could have been fixed, but the resolution seemed vastly inferior -- even with their fancy ALL-I and other settings which make the filesize far more massive for still less quality than the Panasonic.

The final nail in the coffin on the Olympus which I really wanted to like was that the firmware update utility required windows or mac AND an active internet connection. I use Linux and have no internet at home. Also, the EVF on the Panasonic seemed far superior, but the EVF on the Olympus did have a much nicer magnification.

Another LARGE issue for those shooting video on the Olympus is that there is an additional crop factor. I use only primes and so it is like having a completely different set of lenses for video than photo. Not only that but they're in the wrong direction -- I could probably deal with slightly WIDER video lenses, but it does the opposite -- you end up with a shot being even tighter. Which means more lenses, changing lenses, or putting up with slow zooms (and more noise).

So far anyone bothered by NR on the Panasonics who wants to shoot primarily Video but also stills I recommend putting up with using RAW for stills and recognize that video quality has to do with many factors, and when you add it all up, the pros outweigh the cons on the video processing and the NR is a little less extreme there (perhaps from the downsampling).

On the other hand if you're shooting stills I would highly recommend the Olympus over the Panasonic (though the autofocus was much inferior it seems like less of an issue with stills to me).