What's up with the g100 specs?

Tom Caldwell wrote:

Samuel Dilworth wrote:

What worries me about this camera is that the specs are really terribly off – not by a little – and yet Panasonic must have believed otherwise.

And here’s my point: if sales are poor as they surely must be, Panasonic may wrongly blame the failure on Micro Four Thirds generally rather than the botched marketing of this specific camera.

Agreed - if was made to be a failure - and it is hoped that it is regarded as a failed attempt rather than a failure of the M4/3 system per se.

I presume that there was a worry that not enough new camera bodies were being released for M4/3 since the S5 was being developed. Something had to be done, but one might have argued that simply fitting a 20mp sensor into a GM5 frame and waving a bit of stardust over it might have been a better approach and far less demanding on resources.

As the R&D cost of such a GM5ii would be minuscule then they could have sold it at a very attractive price and still made money.

But of course “video” has become the new watchword for any new camera as it would seem that it is getting very hard to find new stills features enough to make any new camera exciting enough to sell. “Video” has become the new sell-word.

So they make a stop gap brand new camera out of parts on the shelf and it is too large for the GM market, too close in size to the GX9, too side hinged for still shooters to even consider ignoring the rest of the video crazy design. Too underperforming for the real video users.

I also like the idea of a GM5ii.

The new (apparently much improved) viewfinder, mic jack and better audio that they did put in the G100 would have been much better added to a GX9 and called a GX10. And then offer it in two versions - one with the current tilty screen and one with a fully-articulated one for the vlogging crowd.

Though when they do get round to bringing out a GX10 I hope they also get rid of that damn 4K crop and give it the latest DFD algorithms from the S5.