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Panasonic DVX 200 Review Part 5: Resolution, rolling shutter, moire, and low light performance

By technical editor Matt Allard:

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In part five of my ongoing review of the Panasonic DVX 200 I will be looking at resolution, rolling shutter, moiré, and low light performance. I continue to stress that this is a pre-production version of the camera, so it is very possible that certain elements of the camera and its performance may change on the final production version.

The DVX 200 is a true 4K (4096 x 2160) capable camera with a 4/3-type MOS sensor. I wanted to do some tests to see how the camera resolved fine detail in 4K, UHD and HD. In the above test you can see that the camera resolves fine detail extremely well and the images remain very sharp even when cropping in. Given that the DVX 200 is a fixed lens camera, it is nice to see that the lens doesn’t seem to be limiting the camera’s abilities when resolving fine detail in a scene. Panasonic have a done a good job making sure the lens delivers very sharp imagery without chromatic aberrations.

In this test you can see the differences between the resolution in HD, UHD and 4K. The 4K and UHD footage is all placed on an HD timeline so you can see how well it performs if you want to shoot in higher resolutions to deliver in HD. The UHD and 4K clearly resolve fine detail a lot better than when you shoot in HD, but the HD still produces a nice clean image if you don’t need to crop in on the image too much.

As far as rolling shutter is concerned, like most cameras, the DVX 200 exhibits a lot more rolling shutter in 4K/UHD mode than it does in HD. I did a very unscientific test comparing it to the Sony a7S in both HD and UHD modes. The a7S was placed in APS-C crop mode. To be honest I have never had a problem with rolling shutter on any camera I have used, as I just don’t ever pan or move the camera at a ridiculous speed. Anyway in the above tests you can see for yourself how the camera performs. It’s interesting to see on the a7S how the colour board squares actually seem to shift off-axis in UHD mode.

I will now look at moiré to see how the camera performs in 4K, UHD, HD and whether any fine pattern effects can be seen in the different modes. The DVX 200 seems to have virtually no moiré in HD at normal frame rates, but it is certainly present in both UHD and 4K.

Last, but not least we will look at the low light performance of the camera. In the above test I have shot in 4K 24p and raised the ISO level from 500 up to 8000 so you can see when noise starts appearing in the shadows and what effects it has on colours. I found that in UHD, noise levels are acceptable up to around 3200 ISO. You could get away with 4000, but anything over that and the image starts to get very noisy. I wouldn’t personally use it at over 2000 ISO.

In the above video you can see how the DVX 200 behaves in low light situations in UHD if you use the cameras V-log L setting. The image gets noisy very fast and anything over 1600 ISO seems to generate a lot of noise with a video feel to it.

Finally I tested the camera in HD when using V-Log L to see how it looked. You can also see the extended gain settings where the camera can be pushed to 16000 or 32000 ISO. I would be very hesitant to use the extended gain settings, but it’s nice to know they are there: if you really do need to get a shot in super low light conditions, it can be done.

The trade-off with a fixed-lens camera that has a variable aperture lens, is that the low light performance will always be a compromise, depending on what focal length you need to shoot at. If you’re on the wide end of the lens the ISO you need to run the camera at may produce perfectly acceptable levels of noise, but when you need to zoom in you’re going to have to raise the ISO. The camera looks to be very similar to the GH4 when it comes to low light performance, but the GH4 has the added advantage of being able to use fast lenses and speedboosters.

In part six of my review I will be looking at other features that the camera has as well as providing my overall conclusion.

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