Panasonic GH2 1:1 crop mode MACRO from Andrew Reid.

Andrew Reid from EosHD posted the first part of the Canon 60D versus Panasonic GH2 Review. He pays a particular attention to the crop mode: “1:1 crop mode enables you to change between a portrait field of view and extreme telephoto at the press of a button, and the telephoto view comes without sacrificing detail (quite the opposite!) and maintains the aperture of the lens, so a Zeiss 85mm f/1.4 for example becomes a Zeiss 400mm F1.4 yet for $500 and the size of a beer can.”

Andrew finds the video quality of the GH2 better than the 60D: “What is frustrating for Canon now, is that the GH2 is going to go pretty much unchallenged on the market for a good few months. Even the Canon 5D Mark II has a sensor which is really crippled by poor image processing relative to the GH2, so you will get a much higher resolved and more detailed image from the GH2 than on the 5D Mark II. And it’s not just detail – dynamic range, colour – everything suffers if the image processing is not up to snuff.”

Thanks Andrew for posting the review but your conclusion makes us even more crazy that we can’t buy the GH2 yet! Right now you can only buy the japanese GH2 on [shoplink 17664]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]. And there is one more bad news for US readers: Amazon changed the Panasonic 100-300mm availaibility status to “This item will be released on January 1, 2011“. I hope that’s just a mistake because european stores like Amazon Deutschland and Amazon UK already do have the lens in Stock and even [shoplink 17618 ebay]eBay has some of them on auction[/shoplink].

This is the only [shoplink 17922 ebay]GH1 + 12.5-75mm[/shoplink] lens I found on vimeo :)

We have still to wait a little bit before to get our GH2. To kill the time I searched for some exotic fast zoom lenses that we (and I) might could use on the GH2. There is one particular interesting lens I found on [shoplink 17922 ebay]eBay (Click here)[/shoplink]. The Cosmicar-Canon-Tokina 12.5-75mm f/1.8 C-mount lens! The focal lenght and constant fast aperture is very interesting and but sadly I found only one video taken with the GH1. The Karaoke part is terrible :)
A few pictures can be seen at Flickr. The japanese website geocities.jp tested the Canon version of the 12.5-75mm lens.

That lens is deifnitely not a professional solution but we have to wait a few months before Panaosnic releases the already announced fast wide and normal zooms!

Omuser.com posted a series of image samples at any focal length an aperture (Click here to read the google english translation). Image quality and build quality of the [shoplink 16261]Panasonic 100-300mm[/shoplink] are very good. The AF is quick and quiet. The only “issue” is that the lens is big and heavy. But damn that is a 200-600mm FF equivalent! And if you compare it to other lenses the Panasonic is really very small and very cheap:

The Panasonic 100-300mm lens is already in Stock in Europe at Amazon Deutschland, Amazon UK
In US you can only preorder the lens at Amazon US, Adorama, BHphoto.

You can also buy all new Panasonic lenses on eBay:
[shoplink 17556 ebay]Panasonic 14mm f/2.5 eBay acutions[/shoplink] [shoplink 17618 ebay]Panasonic 100-300mm f/4.0-5.6 eBay acutions[/shoplink] [shoplink 17620 ebay]Panasonic 3D 12.5mm f/12 eBay acutions[/shoplink]