My buddy Gordon Laing of Camerlabs came to town, with one of the few pre-production Panasonic GH4 bodies in hand.

Naturally, we drank some beers and ate some Chairman Bao.

We also grabbed a few test shots. Nothing too special, but I thought I’d share them here.

First things first: Having held and operated the GH4, I’m more enthusiastic about owning one than anyone should be based on this hastily-shot footage alone. The camera is capable of much better.

We played with 96fps (1080p) at the Ferry Building. The 96fps mode is a bit soft, with some color moiré. It seems (speculating here) that the camera sub-samples the sensor a bit to achieve this frame rate. Still, 96fps is fun as heck. If we’d had more time, I would have played with the synchro-scan menu to try to reduce the flicker.

At Off The Grid, we shot some ISO 800 4K. Or rather, we shot UHD (3840x2160), because it seems that 4K (4096 x 2160) is only avaiable at 24.0 fps mode, not at 23.976—which is a bummer of a (seemingly artificial) limitation. There are plenty of reasons to shoot true 4K at 23.976.

Other observations:

Even after choosing CINE-LIKE D, I was still able to adjust custom picture settings. Of course I turned the contrast all the way down, and sharpness too. But I didn’t have time to test these settings.
Off The Grid shut us down right away when they saw my Redrock Micro Eyespye Deluxe rig. So we packed it up and kept shooting video, using the GH4’s viewfinder. This worked surprsingly well. Holding the little GH4 with the tiny Panasonic 25mm f1.4 lens up to your eye provides great stability, and the viewfinder is plenty sharp for focusing, especially with the handy peaking feature. It’s a lot different than holding an SLR out from your body so you can see the rear LCD.

B&H charged my card this morning for my GH4 pre-order, so here’s hoping I’ll be able to shoot some better footage very soon.

You can order the GH4 from B&H or Amazon. Read the full Cameralabs review.