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(00:00):
Panasonic has just announced a new lens – this 24-60mm f/2.8 alongside two new cameras; the LUMIX S1II, and the S1IIE. This video is all about this new lens, the 24-60 f/2.8. I have, however, released multiple videos about all of these at the same time, so be sure to watch all of those. There'll be a playlist link below and at the end. This 24-60 f/2.8 is an interesting lens with some really cool features. First of all, it's a 24-60, not a 24-70 as is most common in this very standard zoom range. It's a fixed f/2.8 all the way through, so that begs the question, “why not 70?”. I asked Panasonic and was told that this allowed them to significantly reduce the size and increase performance by sacrificing those last 10mm, but if you incorporate Crop Zoom or Hybrid Zoom with this lens, when shooting 4K video, it expands to a 24-93mm zoom, and this lens gives you a super cool way to implement Crop Zoom – more on that later. We'll cover the specs, do some comparisons, and show real world footage largely shot through some of this video's sponsors filters from K&F Concept; more on them later, of course. When comparing this new 24-60 fixed f/2.8 to the 20-60 variable aperture, f/3.5~5.6 kit lens, this new lens isn't that much bigger. The 20-60 is 88mm long while the 24-60 is 100mm. The 20-60 is 77mm in diameter, and the 24-60 is 84mm. So this lens is 12mm longer and 7mm wider. Not bad. It has a larger filter thread of 77mm versus the 20-60's 67mm thread, so you may need larger filters if you already have some at 67mm. But I always recommend buying the biggest filters you might need and using step-down rings to adapt. 77mm matches the filter threads found on the 24-105 and the 70-200 f/4 lenses.

(02:02):
The new lens does weigh a bit more at 545 grams versus the 20-60's 351 grams, so that's where you'll feel the biggest difference. As a total comparison, the 24-60 f/2.8 is about 14% longer, 9% wider, 55% heavier, and of course between two thirds and two full stops brighter than the 20-60mm kit lens. Perhaps though, the most germane comparison is to the Panasonic S-Pro 24-70 f/2.8 lens, which is 40% longer, 70% heavier, and costs nearly twice as much as the new lens. With that huge difference, you can see we're giving up 10mm on the long end, makes an impact. The 24-60 achieves its impressive size, largely through its dual phase linear focus motor; the same design we saw in the compact 100mm macro lens. This is the same animation I created for the 100mm lens, but just to convey the idea… instead of a single group of elements moving to change focus, it moves two groups of elements. This design lends itself to much smaller and lighter lenses without sacrificing quality. The lens is also weather resistant, which of course matters to well everyone who shoots outdoors. Before we go any further, let's see some footage through this lens, then I'll tell you about my favorite feature on it.

(03:22):
Nearly everything I've shot on the S1II has been through this new lens. I was invited to the launch event in Austin, Texas where we had a couple of days to shoot with the .new camera and lens. I wandered around town shooting a bunch of random stuff just to get the feel of it. Autofocus performed extremely well as you'd expect for both still photos and video. When shooting action, continuous auto focus kept up great.

(04:11):
In all the daytime shots, I of course was using a variable ND filter. I'm pretty adamant about keeping to a 180 degree shutter, so a VND is critical for this kind of work. At night though, because I knew I'd be shooting lots of city lights and I personally really like a more vintage looking lens than something super clinical, I opted to put the K&F Concept Shimmer Filter on the lens, which creates a soft and clean highlight halo; kind of like a Pro Mist filter. I'll let these shots run for a bit, then show you the filter up close.

(04:48):
This is the Shimmer filter. It looks like there's a lot going on in the glass, which of course is what gives it that effect, but let's see what kind of effect it has on this shot. Hold on a second. All right, let's see what this looks like. Let's get a little light on here and just give you a little shine in the eyes. It's cool, right? Just get that little bit of soft halation, a little bit of glow on there. It looks pretty good. Let's try it with something a bit smaller; how about my phone flashlight? There you go. You can see what that looks like. I like it. I dig it. Look, it's not for every shot, but when you do want to take off that digital edge, you want to have something that's just a little bit more bloomy, this really does the job.

(05:30):
There's links to these and other K&F Concept filters down below. Please do check them out, and thanks to K&F for sponsoring this video. Another standout feature on this lens is the programmable Control Ring, and this is my favorite feature. In manual focus mode, it's of course just a manual focus ring, but when you're in autofocus, it can do any number of things. There's also a programmable Fn or function button on the lens, so combining these two gets really interesting. You may have heard of Crop Zoom and Hybrid Zoom on the latest LUMIX cameras, including of course the new S1II series. Crop Zoom allows you to seamlessly crop into the sensor to achieve zoom, but never cropping past 1:1, so it's NOT a digital zoom that scales up. Meaning if you're shooting in 6K, you can't Crop Zoom because you're already using all the pixels on the sensor, but if you're shooting in 4K, then you can crop until you get to 3840 pixels wide, so one-to-one on the sensor and in Full HD you can crop until you hit 1920 wide.

(06:31):
The effective result of this on the S1II sensor in Ultra HD is that the 24-60 becomes a 24-93mm zoom, and in Full HD it becomes a 24-187mm zoom. On the 8K S1RII though, it becomes a 24-125 lens in Ultra HD and a remarkable 24-251mm lens in Full HD. Super useful when you want a little extra reach – or a lot of extra reach! – without having to scale your footage up in post. The difference between Crop Zoom and Hybrid Zoom is that in Crop Zoom, mechanical zooming and Crop Zooming are separated, meaning that when you rotate the optical zoom ring, you're not cropping into the sensor. To crop, you control it via an onscreen menu like this. To control this, go into the menu, navigate to the second video menu,

(07:23):
then under others you'll find Crop Zoom. Enable that, and now with the command dial, you can zoom in or out of that crop, but because I already have this programmed into my Control dial (Ring), I can now spin this and zoom that in and out. So now you have optical zoom on one ring and Crop Zoom on the other. Then you can use the Fn or function button to toggle Crop Zoom on and off. To program it, simply press and hold the function button, give it a second, and the function button program menu comes up. In my case, I've chosen Crop Zoom, but of course I have a ton of different options in here for whatever I want it to do, and now when I push that button, it toggles Crop Zoom on and off. Hybrid zoom, on the other hand, blends crop and mechanical zoom seamlessly, so you're constantly cropping while zooming, giving you a seamless smooth zoom from the widest to the tightest possible views.

(08:17):
So you can program the Fn button to toggle Hybrid Zoom on and off instead, like this. I'll go ahead and reprogram it, set it to Hybrid Zoom, and now if I enable Hybrid Zoom, as I zoom the mechanical lens, it goes from 24mm all the way in as close as it can. So that's Hybrid Zoom. Then you can use the Control Ring for something else like aperture or white balance, or any other number of things. Personally, I've been using it in Crop Zoom mode so I can crop into the sensor a little bit, but only when I absolutely need it. Finally, let's do a quick parfocal and focus breathing test. A parfocal lens doesn't change focus as you zoom in and out, meaning you can focus on a subject, zoom the lens and the subject will stay in focus. High-end cinema lenses usually are parfocal while many consumer camera lenses are not, so it's obviously a desired feature. Focus breathing is kind-of an opposite test. Does the lens appear to zoom while focusing? If you frame a subject and then rack focus, will you see the edges of the frame zoom in or out? Again, of course, the desire is to have as little breathing as possible. You don't want your framing to change just because you change focus, so let's test them both right here, I'll rearrange my little set here and drop in a focus chart.

(09:36):
I'll switch to manual focus and zoom all the way out, drop the focus point right on the center and auto-focus that. This way I ensure that I'm actually perfectly in focus and I'm also going to punch in using the Focus Assist feature to make sure that I can see clearly. Now without changing focus – again, the camera's in manual focus, so it's not going to automatically refocus – I'll go ahead and zoom in from 24 to 60 and we can see the focus is maintained. So the lens is parfocal. Now let's check the focus breathing. I'm going to go back to my two little plants here and let's build a quick set. I'm going to zoom in to fill the frame with my backdrop and let's put one little plant right on the edge of the frame. Let's go ahead and set this back into auto-focus and position the focus point there, and I want to make sure that my edge of my little pot is right up against the edge of that frame there, so we'll easily be able to see if the lens breathes or not.

(10:31):
Then I'll take the other one and I'll put it as far back as I can, and again, position it right up against the edge. Now I'll switch to manual focus and slowly focus rack from front to rear and see if we see any breathing, and it looks like there's virtually none at all. I realized while editing this that the focus breathing test I did in the studio was too shallow; it only focus racked a few inches. So I brought the camera outside so we could do a better test at a proper distance. You can see the shot that I'm framing up here. I'm framing it through this doorway, and I'm going to zoom in pretty tight here, so we're kind of right on the edge of that door and we're currently focused on the edge of the doorway there. So now I'm going to rack focus to the trees in the background and pay attention to the edge of the door.

(11:16):
You see, there's virtually no breathing whatsoever. Let's go back to the foreground again, back to the background, and we can see that there's just virtually no breathing at all. So there you go. That's the 24-60 with a proper breathing test. Alright, let's get back from the studio. Well, that's everything I have to show you about this new lens. The pricing is $899 and it's available June 16th, 2025. Here's a playlist of all of my S1II and S1IIE related videos. Click here next to make sure you catch 'em all.