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I'm PhotoJoseph, a LUMIX Ambassador, and I just got back from the LUMIX Global Summit in Japan, where I got to hang out with a bunch of my YouTube buddies for a week shooting a ton of killer content. And while I was in Osaka, I found something I've been waiting for for a really long time. See, I've been trying to figure out my EDC – everyday carry – camera solution. I have this Peak Design Everyday Bag that I carry around with me everywhere I go in town. And this is the littlest one; the three liter one. So let's see what I've got in here. First of all, there's my sunglasses, wallet, coin bag, Sharpie, chapstick, a Leatherman tool, battery pack, my AirPods, a universal cable for the charger. Of course there's a AirTag in here. Got my Kinle… and this cool little magnetic iPhone stand. So that's everything in here, except for one more thing. This is the new LUMIX S9, full frame, everyday carry camera. The first and obvious thing about this – well, other than the cool Night Blue color; also available in Crimson Red, Dark Olive and Jet Black – is of course the size. The camera is a little less than 5 inches wide, under 3 inches tall and well less than 2 inches deep. That's about 126 by 74 by 47 millimeters. The body including battery and SD card weighs just over a pound or just under half a kilo. With the new 26 millimeter all manual lens – yes all manual, we'll come to that – let's compare to some other cameras. Let's start with its big brother, the S5II. And yes, calling it its big brother is completely fair. For all intents and purposes, this is very much a LUMIX S5II in a compact body. Then, let's compare it to the LUMIX G100. The G100 is only slightly smaller and actually it's a little bit taller, but of course the G100 is a micro four thirds camera. So now let's see it next to the camera that I think it'll be compared to most in the reviews that you'll see here on YouTube; the Fujifilm X100. Now this is the original X100, but the newest one, the Mark VI is almost identical in size. The Fujifilm is ever so slightly smaller. It's basically the same width, same height, but it is a little bit shallower with its built in lens. But of course the Fujifilm is an APS-C sensor while the S9 is full frame and the S9 has an interchangeable lens. Arguably one of the coolest features of this camera is its new implementation of real-time LUT. Now without getting nerdy about what that means, let me put it this way. Think of LUTs as “looks”. And you'll probably hear the same comparisons from a bunch of other YouTubers because we were all hanging out in Osaka last week debating how to best present this feature. There's a dedicated LUT button on the back of the camera. And I kind of wish it said “Look” instead of “LUT” but here's what it does. With a push of the LUT button, you can scroll through a series of looks and choose the one that you like. Once selected, any photos you take will have that look burned in. To the JPEG. The RAW however will remain untouched. So a good lesson here is that if you love the idea of shooting with looks built in for immediate sharing on social media or just because you don't want to futz around with editing later, then shoot in JPEG. But if you also want the ability to start over on your edit, then shoot in RAW+JPEG. That way you have both. Now there's looks or LUTs built in, but the real power is in making your own. So how do you do that? I'm so glad you asked. There's a brand new app for iPhone and Android called LUMIX Lab. If you want, I can do a deep-dive on this app in a future video; in fact I probably should, because LUMIX Lab will eventually replace the LUMIX Sync app. Hmm… anyway, if that's something you're interested in, please let me know in the comments below. And while you're down there, please be sure to subscribe if you haven't already. So what does the LUMIX Lab app do? A couple of things actually. It'll geotag and automatically transfer photos to your phone when connected, if you wanted to. That makes it easy to shoot photos or video on your S9 and have them show up on your phone ready to share in just moments. It also has a complete LUT generator. You can design a look in the app and transfer it directly to your camera. Let me show you how. To build a LUT, start by choosing any photo you've already imported. And you can actually start with a LUT that's already in here, but we're going to start from scratch. to the tools menu and then you have light, color, HSL, curves, and so many more effects. under light you can adjust exposure. You can adjust brightness contrast, highlight roll off. Let's take the shadows and the highlights up and down a little With the color tab, you can adjust your white balance, tint, and even color saturation. Under HSL, you can choose individual hues and decide how you might want those shifted, desaturated, brightened, or darkened. You even have tone curves, where you can add a curve to all channels or effect channels individually. You also have split tone effects, details like sharpness or noise reduction, then under effects, you can add grain and even add a vignette. Once you've dialed in your look, tap the share button to create a LUT. Here you can give it a name, and you'll also notice that it has the Photo Style selected. The app knows what base Photo Style the image started with and will automatically set that in camera once you choose the LUT. This means that you can build a LUT based off of any of the preexisting Photo Styles. Once you've created the go to the LUT tab, choose the LUT you've just created and transfer it to the camera. In the LUMIX Lab app, you can also download LUTs made by other creators. This is a curated LUT collection that will just continue to grow. This is a super exciting feature for street photographers, casual shooters who just want a good looking photo straight out of camera, social media posters, or anyone who doesn't want to have to finish their photo on the computer. The fact that you can choose just the right look before you even snap the photo is really cool. This real-time LUT feature applies to video as well. You can shoot video with just the right look and avoid color editing later. Be aware though that you do not get both the corrected and uncorrected versions in video like you can with photos. You only get one video file, with the LUT or without it. What you can actually do though is shoot the video with any standard picture profile, including V-Log, copy it to your phone with the LUMIX Lab app, then apply the LUT in the app on your phone and re-export it to use an Instagram, or wherever. Speaking of shooting video with the S9 for social media, you're going to love this. If you're a regular to this channel, you've heard me talk about Open Gate. If you're not familiar with it, here's the tl;dr version. Shooting Open Gate means recording video with the entire sensor in its native aspect ratio. So in the case of the full frame LUMIX S9, instead of shooting 16:9 video, you can shoot a 3:2 aspect ratio video in up to 6K resolution. This means you can crop a 16:9, a 9:16, and even a square 1:1 edit from this footage without sacrificing resolution or trying to crop an unreasonably tight 9:16 for social media from a 16:9 original. Shooting Open Gate is a solution that gives you the best of both worlds. Shoot once and output many. It's awesome. So does the LUMIX S9 do Open Gate? Yeah, of course. It can shoot full 6K Open Gate, but it also can shoot a new 3.8K MP4 light file for easier editing directly on your smartphone. And this is the default video setting of the S9. Check it out. First, there's a new option under the recording file format menu called MP4 (Lite). As you can see, the description tells us that it “records video suitable for editing on a smartphone application”. With that selected, the record quality menu shows just one option, a 3.8K 3:2 aspect ratio 3840 x 2560, 4:2:0 10-bit 50 megabit per second file. So we get the same 3:2 Open Gate aspect ratio, but instead of a massive 6K file that would likely choke your phone, it's a smaller 3840 wide file, which of course is the entire Ultra HD width. And it's a taller image that at 2560 tall is more than you need for 1080 by 1920 vertical video. And don't let the 3.8K name fool you. It sounds lower than 4K, but it's not. We like to call UltraHD “4K”, but UltraHD is only 3840 pixels wide; the same width as this 3.8K format. True 4K is 4096 pixels wide and is called Cinema 4K. And yes, this little S9 can do that too. So what all this means is that you can shoot video once, easily apply a custom look to it in camera or not, transfer to your phone using the LUMIX Lab app and cut a vertical story for Instagram, TikTok, whatever, and later cut a widescreen from the same clips and not sacrifice resolution anywhere along the way. It's awesome. One of the coolest things about hanging out with a bunch of other YouTubers in Osaka for this launch was being surrounded by all of their creativity. I don't know who started it, but someone in our group immediately set their S9 with a cool film LUT to the X-Pan, 65 by 24 aspect ratio. Now, this certainly isn't new, but I kind of became obsessed with it here. X-Pan, if you're not familiar, is a Hasselblad 35mm film camera that could shoot double the width of a standard 35mm frame, providing a 65mm by 24mm negative. The cameras are no longer made, are quite rare and very expensive, but shooting with this aspect ratio combined with a film LUT is just a ton of fun. I also shot in Japan with the new 10mm Laowa full frame lens, largely in this X-Pan crop – and that's a video I'll be releasing very soon, so be sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Another new feature in the S9 is called Crop Zoom and Hybrid Zoom. By cropping into the sensor, you can effectively zoom into the scene, even using a non-zoom lens. In still photography, this simply means its cropping the JPEG. Which may not sound that useful because of course you could just crop the image in the computer later, but this is really about that instant sharing – crop in camera and get the framing just right before transferring it to the phone. It's a bit different for video though; in video you already have more sensor than you need. The sensor is 6K wide, and you're likely shooting 4K or even just HD, so you actually have a ton of room to crop into the sensor without sacrificing quality. If you're shooting HD vs 4K, you'll be able to zoom even farther. Where this gets REALLY interesting though is with a zoom lens. With Hybrid Zoom enabled, as you optically zoom your lens, the camera combines the optical zoom with a digital zoom, increasing the zoom range of your lens gradually and dramatically. Look at this example; here's the 20-60mm zoom lens without Hybrid zoom, so your standard 20-60mm zoom. Now with Hybrid Zoom enabled, and shooting in UltraHD, the same lens goes from 20mm to 93mm, giving you over 50% more reach. If I shoot in HD, the zoom range goes from 20mm to 187mm, over a 3x increase in zoom! It's a really interesting feature, that extends a small zoom lens to a much greater range! Let's talk about a few other notable features on the camera. Of course it uses the new hybrid phase-detect autofocus system, and has all the same subject detection modes which we've seen on the latest LUMIX cameras. It can be charged over USB-C, and the battery is the same battery that all the latest LUMIX cameras use. If you wanted to power it indefinitely, you'd use a dummy battery like this one from Kondor Blue, and there is a cable path port on the battery door to accommodate. You'll find the SD card slot in the battery compartment as well. It has a micro HDMI port, so if you're going to rig this up you'll definitely want something to lock that in – I'm sure third party companies will be building cages for this soon. It has a microphone port, but notably is lacking a headphone port, so if you want to monitor audio while recording, you'll need a microphone that includes a headphone jack. It has a fully articulating touch LCD, just like we find on most LUMIX cameras. The hot shoe is actually just a cold shoe; there to mount microphones or other accessories, but there's no way to attach a flash. And since this is an electronic shutter only camera, you can't use a flash. There are continuous recording time limits to this camera, which come down to it not having an active cooling system. It maxes out at 10 minutes in 6K, 15 minutes in 4K, and 20 minutes in HD. Like its S5II big brother, the S9 also includes dual native ISO, high resolution mode, shutter angle and syncro scan support, scopes and waveform monitor, extremely impressive image stabilization, full V-Log, Log view assist, anamorphic desqueeze, 30 frames per second stills shooting with pre-burst, great built-in time lapse features, and a ton more. It's even supported by LUMIX Sync software on the desktop, over a USB connection! At the LUMIX Global Summit in Osaka we were also handed this little grip by SmallRig. This adds a very nice grip to the camera, as well as an ARCA-Swiss mount plate to the bottom, so if you're traveling with a tripod like the Peak Design or this Freewell Travel Tripod, you can attach the camera directly without needing an extra quick release plate. Presumably, this will be available by the time the camera is shipping. I think this grip feels great, but I also left it off and likely will continue to use the S9 without it, keeping it that much smaller and lighter. It definitely does improve the grip on it though, especially for those with larger hands. Now, let's talk about this funny little lens. This is the LUMIX 26mm fixed f/8 manual focus lens. So… yes, you heard all that correctly. It's a fixed aperture at f/8, and it really is manual focus. Presumably, ultimately these limitations come down to size; keeping this lens as small and light as possible. It's just 18mm or 0.7 inches long, and weighs only 58 grams, or two ounces. It's not a portrait lens, it's not a macro lens, it's not catch-all zoom lens, but what it is, is very small and light weight everyday carry street photography lens. It's so designed to be ready at any moment that it doesn't need a lens cap. The outer element is a high strength, impact and scratch resistant glass cover. When it comes to focusing, hyperfocal distance is about three meters, and hyperfocal near limit is about one and a half meters. So that means set to infinity, anything farther away than one and a half meters, or a little under five feet, will be acceptably in focus. Of course the lens does focus closer; down to 25cm or 9.8 inches. I think I can speak for pretty much everyone at the event that we were quite surprised to see that it's manual focus and only f/8, and the sentiment around the lens immediately after the launch event was… not that positive. BUT… after shooting with it for a while, I heard a lot of YouTubers opinions on it change. I really enjoyed shooting with it, and can honestly say that this will basically live on this camera. Of course you can attach any L-Mount lens to it; here's what it looks like with the 50mm f/1.8. And it'd look the same with any of the prime or even the 20-60mm zoom as they're all identically sized. There's also a new 18 to 40mm compact zoom lens coming out, with more information to be release later this year. Since this is effectively an S5II in a smaller package, it's fair to compare the two cameras; what are the differences between them? Physically of course, the S5II is considerably larger and heavier. The S5II gains an electronic viewfinder, mechanical shutter, hot shoe, full-size HDMI port, headphone jack, dual SD card slots, a lot more customizable buttons on the body, four channel audio recording with the XLR1 added, and an active cooling system which provides unlimited recording times. All of this of course comes at a cost of weight, size, and well, cost. The S5II weights 50% more than the S9, is taller, wider, and nearly double the depth. And has a retail price of almost $1,000 more than the S9. That said at the moment of this recording you can get an S5II for $600 off – link in description – but I wouldn't count on that deal lasting. So, how much is the S9, and when can you get it? The LUMIX S9 will start shipping on… I don't actually know! They never gave me a date! I mean, I have one, so it must be soon, right? Link below. But I do know the price! It'll be priced at $1499 USD or €1699 Euros. The 26mm f/8 manual lens will be $199 USD and available at launch with the S9. Depending on your region, there may be some pre-order bundle deals to look out for, so be sure to watch for those. There's a bunch of these LUMIX S9 videos dropping all at the same time and undoubtedly over coming days. Here's a playlist with a long list of them, including – depending on when you're watching this – my new video on the Laowa 10mm full frame lens, which I paired with the S9 in Osaka as well. Thanks for watching my video, check out more of them here, and let me know what you think of the S9 in the comments below.