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It's January 2025,I'm PhotoJoseph, a LUMIX Ambassador, and Panasonic continues to add value to your existing cameras with a series of firmware updates, available starting today. There are updates to the LUMIX S5II, S5IIX, the LUMIX G9II, and the GH7. In essence, these updates bring all of these cameras up to feature parity, adding features that were first released the LUMIX S9 and GH7. We'll run through these feature by feature.
You can now add multiple frame markers – up to three total – overlaid on your shot. If you're shooting in 16:9 and want to see what a 9:16 croup would look like, you can do that. Shooting 17:9 and want a 16:9 safety? Cool! But most effectively, if you're shooting Open Gate and want to see what a 16:9 wide, 9:16 vertical, and 1:1 square crops would look like – simultaneously – you can! These can even be repositioned and scaled by just tapping and dragging on the LCD. This feature has been added to the S5II, S5IIX, GH7 and S9II.
Enhanced Subject Detection in autofocus adds Airplane and Train detection to all cameras, and the Target Parts option has been added to Car and Motorcycle. This has been added to the S5II, S5IIX, and S9II – it was previously available in the GH7.
All cameras are now compatible with the new LUMIX Smartphone app, LUMIX Lab. This includes Remote shooting, Shutter remote control, and wirelessly and automatically transferring images to your smartphone. All camaras received Real Time LUT in a previous update, so now you can download and install custom LUTs from the LUMIX Lab app. The cameras that support Wireless IP streaming, that's the S5IIX and GH7, also gain control of this feature through the LUMIX Lab app. There is no longer any need for the end-of-life'd LUMIX Sync app for any of these cameras.
MP4(Lite) has been added to all cameras! This is an exciting format for those who want to shoot video with full size cameras, then edit and post directly from their smartphones in widescreen or vertical or both, but might struggle with the large file sizes of full resolution Open Gate. MP4(Lite) is Open Gate, but at ultra HD resolution instead of 6K resolution. On the full frame S5II and S5IIX, the image is 3840 wide by 2560 tall in a 3:2 aspect ratio, and on the GH7 and G9II, it's 3840 wide by 2880 tall, in a 4:3 ratio. These are H.265 HEVC files at 50 Mbps, 4:2:0 10-bit, and MP4(Lite) supports 25 and 30 frames per second. If you want to shoot high frame rate or 24p, you'll still need to shoot and transfer full size files. These smaller MP4(Lite) files are 41% smaller and transfer 1.7x faster than their full size counterparts.
Hybrid Zoom and Crop Zoom are now available on all these cameras. Hybrid Zoom is an amazingly cool feature that combines a lens's optical zoom with digital zoom – but not the type of digital zoom that scales up the video and looks like trash. No, this is much more clever. Say you're shooting 4K video on a 6K sensor. Normally, those 6k pixels are scaled down to the 4K file. And you want that full width sensor for the widest possible field of view from any given lens. But, you can always crop into the sensor down to 1:1, meaning you're now using only 4K pixels wide on the sensor, instead of the full 6K width. This effectively crops the image – or zooms in – without sacrificing quality; you're shooting pixel for pixel, still. Well, Hybrid zoom combines that sensor cropping with optical zoom, seamlessly gradually cropping into the sensor while you zoom, increasing its effective focal length. How far you can increase depends on the resolution you're shooting at. If you're shooting in HD, you can crop much farther than shooting in 4K, which translates to a much longer zoom. My favorite lens to demo this with is the full frame 28-200mm lens, because when shooting in HD, with Hybrid Zoom, that 28-200 becomes a 28 to 625mm lens. It's insane. Or, if I did the math right, the new 18-40 compact zoom lens becomes an 18-125mm lens. Crop zoom is similar in that it crops into the sensor – again, never past 1:1 – but can turn a fixed focal length lens into a zoom lens, and offers fixed crops, instead of the variable crop that you get with Hybrid Zoom. Crop zoom replaces the Extended Tele Conversion function you may have used in the past.
The new picture size XS, or extra small, is now available on all cameras. This is for still photography, and generates a tiny, HD resolution, 1920 pixel wide JPEG. This resolution matches instagram reels and is still bigger than instagram posts, and is so small that it'll transfer incredibly quickly to your phone. And, if you shoot RAW+JPEG, you also still get the full resolution RAW file to work with later.
There's “improved stability” on all cameras – which basically means minor bug fixes – and also a new pop-up message on the S series cameras when using an expandable lens, telling you to extend the lens to use it.
Finally, a few changes due to security enhancements. If you directly connect your camera and smartphone via WiFi, bypassing the bluetooth handoff, then you now HAVE to enter your password to authenticate every time. Again if you use the bluetooth handoff, as you should, because it's easier, this is irrelevant. Specifically in Europe, there are two security changes – the ability to transfer images directly to your PC via WiFi has been removed, and RTMP streaming directly from the camera has also been removed – however, RTMPS is still there. It takes some extra steps to stream to YouTube using RTMPS, but you can, and it's more secure. Finally, on all models globally, the ability to stream directly to a PC or encoder using RTP and RTSP over a local wired LAN has been removed for “security enhancements”.
Before we get to the installation process… if you have any questions about these updates, or these cameras in general, of course you should subscribe and leave a comment, but also consider joining the channel. YouTube channel members have access to a private Discord server where we talk about all kind of topics channel related. Come check it out! Now, let's see how to get the update and how to install it.
To download your firmware update, either go to photojoseph.com/firmware and that will redirect you, or google search for “LUMIX firmware update download” to find the page. This is what it looks like; select either Full Frame or Micro Four Thirds depending on your camera. Find your camera listed and click the “click to the download page” link, which will open a window like this… then click the Download button to get it. It will download a .zip file; open that and the final file will end in .bin. On a Mac, macOS might try to decompress the .bin file and tell you that it can't; ignore that. The .bin is what you want.
Make sure your camera has a full battery. Insert a memory card and reformat it. Technically this isn't supposed to be necessary but I always recommend it. Insert the memory card into your computer, and copy the .bin file to the root level – do not put it in a folder. Half the comments from people telling me the firmware update doesn't work is because they put the .bin file in a folder. The other half is because they put the .zip file on the SD card. Put the .bin file at the top level of the SD card.
If you have anything connected to the camera – HDMI or USB – unplug it. Pop the card back in your camera, power it up, turn OFF bluetooth; to do that, go the Setup menu (that's the wrench), then In and Out, and then Bluetooth, and turn that off. Then back up to Others, and select Firmware Update, and update the firmware! It'll probably take several minutes; leave it be. No touchy!
That's it, it's really easy to do.
As always, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments, or better yet, join the channel, and I'll see you in the Discord.)