Panasonic S1R II Review: A competent, affordable mirrorless hybrid camera

The S1RII features Panasonic’s latest phase detection autofocus. This has far better subject recognition and tracking algorithms. The S1RII can recognize people, animals (dogs, cats, birds), cars, motorcycles, bicycles, trains and planes. In my tests, Panasonic’s subject tracking system is roughly the same as that seen on Nikon, Canon, Sony, and Fujifurum. Nikon, for example, wasn’t everything that stands out as good at tracking birds, but it’s an all-around solid autofocus system that you won’t miss too much.

Photo: Scott Gilbertson

What I didn’t like was that wasn’t what I would do, it wasn’t what I would do. In other words, if you are in subject tracking mode, you will stop tracking the subject. For example, if you want to track a dog playing on the beach early in the morning and stop for a second to capture the sunrise, you can tap on the screen in Sony and Fujifilm to switch focus to the horizon, focus on the dog tracking, shoot, and then go back. To do that with S1RII, I had to switch subject tracking first. It’s not a big hassle, nor is it a trade breaker, but it’s a bit of a flip of your head.

For the rest of the time I discovered that S1RII did a good job tracking everything I asked. Oddly, it is the most difficult with humans. In the crowd, it can lose subjects. This is something that doesn’t usually happen in my tests of Nikon, Canon and Sony cameras. Panasonic’s autofocus system is definitely faster and more accurate than its previous versions, but not perfect. This is not a trade breaker (I still shoot a lot of manual focus lenses), but filming a lot of sports and wildlife may be worth testing on rentals.

image quality

I have always liked the color representation of Panasonic’s neutrality. Not warm, not cool, completely perfect in the middle. The only place I’ve seen this is that S1RII is a bit different in the skin tone of my kids. They looked a bit pinkish in some lighting conditions, but otherwise I didn’t show any oddity of the colour. The dynamic range is very good. I couldn’t even stop the shadows of the Raw files at 2-3 and didn’t even have to actually deal with the noise.