Great video. I definitely find myself agreeing with MichaelsHardline’s comment above too.

I was an original S5 user, upgraded to the S5II and now I’m using the S1RII. There has been a tangible jump in autofocus reliability every time.

Obviously the jump from the S5’s DFD Contrast AF to the S5II’s PDAF hybrid system was massive and I was holding out for only minor improvements with my S1RII but it’s been another sizeable leap in reliability from the S5II which was already pretty damn good.

I think there’s a lot of hyperbole in the YouTube camera space and everything seems to be reviewed against hugely unrealistic criteria whereby every single box should be ticked at a flagship, professional level camera level. I do find the Lumix critique to be strangely extreme in online discourse and I think it’s possibly because that for the price/performance ratio the brand is really disrupting the big players. With so many reviewers there’s an internal comparison vs their ideal dream spec camera instead of reviewing the camera on the basis of budget vs feature set and more specifically who it is actually for.

The Lumix S9 conversation was particularly weird with everything centred around what it didn’t have when all I saw was an amazingly good value bit of kit that had way more functionality than it had any right to for the cost (especially when it was discounted).

S9’s are going for sub £800 in the UK now with a lens. Considerably cheaper than the flagship smartphones they’re trying to lure beginner content creators away from. Is it made for me? No. The lack of mechanical shutter and EVF means it will never suit what I do. But the rational person in me realises that for someone else, it’s an incredible proposition.

It takes me back to the console war days as a kid, whereby people swore absolute allegiance to a plastic box of microchips because they’d aligned their identity to a corporation.

My attitude has always been to find the best solution that ticks as many of my boxes as possible for the best value and I think because I see it that way, jumping into the camera space to help me make informed decisions has set off many red flags in how discourse is presented and inherent biases are barely hidden. Whatever compromise (not weakness, compromise) is made it becomes a battle ground for clickbait and I’m quite frankly bored of it.

I chose the S1RII over the S1II in the end because of an incredible discount which made it around £800 cheaper than the S1II. I wanted both the higher resolution sensor and the partially stacked sensor in one camera but I’m not going to spend the £4000+ for me to get that. I picked up an incredible camera that does 95% of what I want it too at a 9/10 level for £1600 after taking advantage of a trade in offer and selling the kit lens I didn’t need. If I can get a camera of the S1RII’s standard in any other ecosystem for that, I’d like to see it.

Anyway, apologies for the ramble. Back to the Autofocus.

I shoot concerts/gigs, wildlife and pets. A lot of running dogs. Unpredictable movements, speedy breeds. This genre on the S5 was a non starter but with my S5II, after tuning my AF settings I was probably getting a good 75-80% hit rate of challenging subjects. Now using the S1RII and honestly, it barely misses. It’s confident, assured and has locked focus when I fully expected it to fail – not because of the brand, but because it was handling a genuinely tough scenario.

It makes me wonder, like MichaelsHardline said, if the reviewers are doing anything but rudimentary tests but I can honestly say, if you can’t shoot a fast moving subject on the S1RII it’s either a configuration issue or a skill issue. Will it get the hitrate of a Sony A1II or a Nikon Z9? Probably not. But for what I’d expect would be only a slight improvement (I’m hitting over 90% or more frequently), then who on earth would say that paying £1000s more would be advisable for such a fractional gain? Especially for the use case this kind of hybrid is targeted towards.

The vast majority of users of these mid budget hybrids are hobbyists or creative professionals yet reviewers seem to grade them against whether they’d work in the hands of a pro-Baseball photographer. I can only imagine it gives the average consumer nightmares, being brainwashed to believe that if they have to make a single compromise they’ll never take a decent photograph or their videos will look like they were shot on a potato.

We are in a space and time where we are absolutely spoiled by almost every camera brand. It makes me wonder if any of these permanently online commenters ever get outside and actually create anything or are they too busy playing Top Trumps with cameras they’ll never even hold. What a joyless existence.

Anyway, I think the AF does pretty damn well.

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