Panasonic G9 II – Leica Monochrome

While looking for a much much lighter and more portable camera setup that’s always easy to carry around I had the incredible luck of snagging a 2nd hand Panasonic G9II (pretty much in mint condition, only 40 shots taken) with an older Panasonic Leica 25mm f1.4 lens model. Already knowing the pros and cons of the MFT sensor (I had a Panasonic GX8 a couple of years ago) I didn’t even hesitate to get the G9 Mark II once I saw the feature list — so much great and useful stuff and functionality straight out of the box and almost none of that is available on the Sony a7 IV.

The camera arrived today and after charging the battery I made a short trip to the Rheinauhaufen here in Cologne today to give the camera a try using the Leica Monochrome image profile. The Leica Monochrome profile is a black-and-white photo style developed by Panasonic in collaboration with Leica, designed to emulate the deep contrast and tonal richness characteristic of Leica’s monochrome imagery.

All images were shot in 100MP Pixel-Shift handheld mode which is a pretty cool feature: the sensor shifts by a pixel using the in-body image stabilization (IBIS) and takes multiple images, then combines them in-camera to create one high-resolution image with much finer detail — of course there are some drawbacks, especially with moving stuff like foliage or water. All images were slightly denoised and downscaled by 50% in post.

Equipment used:

Panasonic G9II
Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm f1.4 ASPH