Panasonic GH2 – HACKED! Super mega hdslr around the corner?

by Sebastian WöberJuly 5^th, 2011

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A little more than a year ago Panasonics video dslr the GH1 was hacked. It was an amazing breakthrough that made a barely useful hdslr a real 5D competitor. Many people claimed the hacked GH1 would even outmatch the 5D mark ii in terms of picture quality.

The GH2 was released in October 2010 as a successor to the GH1 and has some very convincing advantages in terms of image quality over Canon’s lineup. Compared to the 60D and 7D, the GH2 has virtually no moire, less rolling shutter and even delivers a sharper picture in some occasions.

So far the video compression of the GH2 has been the biggest problem of the camera and many were hoping for a new hack ever since the GH2 was released. Jorgen Escher put it nicely when he said: “If it wasn’t for the weak AVCHD codec at approx. 24Mb/sec, this would be the best super mega mega DSLR for video use.”

So where download this and make amazing film?
Well, it’s not that simple (yet). If I understand correctly many of the ported patches from the GH1 hack should work but using it is a very sophisticated process you will first have to get familiar with. You’ll probably have to do some trial and error to understand which settings work (many users report errors using the hack, which seems to be normal if you don’t know what you’re doing).

So you could either go to the source and learn how it works or wait until someone comes up with a simpler program and/or those hackers have tested it enough to tell us which way to use it best.

(I’m not a GH1 hacker and I really didn’t get all the hacking stuff written there, so I hope I got this right. If not, please correct me in the comments)

If you really dig the GH2 now you can get it here and if you want the camera body without lens there are also some good deals on ebay here.
(you might want to look out for the asian offers)

The hacking on this firmware was done by Vitaliy Kiselev and the message board for the hack can be found here.

And here’s a nice comparison of the GH2 to the 60D by DigitalRev: