Throwback Thursday: Panasonic’s quarter century of camera innovation

It was twenty-five years ago this week that Panasonic’s first digital cameras hit the market: the DMC-LC5 and DMC-F7. This means it’s also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the “Lumix” brand.

Panasonic, then itself a sub-brand of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co (which has subsequently adopted the Panasonic name for the whole company), was a little late to the digital camera game, as one of its senior directors acknowledged to Reuters in an article quoted in DPReview’s coverage, just before the first cameras reached the shelves.

The company hasn’t ever quite hit the 10% market share target it set for itself (though it apparently made up 10% of the full-frame market in Europe, earlier this year), but it’s produced some excellent and innovative cameras in the meantime. And its influence on modern cameras and the camera industry transcends such simple metrics.

The original Panasonic Lumix DMC-LC5, one of the two cameras with which the company launched the Lumix brand. Despite the Leica branding, the lens seemed familiar.Panasonic

The original DMC-LC5 was a pretty ambitious first camera, with the larger Type 1/1.76 (40mm²) sensor usually reserved for enthusiast cameras and a design that looks a lot like its contemporary, the Canon G2, with a tunnel-type optical viewfinder, top plate display and mode dial.

The LC5 had a Leica-branded lens: the beginning of a relationship with the German company that continues to this day. Though, interestingly, that lens has exactly the same 7-21mm, F2.0-2.5 specifications as the lens Canon was using in its G2. A fractionally larger sensor meant that the Panasonic delivered a slightly wider 33-100mm equiv range from its zoom, but the likelihood of there being two different lenses with such closely matching specs is incredibly low.  

The remarkably LC5-like Leica Digilux 1 would be launched the subsequent year. And that pattern of Leica-branded variants of many of Panasonic’s most interesting (from our enthusiast photographer perspective) models was to continue.

The Panasonic TZ3 put a 10x zoom in a small camera body. And unlike the compact superzooms that had gone before it, it did so with a lens starting at a wideangle, 28mm equiv.DPReview

Highlights include the FZ series of long zoom ‘bridge’ cameras, starting with the FZ1 in 2004 and encompassing a great range of sensor sizes, as well as zoom lengths, through the years. The TZ series (later rebranded as ZS in the American market) helped define and give a name to the compact superzoom style of travel zooms, and were among the first to use digital distortion correction to allow wideangle zooms in a small camera body. And then there were LX compact enthusiast models, whose ultimate successor is this year’s DC-L10, bringing short but bright lenses, larger sensors and the idea that aspect ratio should be a creative option.

DPReview

Leica wasn’t the only company has Panasonic worked closely with, though. In 2004, it joined Olympus and Kodak’s Four Thirds system, producing two DSLRs before spearheading the reinvention of Four Thirds as Micro Four Thirds: the world’s first mirrorless (interchangeable lens) camera system.

It’s strange to look back and realize that there were only five years between the launch of the first wholly designed-for-digital DSLR and the first mirrorless camera. The original Four Thirds DSLR system wasn’t formally discontinued until 2017 but Panasonic had ushered in a new era the day it announced the G1.

It’s hard to imagine Panasonic (or any company, frankly) having such a profound impact on the industry in a single move again, especially as seems unlikely that the organic film/CMOS hybrid sensor its parent company has developed, will make its way across to consumer cameras.

It looked, and operated, a lot like a contemporary DSLR, but the Panasonic DMC-G1 would fundamentally change the industryDPReview

But the creation of Mirrorless camera isn’t Panasonic’s only contribution to camera technology that it’s easy to now take for granted.

Its Dual IS system was the first to use in-lens and in-body stabilization simultaneously, in a co-ordinated manner. Other brands have subsequently adopted this approach, but Panasonic was several years ahead of most.

Likewise, we’re pretty sure Panasonic was the first brand to adopt context-sensitive noise reduction in its JPEG engine: applying more noise reduction in what it interpreted as low-detail regions and less in areas where details needed to be preserved. It was also one of the first to offer subject recognition autofocus trained by machine learning, though it didn’t think to promote it as “AI”-powered, so it didn’t necessarily get the recognition this warranted.

It’s impossible to cover Panasonic’s contribution to the industry without mentioning its GH series of video-forward hybrid cameras

The other very visible impact Panasonic has had on the camera industry has been in raising the expectations of the video capabilities of hybrid cameras. Particularly through its GH series, Panasonic has been the first to shoot 4K, the first to capture 10-bit video, the first to offer Log gamma, the first to have a waveforms display, the first to let you choose the conversion gain mode and the first to be able to capture 32-bit float audio. All of them features that were once the preserve of dedicated video models, many of which have become commonplace on the most mainstream models, because the R&D to provide them has already been done.

Panasonic’s contribution to cameras isn’t something to solely be discussed in the past tense. The S1II is at the cutting edge of what the latest cameras can offer.Richard Butler

This is far from a complete reflection of the impact Panasonic has had. A quarter of a century of progress has seen it deliver a great many interesting cameras and innovations, and cameras like the S1II and L10 suggest there will be plenty of more interesting things to come. But whether you think of the company as Panasonic or Lumix, and regardless of whether you’ve owned and loved one of its products, it’s impossible to ignore its contributions over the past 25 years.