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Panasonic’s best-ever full-frame Lumix is a true hybrid, with 44MP stills, 8K open gate video, 32-bit float audio recording and more. Creatives demanding the very best Lumix has to offer should look no further.
Bang for buck, you won’t find a better hybrid mirrorless camera, especially if video is your focus. The S5 II’s 6K open gate video and array of bitrates, frame rates and color profiles impress.
The Panasonic Lumix S1R II and S5 II look like twins but are more like cousins. Both full-frame all-rounders, but one is altogether of a higher grade. However, we think it’s a good time for S5 II owners to consider whether they might be due an upgrade.
Panasonic’s Lumix S5 II is a highly adaptable camera from 2023 that can serve the needs of photographers and video-based content creators. It’s a generalist. And the overlap between those two groups has never been greater.
We rate the Lumix S5 II as the best video camera for most people. However, the higher-end Panasonic Lumix S1R II leverages the tech progress of a couple of additional years to match and even beat the burst speed of the S5 II while using a much higher-resolution sensor – it’s a more powerful camera in just about every way.
This time around the only issue is the price. If we could only have one, it’s the Panasonic Lumix S1R II every time. You do have to pay for these extraordinarily tempting upgrades, though — quite a lot too. Let’s look into what that extra spend actually gets you.
1. Price
- Lumix S1R II costs $3,299 / £2,999 / AU$5,499
- Lumix S5 II costs $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$2,989, regularly on sale for around $400 / £400 less
The Panasonic Lumix S1R II was announced in February 2025 and costs $3,299 / £2,999 / AU$5,499 body-only. It’s also available with a 24-105mm f/4 lens, in the UK only at the time of writing, for £3799.
Panasonics’s S5 II is a significantly older camera. It came out in February 2023, and cost $1,999 / £1,999 / AU$2,989, body-only, at launch.
Since then the price has come down a little thanks to natural erosion. While it is still listed at £1999 at Panasonic’s own store, it has been seen online for up to $400/£400 less.
2. Design
- Lumix S1R II: CFexpress Type B / SD card slots, connection ports have individual doors, tally lamp and record button on front
- Lumix S5 II: 15g lighter, same 1.84m-dot vari-angle touchscreen
These two cameras are of a high enough grade to receive the classic mirrorless camera build, that of a magnesium inner frame with water resistance good enough to be able to handle some rain.
The two are almost side identical in both shape and dimensions, with just a 15g disparity once they are tooled up with battery and memory card. They are much smaller and lighter than the original S1R from 2019, for example.
Even the control layout is very similar, with just a slight shift of the focus control dial (single, continuous, Manual), a lock switch on the back of the Panasonic Lumix S1R II, and an additional red video capture button up front.
They both have a free-angle 3-inch touchscreen, of 1.84-million-dot resolution, primed for the sort of video shooter Panasonic has in mind for the S1R II and S5 II.
One difference is the Panasonic Lumix S1R II now has separated-out covers for each of the connectors, protected from water ingress by a rubber seal. It doesn’t mean Panasonic promises anything more than protection from water splashes, but the camera is also “freezeproof” down to -10 degrees centigrade. That is its operating temperature floor, while the Lumix S5 II’s range stops at zero degrees. The newer camera is ready for a harsh winter.
You see the greater expected demands put on the Panasonic Lumix S1R II in the memory cards it uses too. There’s one slot for a CFexpress Type B, a second for a classic SD card. The Panasonic S5 II simply has two SD slots, meaning the speeds available to you tap out at UHS-II V90.
This is much less of a limiting factor than it may sound, though, as the far higher throughput is needed in the Panasonic Lumix S1R II anyway thanks to its higher resolution sensor.
3. Sensor
- Lumix S1R II: 44MP sensor, 14EV dynamic range
- Lumix S5 II: 24.2MP sensor, 14EV+ dynamic range
These two cameras have full-frame sensors, but their specs otherwise belong to two different categories.
The Panasonic Lumix S1R II is a high-resolution sensor, one ideal for stills. It brings 44-megapixel resolution to the table, where the S5 II has a more conservative 24.2 megapixels to its name.
Higher resolution will provide much greater still cropping versatility when used with a good lens. There’s even a 177MP high resolution mode, which Panasonic claims can be used handheld. As in other modes of this style, the stabilisation motor is used to fractionally move the sensor, allowing multiple frames to be stitched together to capture more detail.
The most impressive part is this much higher resolution is not accompanied by a drop in burst performance, thanks to the super-fast readout of the Panasonic Lumix S1R II’s new sensor.
When shooting with the electronic shutter it can reach 40fps, compared to 30fps in the Panasonic S5 II. Or 10fps with the mechanical shutter, 9fps in the Lumix S5 II.
It’s remarkable swiftness considering the sheer amount of data involved, and electronic burst shooting is also blackout-free when using the viewfinder. The S5 II is not entirely blackout-free, and the effect is quite noticeable when using the mechanical shutter.
Panasonic only provides dynamic range numbers for its V-log flag video mode these days. It’s “14” stops for the Lumix S1R II, “14+” for the Lumix S5 II. It’s one of those areas where having lower resolution actually helps, due to resulting in larger sensor pixels.
4. Video
- Lumix S1R II: 8K, 5.8K 60fps, 4K 120fps, All-Intra, Apple Pro Res Raw internal
- Lumix S5 II: 6K, 4K 60fps, Apple Pro Res Raw external
At first glance the Lumix S5 II provides the video modes most people need. It can capture 4K video at 60fps, and has a 6K mode that uses (nearly) the full horizontal resolution of the sensor.
There are some compromises, though. The S5 II can only capture 4K/60 at an APS-C crop. Full width shooting is limited to 30fps at 4K, or you can drop down to 1080p to hit not just 60fps but 120fps.
The Panasonic Lumix S5 II also lacks ALL-Intra video compression, where each frame of video is compressed individually. Instead all modes use LongGOP, where aside from key frames, only the difference in image information is recorded in the actual file. It saves on storage space, big time, but can cause some image issues in scenes of fast motion.
Panasonic’s Lumix S1R II, you guessed it, solves all these problems and raises the ceiling too.
It can shoot at 4K/60 at full sensor width, and can reach 120fps at 4K too. If you need 60fps footage, the maximum resolution is 5.9K (5,888×3,312 pixels). And a drop to 30fps extends the resolution to 8.1K, effectively using the full horizontal resolution of the sensor.
The best all-rounder mode for shooting is probably still 4K (or DCI 4K if you’d prefer a 17:9 aspect ratio), which offers 4:2:2 Chrome sub-sampling and a bitrate of up to 800Mbps (MP4). And, yes, ALL-Intra compression for the best quality results.
High bit-rate ProRes 422 encoding is also an option, as is 5.8K shooting at 60fps — this mode has a slight crop as it captures a 5.8K window’s worth of the information from the full 8.1K sensor width.
Open gate (3:2 aspect ratio) 8K capture at 30fps is also coming in a software update. It’s all looking very promising for the S1R II as a serious video capture tool.
5. Features
- Lumix S1R II: 8EV in-body image stabilization, 5.76m-dot EVF, improved hybrid autofocus
- Lumix S5 II: 6.5EV in-body image stabilization, 3.69m-dot EVF
Panasonic used the launch of the Lumix S1R II in February 2025 to announce its partnership with Capture One, a piece of software used to tether a camera to PC, iPad or iPhone to review photos. We’ve heard future Lumix cameras will support it too, although there’s no word of it coming to the older Lumix S5 II as well.
IBIS (in-body image stabilisation) appears to have been improved too. When combined with lens stabilisation, the claim was the Panasonic S5 II could provide 6.5 stops’ worth of compensation. And it was — and is — fantastic in actual use.
The claim is even higher for the Lumix S1R II, though, at 8 stops.
Other core features are significantly better in the Lumix S1R II. The EVF, for example, is — in line with pricing — much better.
The Lumix S5 II has a 3.69-million-dot EVF (1280 x 960 pixels), the Lumix S1R II a 5.76-million dot one (1600 x 1200 pixels). Their magnifications are the same, though, and both use 120Hz OLED panels, so the primary difference is in resolution.
Focusing promises a major improvement, although this is something we’ll have to check out in testing rather than in specs. Both cameras use phase detection pixels on the sensor, and have an ability to revert to depth-from-defocus (basically smarter contrast detection) when necessary.
However, the improved smarts of the Lumix S1R II are likely to have a major effect on real-world focus efficiency. Panasonic claims its AI-infused smarts — because everyone has to have those these days — double the subject recognition performance of the Lumix S5 II.
Another neat video feature of the Lumix S1R II is the ability to record direct to an SSD, which are of course radically cheaper than the CFexpress cards you otherwise have to lean on for the most demanding capture modes. The Panasonic Lumix S5 II X can record to SSD, the standard S5 II cannot.
Early verdict
The Panasonic Lumix S1R II would make a terrific upgrade for a Lumix S5 II owner looking to step up to something even more capable. It’s no bigger, no heavier — not to a meaningful degree — and yet is more capable in every area.
Burst shooting is faster despite the much higher sensor resolution. The ceiling on video modes is raised to 8K, or 4K at 120fps. And there are little design improvements or upgrades throughout that may not be obvious at first glance, given they look so similar.
This is not a no-brainer buy, though. The Lumix S1R II is only such a clear winner after just a 2-year release gap because it is also a significantly higher-end model.
The price difference is around $1300 / £1000, and likely even greater much of the time given the Lumix S5 II is now seen on sale regularly.
