Panasonic GX80/85 and Nauticam NA-GX85

Peter Rowlands · Issue 93, Nov/Dec 2016 · pp. 34–35

Products mentioned: Nauticam NA-GX85, Panasonic GX80/85, Panasonic GX7, Panasonic 14-42 EZ lens, Nauticam WWL-1, Panasonic HC-VXF990, Olympus 8mm F1.8 fisheye, Zen dome

It is 3 years since I upgraded my camera to a Panasonic GX7 and I have been extremely impressed with its performance and have really enjoyed shooting with it in my Nauticam housing. I shoot mostly available light video and the GX7’s manual white balance capability is excellent. I can’t recall a time when it has failed to produce a good balance and it has the ability to manually tweak it if required. My main lens combination is the Panasonic 14-42 EZ lens with the Nauticam WWL-1 wide wet lens and this produces crisp images throughout the zoom range. So why am I considering upgrading? As a video shooter the big development in the past 3 years has been the introduction of 4k video. This is effectively almost 4 times the quality of Full HD (or 2k) and the difference is immediately visible and highly desirous! And don’t forget that the GX80/85 is no slouch when it comes to stills. The 16mp se…