Vitality announced on his website today that he is able to downgrade unhackable gh1s to version 1.32. This will allow any GH1 to run the GH13 bitrate and battery patches!
Hurry up and buy a body for $399 before they disappear!
Buy the GH1 body from B&H for $399 before there gone!
Unfortunately this confirms that the GH2 has the same poor codec performance symptoms of the un-hacked GH1. Certainly the bump to 24mb has increased the amount of detail the encoder can handle, which is on par or greater than the hacked GH1. This only seems to hold true as long as the camera is not moving. For instance, take the passing cars. As soon as they pass in the frame, the resulting pavement looks like a bath of muddy pixels akin to DV era camcorder resolution.
Will there be a fix for this? Probably not from Panasonic, but if the firmware is able to be hacked by resident GH1 DVXuser hacker, Vitality – then an increase to the overall variable bitrate might fix this problem. Just as it helps the GH1