I’m not a vlogger so I don‘t know how relevant my experience might be. About September, 2019, I considered replacing my G7X II travel camera before a fall trip. At the store I looked at the M50, but decided to stick with something pocketable. The Sony option didn’t appeal to me because they had opted to make the lens much slower to make a longer zoom, just the opposite of what I wanted for my travel pictures. As I stated above, I didn’t need the new vlogging features of the new 7, so I got the G5X II.
Before the trip I took the camera with me to a college football game in the afternoon. I was in a hospitality area (free food and beer) behind one end zone. Even with the limited zoom, I got some surprisingly good video shooting to the other end of the field. Of course the touchdown I shot near to me was really clear.
On the trip, I shot over 3,000 stills, but no video. I was very pleased. I didn’t use the popup viewfinder often, but it was handy in really bright sunlight sometimes.
My main video project each year is to shoot some after-hours pick-up basketball during camp. It features returning college players, new players, pros who play in Europe but back in the states for the summer, and sometimes in the past some NBA players. I often have used it to learn how to use new cameras, but they had not had these games since I had this camera until this year.
My main mistake was in using autofocus. I’ve never had focus problems with this camera before, But several clips began with the camera fishing around for focus. There is enough depth of field with the little lens that I should have just focused manually on one of the baskets and known that everything else would be good, and leave it there. I was going to learn from my mistakes and do better the next night, but they didn’t play again. The zoom lever is not practical to use during shooting, so I leave it zoomed to around 40 or 50mm equivalent and shoot in 4K and then do my zooming in post. That worked fine.
The problem was with all that 4K shooting, the camera overheated. So I shot for a little while with my iPhone in 4K. I had to crop a little more on that footage, but had plenty of resolution still. So I concluded that the G5X II is not the ideal camera for that project, though I could do better with it knowing what I know now. My audience is interested in how the new guys play, how the returning guys have improved, and how the pros are coming along after college. They don’t care much about whether the beginnings of some shots are fuzzy. When the camera was new, I set it up on a tripod on my deck and tested the autofocus by shooting me as I moved back and forth à la Dr. Tongue, and it tracked my face really well. So I was surprised at the basketball focus issues. At vlogging distances, it did great.