Panasonic’s Lumix S9 Is the Perfect Camera for Social Media

Cameras are cool again, and Lumix’s new S9 is set to beat Fujifilm’s X100 series as the camera for TikTok and Instagram, thanks to a surprise secret weapon.

Your phone’s camera may always be in your pocket, dangling from a cross-body lanyard, or clamped to a selfie stick, but its photos are not the best. Neither does your phone look as good as a real camera when it’s in the frame, and you’re showing it off to your seven avid followers. The S9 is a very powerful camera, with a full-frame sensor and interchangeable lenses, but it also looks great and—perhaps most crucially—makes it really easy to post photos to your socials.

“Influencers and Instagrammers are gravitating towards real cameras like Panasonic’s Lumix S9 because they offer superior image quality and creative control that smartphones can’t match,” professional photographer Jodi Blodgett told Lifewire via email.

“Quickly sharing photos to social media is essential in today’s digital world. During family and business events, I often rely on cameras that integrate seamlessly with smartphone apps for instant sharing. This ability ensures my clients receive timely updates, keeping their audience engaged,” says Blodgett.

LUTs

For some years now, the hottest camera for social media influencers and influencees has been Fujifilm’s X100V, and now the brand-new X100VI. This camera is so popular that Fujifilm had to move production from Japan to China, and it still can’t keep up with demand.

As you can see, the X100VI looks amazing, but it also takes really great photos without any need to spend time editing them in Lightroom or whatever. That’s down to its film emulations. Unlike filters, which just add colors to your JPGs, film emulations work with the data from the sensor at a low level, mimicking how different films react to light.

“While the X100 series is revered for its classic styling and film simulation modes, the S9 offers a minimalistic design that appeals to a different aesthetic. Its LUTs provide the same level of creativity and post-processing flexibility that Fujifilm users love,” says Blodgett.

Unlike Fujifilm, Panasonic doesn’t have a long history of making real film. What it does have is a knowledge of movie-making—Panasonic has been making video cameras since home video became a thing. And when videographers want to give their footage a ‘look,’ they turn to LUTs or Look Up Tables.

A LUT is an array of numbers that the software applies to the image data before you even see it. For an in-depth explanation, read this Studiobinder article. The short version is that you can use and create very powerful recipes that give your photos a particular look in the camera, with no post-processing required.

It’s hard to overstate how important Fujifilm’s film simulations are to its success, and Panasonic’s LUT support puts it in direct competition. They should have come up with a catchier name, though.

On top of this, the S9 has a bigger sensor than the X100V—it’s a full-frame sensor, which means more of that lovely out-of-focus background effect—and you can also change lenses. The X100 series has one fixed lens.

The camera costs $1,500 without a lens, which puts it in the same ballpark as the X100VI,

LULZ

Those beautiful photos aren’t much good if they’re stuck in the camera. The need to transfer pictures to a computer has always been the barrier to using proper cameras for social media and general sharing. It’s way easier to whip out your phone to send a fitting-room selfie to your bestie for clothing advice.

Fujifilm has its X app, which lets you automatically transfer images from your camera to your phone whenever you switch the camera off, but in my experience, it’s not always automatic.

The Lumix Lab app also lets you transfer photos and videos to your phone. The app will show you a grid of thumbnails of the pictures on the phone, and you can pick the ones you want. But the neatest part is that it lets you design your own LUTs. You do this just by editing a photo, and the app then saves that look and can transfer it to the camera. You can also automatically crop the photos to popular sizes, for sharing straight to, say, Instagram Stories.

This app integration might be the key to the S9’s success. Tweaking settings on the Fujifilm cameras is a real pain, so this is a real step up. But the X100VI still has one thing going for it—it looks way cooler than the dorky Lumix—and it has a viewfinder.

“Adding a viewfinder, and color options like cream, and tan, would make a huge difference to the retro appeal that people love about Fuji cameras,” said camera fan FangdaleBeck in a Verge comments thread.