My personal comfort zone has been the G9 for video and for hybrid shooting, it is hard to beat. The EM1’s would also be great, but they fight hybrid use, lacking useful custom control settings, meaning switching quickly is not a thing.
My current G9 hybrid process is;
Set the basic settings for stills, but set all the Custom functions to video in a variety of formats.
The G9’s are decently heavy hitters in video, especially if you run them out to an off board recorder. As I have them, sans the V-LogL upgrade option, they are better than average hybrids, but I have found the contrast is higher than the GH series, probably to suit stills. I could get a Ninja V or BM off board recorders, but have chosen not to as they cost nearly as much as the cameras.
To clarify this position also, I do not want full frame for stills, M43 is my happy place, but for video, full frame with it’s much higher ISO tolerances is a genuine benefit. It is nice to have a full frame around for stills, but I just have not found a need.
M43 does all I need for stills. and has been fully supported to this point
I now intend to run the G9’s as stills cameras, with occassional mobile rig use (the inherent deeper depth of field and stabiliser advantages at play). The S5 however is just too good as a video option.
The S5 just has too many practical advantages over the G9’s.
The profile options (V-Log, Flat, Cinelike-D2 etc). Flat in particular seems to be like modified Natural, but even flatter. This is ideal for me and a decent equivalent to Cinelike-D available from my other cameras.
Continuous recording. The bugbear that short of an off board recorder, will always hold the G9 back.
Overall better “GH” like contrast. Ironically, this is where the G9 could even the field with a flatter profile. The S5 gets all the options, the G9 not quite. I could upgrade it to VLog-L or an off board, but the S5 with lens added so much for relatively little.
Dual ISO settings. Basically, the S5 is ISO free compared to the G9’s, although the M43 depth advantage does give the G9 two more stops (useable f1.8 = ff 2.8), making up for the natively better FF ISO performance, but the dual option puts it into another league.
Both valid, but the S5 just works better for me. The red record button is a bit lost, but I don’t use it anyway. The only minor issue is the cage is very smallrig biased, so other brands cold shoes and handles do not always fit ideally and the handle is slightly off balance when mounted centrally.
Better video camera settings. This is the big one, from Wave forms, Vectors, shutter angle, many, many more video menu settings, including sound and visual assists. Honestly I could fill a page. The difference between a G9 and the S5 is the same as the G9 to an EM1 mk2, which is to say, there is daylight between them. The EM1’s are stills cameras with capable video hidden inside, but little effort to make them comfortable to use in that space. The G9 is the true hybrid favouring neither at the expense of the other, the S5 is a video camera first, the easier stills options is effortly added by default, but is not a priority.
Little things like no top panel screen, which may seem odd, but for video the real estate is better dedicated to useful buttons and vision relegated to either the rear screen or in my case the 5” Portkeys. In a cage, the G9 screen is partly obscured anyway. The on-off switch is separate to the shoot button, and protected under the cage, the smaller card door, but bigger other flaps.
The only exception is the Smallrig cage, that is a better fit than my GH5/G9 Niceyrig one, but lacks a few screw mount holes on the left side. I have fixed this to a point with a Smallrig plate bolted to the side, but just one set of matching screw threads would have been good.
Of course, there are down sides (accounted for in balance with the price), like new batteries, new lenses etc, but these have mostly become non issues, absorbed into the equivalent options in M43 (the dearer GH6 also needed an expensive card etc, GH5 an off board and gimbal).
My goal was to take the easiest route to easy to take, quality 1080 and occassional 4k footage within a realisticly achieved envelope. The S5 achieves this easily with a minimum of fuss and upgrade paths if required are many. It also meshes well with the OSMO as the full gimbal-odd angle option. The S5.2 AF is not a draw as I manually focus and the slightly higher upgrade options are well beyond my needs.
If I went again, I may have gone the GH5.2, just to keep it sane, but the saving at the time was only about $400au, which did not even cover the S5’s extra lens. I would have All-i recording and live streaming, neither of which seem to matter that much.
If I ever upgrade any of my cameras, a G9.2 would likely be the way, adding hopefully better video options than the G9, phase detect AF and stabilising that all my M43 lenses could take advantage of and GH6 level stills performance (or better).