I finally got an answer from Panasonic factory about my questions of Panasonic 14-140 f3.5-5.6 OIS jittering in video. They said that my many jittering example videos looks normal and the OIS seems to work in factory standards and there is nothing wrong. It is not a surprise, what else they can say. They said the same thing about 35-100 f2.8 but still they made the FW fix. Now they still cant say that they have not heard about the issue.

Great news! Hopefully they will do the same for 14-140mm II as well

@vesku: Thanks for your notification.

I downloaded the firmware update and tested it @1080p and @4K. This firmware is a HUGE improvement. I would say, handheld OIS stability of the 35-100mm lens is now on par with the 12-35/2.8 lens @35mm and does not get significantly worse @100mm. However, in my hands there is still a slight jitter visible on both lenses.

35-100mm f2.8 FW update !!!

Can someone report if the jitter issue is fixed?

No answer from Panasonic yet although I keep asking.

Meanwhile we can enjoy jittering videos from Youtube ( GH4 + 14-140mm f3.5-5.6 ) :

Two more examples of 14-140mm v jittering OIS. Is there somebody else with same kind of videos? I need evidence for Panasonic.

This is mine at 14mm:

My 14 140 v1 jitters, it also has this strange behavior that when on a tripod, the lens does this strong jitter from time to time. I know it makes no sense to have the ios on but its just really annoying that it ruins the shot if I forget to shot it off. Its also a strong indication that something is really wrong with the way ios works.

I'm to the point where I think ios is useless, and I think the jitters ruins the frames with jitter to a point thats not recoverable by post stabilization due to the smearing caused by the nature of the very fast movement of the jitter combined with slow shutter when filming.

Now I have tested the demo version of new Mercalli v4. It has good improvements. I can now stabilize many clips with assigning the same settings to all files. There is still not a possibility to save settings. I can now get rid of that micro vibration easily with lots of files.

The luminance shift GH3/4 0-255 to 16-235 is corrected (hurray). It is funny because when I asked them earlier about it (v3) they said that the issue not exists but they have now corrected it silently.

Rendering is still about the same than earlier and the bitrate goes easily very high with complex 4k scene.

There are some new features like NR/sharpening and clip combining. There are also new stab features with very slow analysing but those are optional. I can not say much about stab IQ, I just started using it.

Here are 3 more videos showing the 14-140mm v2 OIS vibration.

The vibration shows even in these low res clips.

Is it reasonable to conclude that for handheld video shooting the 14-140 v1 is better for OIS than the 14-140 v2?

I have 14-42mm v1 but I have tested v2 and it seems to work quite identical to v1. v2 has better IQ.

@v10tdi

Thanks a lot for these tests. It confirms may findings well. I can be sure that my 14-140 v2 is not broken and this is a common property of my lens.

The only micro jitter free lens in this test seems to be 100-300mm. It follows the hand movement but there is no fast micro jitter. Other lenses corrects hand movement well but then adds the nasty micro jitter. Worst is 35-100, then 14-140 v2, and then about equal 42.5 and 12.35. All these POWER OIS lenses has micro jitter. I wonder why there is so much movement in 100-300mm test, I usually hold my 100-300 much steadier.

When I compare your POWER OIS tests to my 14-42mm my lens is rock steady handheld, much better than 12-35 or 42.5.

Thank you for your effort and for posting your comparison. This exactly conforms to my own findings on my lens samples (except the 42,5 which I don't own).

I think that all behaviour is built into these lenses by design. It's not a fault of specific samples. I suppose this might be a consequence of the size/weight relation of the moving parts used for OIS.

Nevertheless, it's a shame for Panasonic that the most expensive 35-100/2.8 zoom behaves worst and that there is a big difference between the general marketing statements for Power OIS and the reality. OIS of the 35-100/2.8 lens is obviously optimized for stills and not for video. I tested that this lens is the only lens which avoids shutter shock on the older bodies like GH1 and GH2 which don't have an electronic shutter. I really like to use this lens for stills, but I would have appreciated to use it for handheld video as well due to it's great optical quality.

I'm still hoping that Panasonic will sometimes release a firmware update for the 35-100/2.8 lens which improves the OIS for Video like they did for the 12-35/2.8 lens.