@brudney It doesn't appear to be an issue on some cameras though. This is a message from that dvxuser thread:
"I am agree with most of your points.i tried 2 gh2 before and i sent them back because of fix horizontal banding.for me it was defect aswell, i didn understand how panasonic can sell camera like this.also so a few people talking about it.there are other issues but you can work around them or technological limitations. However i bought my 3rd camera, and seems to be there is no or very litle banding. In low light situation there are still a lot going on,like 8 bit banding , postarization, strange distrubition of noise.but it looks like panasonic silently fix the problem of horizontal banding.I couldn also quite belive my self the difference between cameras i tried.my conclusion is there are good and bad Gh2s out there.may be that is why there were bot so huge reactions on this forum because some people never had this problem. I am going to keep this one, in good light image from camera is very good.i will still not use highest isos, but if i need to , i know i can. For the information, i bought the camera 2 days ago in Holland, so it is pal and serial number starts with WE1CA I hope this helps to some people"
well, that's a well known (or is it?) 'feature' of GH2. Thankfully it's only visible in high ISOs and is much much less frustrating than GH1s FPN. My previous GH2 (WE09) had it, my recent GH2 has it (WE1C). I wonder what kind of FPN GH3 will have;)
@cbrandin I tried the sensor clean and pixel refresh and it hasn't made any difference. I'll test and see if it jumps about when the shutter speed is changed (like the guy on Vimeo reports)
On the DVXuser thread some people report that replacement cameras haven't had this problem, through sometimes they've had to replace it three times or more before getting a clean version.
I did a little image analysis on your picture. The new patches increase low level resolution quite a bit - so defects are more visible. I can see FPN all over the image (it's not very visible without doing some image processing with Photoshop). The line isn't quite straight - it looks almost like a smear on the sensor. Maybe the sensor is just a little dirty? If it were true FPN I would think the line would be straighter.
I was noticing the same issue on some ISO 3200 footage I shot yesterday using 3.62. I'm not at my home machine right now but I can attach some stills later if anyone's interested. I haven't noticed it in normal use, and even at 3200 it's not unbearable, but it did make me wonder what was happening.
The lines are a good 30 pixels clear of the band top and bottom. They are just to direct the eye as it's very difficult to see in stills. I've attached another PNG without the lines though.
The MTS files should be available in the next 25 minutes.