There are a lot of reviews floating around complaining about the Panasonic LX100’s video mode. Out of the box with factory defaults, I would agree, the video features on the LX100 are pretty clunky and poorly setup. However with a little bit of tweaking and the use of the custom setup menu, you can easily switch between a very comfortable film setup and a more traditional photography setup.

Before we start diving into all of the random setting menus there are two things I would like you to do first. Number one, look between the shutter speed and exposure compensation dials, right behind the shutter button. You should see a little button that says iA. If iA is turned on you should see a iA label or dancing flower on screen somewhere. When this feature is turned on you can not get to all of the menu settings on the Panasonic LX100, so make sure it’s off. Number two, if your current setup or settings are something you want to keep, go to the custom menu on page 1/9 and click on “Cust.Set Mem.”, pick one of the custom settings slots and save it there so you know where it’s at.

Now that you’ve got that done, let’s dive into the menu system and turn the Panasonic LX100 into a proper 4k shooting film tool. First thing you’ll want to do is navigate to the Motion Picture menu and scroll to page 1/4, then find “4k Photo” and set it to “ON”. This does two things for you. First it allows you to start video capture with a full press of the shutter button. Second, it places the camera into 4k crop mode so that your screen doesn’t resize when you start recording video. That resizing issue is the likely one of the biggest complaints I’ve seen from reviewers about the Panasonic LX100 and it’s such an easy thing to fix. 

The other big complaint about the Panasonic LX100 is focus hunting in video mode. It’s annoying to see the focus hunting as your subject remains the same distance from the camera. You can find this setting in the “Motion Picture” menu on page 2/4 under the label “Continuous AF”. But turning this off, whatever focus point you set will be maintained by the camera until you half press the shutter button again.

Taking care of the things listed above will eliminate most people’s complaints about video mode on the Panasonic LX100. Once you’ve got these things changed in the menu go to the custom menu on page 1/9 and click on “Cust.Set Mem.”, then save these features in another slot.

The things above are the main changes to the LX100, but I’ve actually gone through and made a few more changes to my camera. While I could continue to bombard you with screenshots like the ones above, I think you are all capable of finding and changing things in the menu system so I’m going to give you a nice list of each change I’ve made and where you can find it in the menu system.

Under the Custom Menu:

• 2/9 Eye Sensor AF set to off
• 3/9 Focus release set to release
• 5/9 Constant preview turn to on
• 7/9 Fn Button Set fn3 set to C (This allows you to use the Fn3 button to select photo or video mode)

Under the Rec Menu:

• 5/7 ISO Increments set to 1/3EV

Under the Motion Picture Menu:

• 3/4 Mic Level Disp. set to on

While the Panasonic LX100 has a rather convoluted menu system, once you’ve made and saved all of these changes to a custom spot on the camera, the LX100 is a pretty decent video tool. While it’s priced at around $700+ on Amazon, you can find it for as low as $599 new on ebay.

While that’s a bit spendy for a point and shoot, it’s a pretty impressive camera for the price. For those looking for an affordable B-Roll camera to use in conjunction with something like a GH4, or people looking for a feature rich camera in the price range of a Hero 4 black edition, the LX100 is perfect.

The downsides to be considered are the lack of live HDMI output and the missing mic jack. The Panasonic app makes up for the lack of HDMI output for the most part and Vloggers will find that feature handy for self recording. The lack of mic jack isn’t the end of the world, but you’ll definitely need a field recorder of some kind to get quality audio when shooting with this guy. I’ll dig in deeper once the full review is finished, but hopefully this will help those of you using this camera get things setup for good 4k shooting.

Tags: 4k video, Gh4, LX100, LX100 4k setup, Panasonic LX100, RX10, RX100