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Editor’s note

The Best Upgrade a Camera Gets Is Free

October 2, 2026Mara Lindqvist

A firmware update for a mirrorless camera is usually a file under a hundred megabytes — smaller, often, than a single raw photograph it will later help you take — and it is the only part of a two-thousand-dollar object a company can still hand you for free a year after you bought it.

Panasonic's upcoming LUMIX S9 firmware version 2.1 does exactly that. CineD reports it adds new MP4 (Lite) recording options, including 4K at 60p and 50p and Full HD frame rates up to 120p, along with expanded functions for the lens's Fn button. No Film School calls it a power-up for a camera that was never built to lead on video, and that is the honest way to put it: nothing changes inside the body. Only what the body is now permitted to do with what was already there.

MP4 (Lite) is the plain name for a lighter, less demanding version of a video format — a camera writing it asks less of its processor and its memory card, which is how a sensor can suddenly manage sixty frames a second in 4K when it could not before the update, without a single new part inside it. The S9's sensor could likely always read out that fast; the firmware is the company deciding, months later, to let it. A lens Fn button is the same kind of decision in miniature: a switch that did one job on the day you bought the camera and now, with nothing moved or added, can be told to do another.

I do not own the S9 and I have not put a card in one running 2.1, because it has not shipped. Panasonic has announced it, not released it, and a note about a firmware version nobody outside the company has run yet is a note about a promise, not a camera. I will write about it again when it lands and I have tried it myself.

Until then, what I keep thinking about is the file itself: smaller than a single photograph, sitting on a card, waiting for someone to turn the camera off and on again and become, an hour later, a slightly different machine than it was.

On the wire this week

  1. Panasonic LUMIX S9 Firmware 2.1 Brings 4K60 in MP4 Lite Mode, Expanded Lens Fn Button Functions, and More CineD
  2. The Panasonic LUMIX S9 is Getting a Power-Up With 4K60p in MP4 Lite and Expanded Button Functions No Film School

Mara Lindqvist grew up in Gothenburg with a father who repaired cameras in a shop off Avenyn and let her keep the ones nobody collected. She shot news for a Swedish daily for nine years, then documentary for hire, then stopped taking assignments to write about the tools instead. Since 2021 she lives in Tokyo, ten minutes from the used-camera shops of Shinjuku, and tests every body and lens she writes about on a real job before a word goes down. She shoots film on Sundays and does not think that makes her interesting.