Panasonic interview at Dpreview: “For the future we will focus on high end mirrorless cameras”

Dpreview talked to the Director of Panasonic’s imaging business Yosuke Yamane. And he gave quite a few insights on Panasonic future focus:

GH5 fimware update coming:
it will improve the smoothness of DFD for video

About on sensor phase detection:
“On-sensor phase detection doesn’t work any darker than F8, [which can be a problem in video]. It’s not necessarily true that phase detection is better than DFD plus contrast detection. We think our DFD is going to be better than [the best phase-based AF]. That’s our target and we want to realize that accurate autofocus”

Goal on the US market:
“For Lumix, the United States is a very strategic market. Our target is to double the business volume by 2020. For the future, to double the business, we’re going to focus on high end product: mirrorless cameras and high-end compacts. We expect a decent increase of the compact market to be sustainable.”

LX100 successor:
As the customer expects LX200 we will also strengthen the successor of LX100. How will we answer to the passionate customers of the LX100? We will study how we’re going to answer these customers.

Trickle down tech:
“we would like to expand the [GH5’s] technology to other models”

8k:
“In 2020, when the [Olympics] are in Tokyo, the era of 8K will start: we will develop the hardware to develop the 8K picture“