The Rat wrote:
I was looking at potential camera upgrades for my EM1 Mk2, used near exclusively for tripod hi-res mode. Ended up talking myself out of any of the Panasonic models, on account of a minimum aperture of f11 and a max shutter speed of 1 second. I go beyond those sometimes and I'd hate to feel like I was losing capability. As an example, the below is a blue hour shot with 1.6sec exposure.
I have been recently using G9II for landscapes, environmental portraits, and similar. My feelings about this experience are mixed. On the one hand, this is not a camera that I have enjoyed using. I don't hate it either, but compared to OM-1 II, I don't like the G9 II as much. The AF and IBIS of the latter are ordinary and inferior to those of OM-1 II. The G9II is bulkier and heavier. I find it uninspiring (sorry if this should offend some other users).
Having said the above, I believe that the G9II might be called the best micro-four-thirds camera for landscapes/cityscapes (and possibly for portraits), somewhat slightly better that the OM-1II. The G9II has the best-in-class dynamic range (the PDR is 10.17 at ISO100 vs. 9.69 at ISO200 for OM-1 II; the numbers are from Photons to Photos). The 25MP vs 20MP difference is marginal, yet it is in favor of the G9II. The hand-held high-resolution mode works well on the G9II to give 100MP raw files. The hand-held mode of the OM-1 II, in my experience, works only in the JPG mode; the raw files come out soft to the point of being not very useful.
When looking at your numbers, I am not sure why you may want to use an aperture smaller than f/11 that already gives the equivalent DOF of a FF f/22 lens and is affected by diffraction. For the "blue hour shot with 1.6sec exposure" (NICE!) do you mean 1.6s per shot and total 8 x 1.6 = 12.8 s exposure (if this is a high-res image)?
Note that the hand-held high-res mode of G9II collects 16 shots. Thus, even when the SS is 1/1.3s, the combined exposure is 12 s. The hand-held mode can be used with the camera set on a tripod, with the IBIS ON or OFF. I don't see this as a problem. The high-resolution mode of the G9II designated for tripod use collects only 8 shots. I don't know the reason, but in my hands the hand-held mode works satisfactorily. The three landscape photos that I posted above were all taken using the hand-held high-res mode on my G9II. The objective was to gain 2 stops of the dynamic range in those very contrasty scenes, to have more room for shadow recovery; I didn't really need 100MP.