Photographs, Photographers and Photography

That’s more like it, Panny!

After the tired product ‘refresh’ that is the Panasonic G2 (see below) this patent filing from Panny (from 43rumors) shows a Leica rangefinder format micro four-thirds body with an EVF where a viewfinder should be and finally appears to take advantage of the compactness available to micro four-thirds designers. Miraculously they have managed to retain an electronic flash in a neat flip-up design in the center of the top plate.

Panasonic GF2 patent

I started thinking about writing something like “This is the final nail in the coffin of the antiquated Leica M rangefinder, a design now some 55 years old” but thought better of it. There will always be a market spot for the ultra-wealthy who think nothing of blowing $10k on a limited function display piece, and good luck to them. The GF2 is simply the Leica for the rest of us. Kudos to Panny for finally recognizing that a lot of serious photographers want a small rangefinder-format DSLR with auto everything.

Let’s hope we see it later this year, at well under $1,000 for the body and with the same EVF definition as that found in the G1/G2/GH1 bodies, meaning excellent.

The G1 and G10 tinker at the margins.

As I am so delighted with the Panasonic G1 I tend to keep a weather eye out for new gear in this line of micro four thirds cameras. My wish list is short and, I suspect, shared by many serious users of the G1:

• Drop the prism hump
• Delete the built-in flash
• Upgrade the EVF to avoid ‘burn out’ in bright light
• Move the eyepiece to the rear left
• Reduce noise at higher ISOs
• Improve iA to make it use faster shutter speeds
• Add a 10mm ultra-wide pancake lens

Well, the recent new product announcements from Panny address only one of these – possibly improved noise at high ISOs from an updated processing ‘engine’ – marketing gobledegook for software.

The G2. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

The new G2 adds 720p movie mode, SDXC card capability and moves around a button or two. I’m a street snapper – you can keep the movie mode. And one 8gB SDHC card holds 600 RAW images so the far greater storage promises of SDXC are not something I lust for. The EVF is unchanged. The G10 fills what must be a niche between P&S compacts and the G range, offering simplified controls in a G1 format body. And, curiously, the 14-45mm kit lens is now 14-42mm, deletes the OIS switch which is now a software function (no big deal for me as I always leave it ‘on’) and – this is the strange part – the lens actually gets slightly larger, if lighter. That makes no sense other than to accountants who are squeezing profit margin out of the product. Panny makes no claims for improved optical performance, so it’s hard to draw any other conclusion. Truth be told, the optics of my 14-45mm are so superb, even if the mechanicals are so-so, meaning a rough zoom ring, that I would hate to see things going backwards.

Sure, the G2 adds a touch screen for menu selections but for those like me who hardly ever use the LCD screen, this is a solution looking for a problem.

So it’s hard to see these new models as anything more than minor refreshes while we all wait for a GH2 with a proper viewfinder and some new compact lenses at the very wide end.

Let’s hope for a GF2.

The 43Rumors site speculates that the Panasonic G1 has been discontinued.

That wouldn’t surprise me. The camera lacks the GH1’s movie mode (not a factor for me but doubtless bad in those tabular comparisons beloved of gearhead sites) and two years in a field with rapidly changing technology is probably as long a life as anyone can expect.

What would make me trade? Well, I’m hoping for a GF2 – meaning a body shaped like the GF1 with the deletion of the pop-up flash, this being replaced by the G1’s excellent electronic viewfinder – much in the same location as on the rangefinder Leica M models. The EVF can only get better and marvelous as the G1’s finder is, Panny can improve on its tendency to blow out bright lights as well as reduce the noise in lower lighting. The noise thing is, however, way exaggerated by the mass media. Which would you prefer? A near invisible traditional DSLR view or a noisy but bright one from an EVF?

Come to think of it, why not a slimmed down version of Panny’s own failed L1 which was overpriced and offered mediocre sensor quality and a lousy EVF in an oversized package? I would think that by now Panny has realized that the original marketing focus on point-and-shoot upgraders is too narrow and that the whole micro-four thirds thing is now becoming a very serious threat to all those gargantuan DSLRs out there.

The GH2/G2 – take an L1 and remove 30% of the bulk and weight.

And while you are at it Panny, please add a real click stopped ISO dial on the top plate and make that darned wheel less easy to depress so that I cease constantly going into exposure correction mode when all I want to do is change the aperture or shutter speed.

If, on the other hand, the G2 is just a warmed over thing with more buttons, I can see adding another G1 as a back-up when the body only price drops to $300.

An interesting quirk.

As I mentioned in my first article on the Panasonic 45-200mm lens for the G1/GH1/GF1, the first thing I did was to update the software for that lens and the 14-45mm kit lens and, in the process, also separately updated the software for the G1 body when I saw that was also out of date.

I thought no more of those updates until, out of curiosity, I looked in Lightroom to see how many snaps I had retained (post cull) with the 45-200 since getting it. Well, it turns out that, based on the dates of pictures, Lightroom was pretty clueless about which lens had been used on the G1 until those updates were made! Now the lens used is correctly recorded when the picture is taken but until then it’s all ‘Unknown Lens’ – 99% of which will have been with the kit lens in my case. So either the lens or the camera software updates – I don’t know which – did the trick and now I have the comfort of knowing which lens was used.

G1 lens metadata from Lightroom.

Quite what use that information is in practice I’m not quite sure, but at least it is there. So if that sort of thing matters to you, it pays to make the software updates in a timely manner.

As of now I’m only aware of one reason not to make the G1 body software updates. Versions after 1.2 (I’m not dead sure which version but I seem to recall it was 1.3) will not work with non-Panasonic branded aftermarket batteries**. Given that the saving on grey market batteries is trivial, I hardly regard this as an issue but, then again, both my batteries are Panny branded so it’s easy for me to say that.

** If you are bound and determined to save $30 and prepared to accept the risk that the ‘fix’ may be broken with later software updates, you can buy an aftermarket battery for $22 here.

Monty Python to the rescue.

One reason the news is always bad is because good news is boring.

Never was this made clearer than by the fellows at Monty Python who, responding to this sad fact, crafted a ‘Good News’ news broadcast. The presenter, big smile and all, repeated variations on the theme ‘And in more good news today, no wombats were killed on the freeway’.

And chat boards are, for the most part just like the news and hospital waiting rooms. Both specialize in bad news. You don’t go there when all is hunky dory.

So it’s difficult to make sense of the fairly common complaint on Panasonic G1/GH1 discussion fora that has it that Panny’s best and brightest suffers from a potentially fatal defect whereby a strap lug will detach itself, leaving your favorite in pieces on the concrete sidewalk. I mean, ‘No strap lug detached itself today’ is right up there in wombat country. You won’t read about it. It’s a skewed sample whose statistical significance is impossible to determine.

Anyway, here’s hoping yours remain attached. Using a wrist strap doubles the load, of course, so I have $650 set aside in case one of my lugs fails and that I fail to prevail over the schmuck warranty lawyers at Panny USA. (It’s not personal Panny – I administer equal opportunity offense to the whole profession).

A view of the future.

The traditional approach to optical design has always been to try and correct aberrations in the glass. As apertures get larger and focal lengths get shorter, this gets ever harder to do, so you end up with ridiculously oversized lenses, their bulk further compounded by the need to clear flapping mirrors through the use of ever more complex retrofocus designs.

Some of the results of these design dictates can be seen in gargantuan lenses for full frame DSLRs, best illustrated by showing their weight and bulk. Some examples (weight in ozs, dimensions in inches – length x diameter, volume in cubic inches):

• Canon 14mm f/2.8 L II: 20 ozs, 3.7″ x 3.2″, 29.7 cu. in.
• Canon 24mm f/1.4 L: 20 ozs, 3.4″ x 3.7″, 36.5 cu. in.
• Canon 35mm f/1.4 L: 20 ozs. 3.4″ x 3.1″, 25.7 cu. in.
• Nikon 14mm f/2.8 ED: 24 ozs, 3.8″ x 3.4″, 34.5 cu. in.

Things get worse when you get into wide zooms:

• Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L: 22 ozs, 4.4″ x 3.5″, 42.3 cu. in.
• Canon 17-40mm f/4 L: 18 ozs, 3.8″ x 3.3″, 32.5 cu. in.
• Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 EF-S:35 ozs, 5.2″ x 3.9″, 62.1 cu. in.
• Nikon 17-35mm f/2,8 EF-S: 27 ozs, 4.2″ x 3.3″, 35.9 cu. in.

Without doubt these are some of the finest optics made but take two or three of these in your shoulder bag and you won’t be snapping away for too long before exhaustion sets in.

The other design alternative, of course, dictates smaller sensors which bring with them shorter focal lengths and less bulk. But take that thinking all the way and you get what Panasonic has done with its lens range for its micro-four thirds range of cameras – the G1/GH1 and GF1.

That approach, simply stated, is one of “Get the optics to be as sharp as possible and hang the aberration corrections. Fix all uncorrected defects using software”.

I was thinking how best to illustrate this (the preview of the imported file in Lightroom already has the aberration corrections applied) when it struck me that PTLens has the ability of showing corrected as well as uncorrected images – by comparing JPGs (automatically corrected in Lightroom or Silkypics) with RAW (uncorrected) originals generated in the camera; seconds later I had exported an image taken with the G1 and the 14-45mm kit lens at 17mm (34mm equivalent on full frame) and show the results below. Mouse over the image to see the uncorrected original (Note: The mouse over effect works fine on my Mac with Safari and Google Chrome but not with Firefox or Camino, so please use one of the first two browsers if you have difficulty seeing the images below on a Mac. If you use Windows, please let me know what works so I can post that information here).

You can see the remarkable amount of software correction applied quite clearly with software removing severe pincushion distortion. Now these lenses are not as fast as the monsters profiled above, but look at the trade offs in terms of size:

• Panasonic 7-14mm f/4: 11 ozs, 3″ x 3″, 21.2 cu. in.
• Panasonic 20mm f/1.7: 3.5 ozs, 1″ x 2.5″, 4.9 cu. in.
• Panasonic 14-45mm f/3.5-f/5.6: 7 ozs, 3.4″ x 2.4″, 15.4 cu. in.
• Panasonic 45-200mm, f/4-5.6: 13 ozs, 4″ x 3″, 28.3 cu. in.

These are enormous differences – even greater when the lower weight of the body is added in – and means that you can carry a G1 and a three zoom lens outfit all day without tiring. Weight of the three zooms with the G1 body? 38.5 ounces. By comparison, a Canon 5D body without lens weighs 31.5 ounces. And your 35mm full frame-equivalent focal length range for the G1 kit is an astounding 14-400mm!

My point here is twofold. First, the future of lens design lies with software, not glass. Second, the only good camera is the one you have with you and I can assure you it’s a whole lot easier to take the G1 and a couple of lenses on a hike than it is to take a full frame DSLR similarly equipped.

For comparison, here’s a snap using the overrated Canon 24-105mm L lens on a 5D body – I say ‘overrated’ because it is a nightmare for architectural photography. The approach adopted by Canon/Adobe Lightroom is to leave the extreme barrel distortion at 24mm uncorrected, necessitating a round trip through PTLens or the like to straighten things up. The imported image in Lightroom shows extreme curvature of lines parallel to the edges at 24mm..

Panasonic’s approach is, I believe, the future of lens design and I expect all leading manufacturers to embrace this methodology during the coming decade.

A sweetheart in use.

I looked at the design of this lens in Part I. Nothing could more clearly illustrate the difference in size between a full frame 400mm and Panasonic’s 45-200mm:

The Panny is at 200 (=400mm on full frame), the Canon has no choice in the matter!
The hood on the Canon is not extended for fair comparison. Weight differences are just as impressive.

I took the Panny out for its first street trip today and found that it is a real sweetheart to use. Forget the dumb lens hood which makers it look gargantuan; without it no one would begin to think that so long a focal length is in use and while, I suppose, it’s great for clandestine stuff, that’s not my thing, so I just played about enjoying some architectural details in the old town of Burlingame, CA.

I used Lightroom 2.6 for processing with sharpness settings on import of 100/1.1/64 and ISO set at 320. I find that speed to be the sweetspot – grain is not objectionable in large prints and you have enough sensitivity that short shutter speeds are the norm. I mostly used full aperture as I have had such success with it on the 14-45mm kit lens.

A guilty confession. I popped the kit lens in my jacket pocket even though I resolved not to use it. So enamored am I of its quality and compactness that I thought I might need a quick fix, so better safe than sorry. In the event I managed to keep it off the G1 but dropping it in a jacket pocket took me way back to when I last did that with a lens – that would have been with Leica’s ne plus ultra 35mm Asph Summicron-M with its 90mm Asph brother mounted on the Leica M2. Nice glass, but hopelessly outmoded today with auto-nothing and if their optical quality is marginally better, Lightroom can fix that and the Panny lenses are one tenth of the cost. I’m tempted to say “throw away cheap” and while that sounds arrogant, that will likely be their fate when something better comes along in a few quarters.

For the pictures which follow, the focal length is stated at actual on the G1; double the number for the 35mm full frame equivalent.

While web reproductions cannot do the originals justice, the fringe here is to-die-for sharp:

At 128mm, f/6.3, 1/3200, ISO 320

No, not a test chart. Just some nice brickwork. At 61mm, f/4.1, 1/4000, ISO 320

No lack of detail in the textured stucco here. At 45mm, f/4, 1/4000, ISO 320

Nothing wrong with the detail in this lovely relief.
I especially like the eccentric alignment of the letters. At 124mm, f/5, 1/2000, ISO 320

At huge enlargement ratios the micro detail is lower than with the Canon, but the Panny is the one you take with you.
At 45mm, f/7.1, 1/500, ISO 320

At the local brew pub. At 91mm, f/10, 1/5th, ISO 320

I meant to set the lens to full aperture but somehow messed up and was awfully lucky to get away with this at 1/5th second exposure at a 35mm-equivalent of 182mm. Sometimes you get lucky. This pretty girl is the hostess at the local Steelhead Brewing Company restaurant which makes a nice selection of very decent beers right on the premises. They even serve them at something approximating the right temperature, meaning not ice cold. The staff seems to mostly consist of aspiring actors and actresses, judging by their looks. I was enjoying a Red Zeppelin at the time – who could turn down that name?

As is my usual approach, I used aperture priority and auto-everything (except ISO) for all of the above. It’s so nice not to have to worry about the technical mumbo jumbo and just take snaps. More of these at Snap! over the next few days.

On one or two very high contrast color transitions I noticed a touch of blue fringing, but nothing major. The software correction of aberrations is pretty thorough in Lightroom.

If you like baggy jackets with big pockets but lack big pockets for the exotic glass, this sweetheart of a lens is just what the doctor ordered. I’m keeping mine. Is the Canon better? Absolutely. But it can’t be very good when it’s at home, which is the likely result when you can choose between it and the Panny zoom.

Often photographers will find they are using zooms at maximum extension. No problem here – if you need a 400mm equivalent, the only thing currently available in micro-four-thirds size is this lens and you have a bunch of other useful focal lengths thrown into the bargain, at no additional cost.

When the next generation of sensors and EVFs comes along in a year or two I suspect we will all be wondering how we managed with those gargantuan clods of old. The only challenge will be for professionals, who will have a job convincing clients to take their G2 with its miniscule 20-200 f/2 lens seriously ….

Woof!. At 200mm. f/11, 1/250, ISO 320

A little bit of magic.

Santa came through again this year, this time in the guise of a Panasonic 45-200mm zoom for my G1. I had noodled on the idea of getting the 20mm f/1.7 but that lens’s lack of OIS meant that its f/1.7 was no faster than the f/3.5 of the 14-45mm kit zoom from a steadiness perspective. Further the saving in bulk was not that great – the camera is not pocketable with either. So while f/1.7 is appealing from the perspective of limited depth of field, the overlap with the range of the kit lens left me uninterested.

The miniscule 45-200mm mounted in a G1

When I was buying the G1 I wrote of the myriad adapters available for the body, but I have since realized that these offer far less than you might think. Unless you have some special bit of legacy glass that you absolutely must use, adapted lenses fail on many fronts. You have no aperture or focus automation, manual focus with the enlarged EVF image needs buttons to be pressed, taking away the G1’s immediacy of reponse, you lose OIS and you have no possibility of taking advantage of the wonderful distortion and color correction afforded by Lightroom when processing your RAW originals. Which is another way of saying that I sold all my costly Leica M rangefinder optics ages ago and I’m simply not going to go back in time. The operating speed of the G1 is a factor of major importance to the way I work and that would be lost with these kludgy adapters which are doubtless just fine for static work. Not my thing.

So what are the first reactions? Really much the same as with the G1 itself.

• The lens is incredibly small and light when you realize it’s equivalent to a 90-400mm on a full frame body
• OIS is built in
• The zoom ring is smoother than on the kit lens but tightens up a bit at 160-200mm – no effect on use
• Mine has those three magic words on the barrel – ‘Made in Japan’. Sorry Beijing!
• The lens hood is huge – I didn’t even unpack it. No use to me.
• The balance on the body is perfect
• Focus is fast but not Canon 5D fast
• Manual focusing brings up the magnified EVF image and is very accurate – surely this is the most perfect manual focusing system yet?
• Minimum focus at 200mm is a mere 3.3 feet – like a 50mm lens on full frame at 5 inches!
• The barrel extends maybe 3″ at 200mm and has very little side-to-side play.

While there are several digital point-and-shoot cameras available with fixed ‘mega zoom’ lenses, I suspect this is the smallest and lightest interchangeable DSLR lens which reaches out to 400mm (35mm equivalent). Panny’s own FZ35 spans no less than 27-486mm with apertures of f/2.8-4.4. Canon has the SX20 (28-560mm, f/2.8-5.7). Nikon the Coolpix P90 (26-624mm, f/2.8-5.0). All breathtaking stats. And while these may be compromised with lousy EVFs and very small and relatively noisy sensors, it’s very much where design is going. Before long we will likely have APS-C sensor fixed zoom DSLRs with comparable zoom ranges and low bulk.

This Panny zoom weighs in at just 13 ounces making it, from my perspective, the first lens with 400mm capability that you take with you without another thought.

Putting matters in perspective, the G1/45-200mm combination is no substitute for a Canon 5D equipped with Canon’s non-IS 400mm f/5.6, which I wrote about here or similar ‘pro’ equivalents from Nikon, Pentax, Sony and others. While the non-IS Canon lens is the bottom of their 400mm line, which sports no fewer than four models, the other three are all faster with IS; even so, the Canon f/5.6 I own is simply in a different league optically and mechanically from any 400mm lens I have owned. Even after a couple of years’ use it still takes my breath away with its autofocus speed and accuracy and its ability to capture micro-contrast and detail at full aperture. You can see some results here. This speed and quality come at a price, of course, meaning enormous bulk and weight. You do not just casually drop the Canon in your bag when making off to take pictures. It’s a considered decision because you are not going to be switching merrily from ultra-wides to 400mm unless you want to carry a lot of gear. Further, chances are you will be taking a monopod or tripod when using it.

A significant point is that the Canon will run you over $1,200 whereas the Panny comes in at just $300. Maybe not a fair comparison as the Canon covers a full 24 x 36mm frame and is in a different class build-wise, but money is money and few need the big print capability of the superior Canon optic.

The working style with the Panny optic could hardly differ more. First the lens has no tripod bush, so you tend to think about hand holding it. Second, IS adds two to three shutter speeds making handholding even more tempting. And third, it’s so light and small that …. heck, you end up hand holding it! A nice added feature is that the filter size, at 52mm, is identical to that of the 14-45mm kit lens – nice for me as I forgot to order a UV filter when I bought the lens!

The first thing I did on receiving the lens was to go to Panasonic’s site and download upgrades for the lens’s firmware. Yes, modern lenses are packed with code and Panny’s 14-45mm and 45-200mm lenses are now on version 1.2. Both mine were on 1.0, so I updated each – the downloaded installable files differ between the two. I neither much know or care what these downloads change but I prefer to be current. The G1 itself is now on body firmware version 1.4.

The next step was to bang away and try a few snaps at 1/125th or so at full extension. The claimed 3 shutter speed benefit of OIS seems largely realized as I was finding that two out of every three snaps were shake free and good enough for 13″ x 19″ prints. Further, these were taken at full aperture, which is f/4 at 45mm, dropping to f/5.6 at 200mm. I simply set the lens to f/4 at the wide end and that leaves it at maximum aperture throughout the zoom range. Having got into the habit of using the 14-45mm at full aperture and finding the results to be excellent, I went the same way with the 45-200mm and was not disappointed.

I processed the RAW images in Lightroom 2, because that’s what I ordinarily use and because Adobe has built in distortion and chromatic aberration specific to these lenses which is applied automatically. As a result, the pictures appear distortion free and I cannot see any significant color fringing anywhere in the zoom range. Quite why Adobe is not broadcasting this wonderful bit of application programming from the rooftops beats me, as independent reviews confirm that the native output of the lens exhibits significant distortion and chromatic aberration problems, whereas the Lightroom user sees none of these.

In Part II I will look more at practical use and results but can already say that this is an exciting addition to a very small camera outfit which, with two light and compact zooms, offers excellent image quality all the way from 28mm to 400mm (35mm full frame equivalents) in a camera which uses a reasonably sized, low noise sensor. Now if only Panny could be convinced to make a 10mm pancake, equivalent to an ultra-wide 20mm on full frame, this user would have everything needed in a superbly compact outfit with very light weight.

State of the art.

A couple of years ago I wrote that the real digital revolution in photography gear would be fomented not by traditional manufacturers but rather by the new breed of companies specializing in electronics and modern design, unshackled by historical investments and conventions.

Never has this proved more true than with the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 ’standard’ lens for the G1/GH1/GF1 micro four-thirds camera range. As the excellent piece at DPReview discloses, this 40mm equivalent lens is simply state of the art, a superb marriage of hardware and corrective software design. I would go as far as to say that it is to digital what the 35mm SummicronM, in its aspherical final version, was to film. I used one of those for years and, suffice it to say, you could buy no fewer than seven of the Pannys for the ridiculous price asked for the Leica optic today, so it’s hard to complain that the Panasonic lens is expensive.

The new Panny lens peaks at f/4, just like the Leica Summicron of old (both in its 35mm and 50mm guises) and, unlike the kit zoom, does not include shake reduction. Perhaps the shake reduction on the Olympus EP1, which is built in to the body of that camera, works, but frankly the EP1 is such a poorly executed camera for street snaps (slow focus, awful shutter lag, no proper viewfinder, mediocre optics, etc. – a joke from such a great manufacturer) that it’s not like I will ever be trying it.

So why am I not rushing out to buy one? Well, I very much intended to when it was first announced but, frankly, I have become so enamored of the kit lens with its exceptionally useful 14-45mm (28-90mm on full frame) zoom range in a very small package that I no longer want to be burdened with the task of swapping lenses when snapping on the street. Or, for that matter, carrying more clutter. While f/1.7 is nice to have, the f/3.5-5.6 maximum on the kit lens is fine for my purposes, as I am not an available light maven. And the kit lens is so good I find that I am using it at or near full aperture nearly all the time, with the built in shake reduction adding 2-3 stops, effectively, in low light, making the effective aperture range more like f/1.4 to f/2.5. The only thing I miss is the shallower depth of field that a true f/1.7 offers, but the compromise more than works for me.

Sensor design is still in its early days.

Friend of the blog, and fellow Panasonic enthusiast Peter Solmssen has forwarded a fascinating technical piece which addresses changes in digital sensor design and suggests the oligopoly held by Canon and Nikon, who account for 78% of the DSLR market, is likely to weaken.

Most significantly, the article provides evidence that the Panasonic sensor in the GH1 (the G1 with video added) is anything but the same as the one in the G1. I would hate to have to compete with a behemoth like Panasonic which can roll out the first workable Electronic View Finder in the G1 only to completely redesign its sensor for the GH1 released shortly thereafter.

I quote: “Upon receiving the DMC-GH1, we fully expected to see a fabrication process similar to the DMC-G1, but partnered with a new design to add HD video functionality. While still early in our analysis, we have been pleasantly surprised to see Panasonic switch fabs and radically re-design their fabrication process and pixel architecture. ”

By the way, the GH1’s sensor is oversize compared to the one in the G1 so that when the user changes aspect ratios (16:9, 3:2 or 4:3) the total pixels used stay much the same.

The article also addresses innovations by Samsung in the sensors used in the fine Samsung/Pentax DSLR cameras and suggests that Canon is sitting on its laurels for now. In fairness, I have to add that’s no bad thing given how wonderful the FF sensor in my 5D is, but I have never known complacency to be a winning strategy.

Click the chart for more.

For those who thought sensor designs had peaked this piece will reinforce the fact that we are still in the early stages of innovation which, coupled with the new breed of Electronic View Finders, will make the next decade a Golden Era for new and increasingly responsive camera designs. In fact I expect that a decade hence, the pentaprism and flapping mirror will have disappeared from all but the most basic cameras (and the Leica DSLR, of course), confined to Rube Goldberg’s (Heath Robinson’s for UK readers) garbage bin where they belong.

On the BART. The G1’s antiquated sensor will do fine for now!
G1, 31mm, f/5.4, 1/80, ISO 800

Come on, Panny.

Here’s a good video of the new (almost) Leica killer, the Panansonic GF1.

Almost? Jump to 3:20 in the video and you will see why. Panny totally blew it with the viewfinder, and no real working photographer is going to use a dumb LCD screen for street snaps. So Panny provides a clip on EVF (nice – though no comments yet on how good it is) and promptly destroys the compactness of the camera with the bulk of the EVF.

Come on, Panny! Dump the built in flash and replace it with the EVF. Then, finally, all of us Leica M refugees from the film days will have what we want. It has been a long wait. As it is, the bulk of the camera is much the same as my G1 once the EVF is clipped on and I somehow doubt the clip-on EVF will be as good as the superb EVF in the G1. (See the link in Comment #1, below).

Add the clip-on EVF and the bulk is the same

There is some good news, however. The 20mm f/1.7 is finally available, rumored to be $400 – not bad for an f/1.7 if it’s anywhere near as good as the excellent kit lens. At a 40mm equivalent full frame focal length, it should prove to be a wonderful street lens, especially if it’s as fine optically as the 14-45mm kit optic. And there’s a 45mm Leica macro for close-ups, though the Canon 5D and 100mm macro I use is just fine for my purposes. And, at $900 for the Panny macro, I would far rather have the full frame Canon whether with IS (see yesterday’s column) at $1,000 or without at $600. At almost four times the sensor size in a 5D etc. compared to the G1, you know where to go if very large prints are your goal. If all you want is web publication, a $100 point-and-shoot is more than you need in any case.

Meanwhile, just imagine the consternation and finger pointing at the competition, because the GF2 will likely get it dead right with a proper built-in EVF and an even better sensor. “But Yamamoto san, you told me this micro-four-thirds thing would never catch on. And you, Kazuki san, said that Panasonic is clueless about making cameras. Now what do we do?”

Something governments everywhere could learn from. There is no time in the history of mankind when competition did not accelerate the move to excellence. The GF1 may be flawed, but you can bet it is has the competition jumping.

One final thought on body dimensions, compared to the greatest rangefinder camera of the film age and one I used for 35 years:

GF1 (no lens): 119 x 71 x 36.3mm
Leica M2 (no lens): 138 x 77 x 33.5mm

Add a pancake 20mm to the GF1 and a 35mm Summicron to the M2 and …. well, you get my point. And only one of these has auto-everything and digital technology, making it faster in every respect. And net image quality in the Panny is superior – whatever compromises were made in the design of the kit lens are more than offset by the superiority of the digital sensor compared to film. How do I know this? Because I have gone back in my archives and compared images – not something any of our modern ‘experts’ seem capable of doing. And the sensor in the GF1 is identical to that in the G1 so if you can live without a proper viewfinder, the GF1 may be for you. For the rest of us the G1/GH1 is ideal for now.

The rumor every Leica user wants to be true.

The Panasonic GF1? Click the picture for more.

Imagine the capabilities of the excellent G1 packaged into a miniscule body with an electronic viewfinder and interchangeable lenses. With a decent ultrawide – say a 10mm f/2.8 (=20mm full frame equivalent) and the outstanding 14-45mm kit lens, you would have a pocket sized camera (OK, a big pocket is needed) which would suffice for almost all your travel needs.

It seems the EVF is a clip on accessory, and not built into the body, which is a shame as it will add to the bulk and make the shape more ungainly. Still, any finder is better than an LCD screen.

Panasonic has already clearly stated that they could have made the G1 much smaller and that they left the faux prism hump in the design to make the camera look like a viable competitor to the raft of modestly priced DSLRs on the market. But surely there is enormous unsatisfied demand for a small camera like this and not only from disaffected former Leica fans like me? So while the picture may be a fake, something like this is only a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’. But Panny, please integrate the EVF into the body – isn’t that just obvious, for goodness’ sake?

Meanwhile, the G1/GH1 are more than up to the task of acting the modern Leica.

From Lightroom

Lightroom makes it easy to summarize statistical data about your photos, so after a month with the Panasonic G1 I thought it would be fun to see some analytics.

Of the 750 pictures I have taken with the camera so far, 275 survived the cull (36%) as ‘keepers’ and the following data are for these 275 keepers. My hit rate has really been little changed over the past 40 years or so – if anything, it’s increasing suggesting I am getting better at pre-visualization or less discriminating in my old age ….

I have the camera set for Aperture Priority with iISO (the camera selects ISO) for all of these.

As you can see, the CPU selects shutter speeds which favor the lowest possible ISO, consistent with the best image quality:

I select the aperture in Aperture Priority, and tend to the large aperture end of the range (f/3.5 to f/5.6 for the kit lens – 64% of the total), where the lens delivers its best quality – quite a tribute to Panny’s hardware and software genius; I also thus force faster shutter speeds to minimize definition loss from camera shake:

Here are the shutter speeds set by the CPU:

Interestingly, I have a significant preference for portrait orientation, with fully 58% being in portrait mode (LR incorrectly refers to this as ‘Aspect Ratio’):

And, finally, as will come as no surprise to readers of this journal, I am very much a devotee of color, though I started life as a monochrome snapper:

Home under the freeway. G1, 21mm, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 160

I have yet to figure out how to summarize which focal lengths of the kit zoom’s are most used – that would be most interesting – but if I do, I will add a piece on that.

As for my preferred color palette, what most catches my eye on the street, red and blue seem to dominate, as this extract shows:

My G1 color palette

The snaps with a ‘2′ or ‘3′ at the top left indicate that the image has been round-tripped to Photoshop CS2 – 20% in this sample. This is almost always to correct leaning verticals as I am anything but a Photoshop maven. In fact, I detest the product and avoid using it whenever possible. Were Adobe to add perspective correction to Lightroom I would probably completely cease using PS.

Looking at your statistics can be both fun and a learning experience.

A useful feature in the Panasonic G1

Given the myriad of adjustments which can be made to the Panasonic G1’s custom settings, it’s nice that Panny has provided the option of saving up to three custom sets in the Custom Menu.

After banging away for a while and getting generally familiar with the camera over the past month, I have pretty much settled on a set of street snapper settings whose goal is to have a camera that is as responsive and fast to use as possible, while at the same time having a minimum of clutter on the EVF screen to get in the way of seeing pictures.

To save these setting, I start the camera in Aperture priority mode to which I apply the usual defaults, such as iISO (intelligent selection of ISO by the camera’s CPU), RAW picture quality (I have no use for RAW + JPG) and, of course, shake reduction. The EVF display is set to minimal display by toggling the ‘Display’ button on the rear, so that only Aperture, Shutter Speed and over/under exposure adjustment is shown, the latter set to 2/3rd stops under-exposed. I do not use the LCD screen on the rear and have it turned face in, as LCD settings are irrelevant to street snapper mode.

Custom Sets allow no fewer than ten additional settings to be saved, so with the camera still set on ‘A’ on the mode dial (for Aperture priority), I set the remaining variables as follows:

AFL/AE: AE. I want the rear panel button to lock exposure only, when depressed and held. I prefer to lock focus with a first press on the shutter button, when needed.

AFL/AEL Hold: Off. The problem with this setting is that the ‘hold’ remains in place after the picture is taken, which is exactly wrong. So ‘Off’ it is.

AF + MF: On. This allows for fine tuning focus, even though the camera is set to auto focus, by turning the focus collar on the lens. Very handy if you are shooting through a window or a wire fence, for example, as the camera can get confused and focus on the obstacle rather than on the subject.

Focus: Off. This allows the shutter button to work even if the image is not in focus. Better a slightly unsharp picture than none at all.

AF*: Off. This makes sure the bright red auto focus ‘assist’ light stays off in dim light. The very last thing you want for unobtrusive snapping is for a bright red LED to broadcast your presence.

P-AF: Off. This disables continuous pre-focusing before the shutter button is released. A waste of battery power and you need all you can get.

Fn: Set to Aspect Ratio. This dictates the action of the small Fn button on the rear panel. I have it set to allow choice of aspect ratio (4:3, 3:2, 16:9) as the other choices (RAW or JPG, Metering mode, iExposure or Guidelines) are of no use on the street. For that matter, setting the aspect ratio is of little use to me as I always use 3:2. You can take the man from his Leica but you cannot take the Leica from the man, and film Leicas are 3:2.

Auto Review: Off. The last thing you want is to be presented with an Auto Review of the last snap when you are desperate for the camera to free up for the next picture. Anyone who complains about the picture-to-picture times of the G1 being too slow is ignorant of this setting option. Unfortunately, Panny ships it with Auto Review set to ‘On’ which hardly helps matters.

NR: On. Reduces noise in long exposures. Why not?

Shoot without lens: Off. This allows adapted lenses to be used but, for now, I have all I need with the 14-45mm kit lens.

To save these, all you have to do, with the camera still in ‘A’ on the top mode dial, is to go to the Custom Menu->Cust.Set.Men (the very first choice), right arrow, hit Menu ->Yes and your settings are now saved to Custom Set 1.

Then rotate the mode dial to ‘CUST’ and the first Custom Set, the one you just saved, is in effect. If you create other Custom Sets, then you have to depress the Menu button and choose the one you want. For example, you may want an auto-bracketing set for HDR photography, or a ‘100 ISO’ only set for highest quality images, and so on. However, at my time of life, when I’m happy just getting the right leg in the right half of my pants, one custom set is just fine, thank you.

G1 – Custom Set 1 at work

In a word, impressive

I continue to be mightily impressed by the kit lens which comes with the Panasonic G1. At 14-45mm (28-90mm full frame equivalent) it has a most useful range of focal lengths and while the maximum aperture of f/3.5, falling to f/5.6 at the long end, is nothing to write home about, the lens is a fine performer. Back in the days of film, the Leica M street snapper found himself carrying 35, 50 and 90mm lenses for a similar focal length range. Swapping these was no fun, though the offset was that they were 2-3 stops faster in a very compact size. And the lenses were as good, if no better, than the kit lens supplied with the Panny.

Witness this snap taken at the crack of dawn.

G1, kit lens at 37mm, 1/50, f/5.6 iISO at 500

It’s a picture which discloses two things. First, the Electronic Viewfinder in the G1 renders an early dawn scene as if it was bright daylight, making composition incredibly easy, even if it makes pre-visualization of the final picture difficult.

Second, check out the near total absence of halation (light halos around bright objects) in this enlarged view.

Finally, there’s only minor chromatic aberration (red fringing in this case) to speak of in this very high contrast, challenging subject.

That’s no mean performance from an inexpensive zoom loaded with plastic components. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that many of the ‘glasses’ in the lens are made of plastic. Who cares? It’s the results that count. And this is at full aperture for the 37mm focal length used.

It’s also just visible in this snap that the limiting factor in definition is grain (sensor noise), not lens definition. At 500 ISO things begin to deteriorate as image size grows. The larger image above is consonant with a 30″ x 45″ print, so it’s not like I’m complaining. On the other hand, had this been taken on the Canon 5D, the fine detail, such as the print in the menu on the wall, would have been easily resolved whereas it’s lost in grain here. And, whether you like it or not, if you make big prints viewers will invariably stick their noses in them.

For film aficionados, the ‘grain’ is much finer than that delivered by, say, TriX film. It’s comparable to a medium speed black and white emulsion like FP5 or to Kodachrome 64 in color slide film. So those extolling the wonderful definition of Leica M lenses at f/2 should pause. What use is great definition if your sensor – be it film or silicon – cannot resolve the detail?

All in all – decent sensor, great kit lens – it’s not a bad compromise given how diminutive the G1 is. Absent the usual sharpening on import of the RAW image into Lightroom 2.4 (Amount=100, Radius=1.1), the image is completely unprocessed. And Panny will only improve things, based on their recent rate of progress.