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.