Cheap and effective.

For a delivered price of $20.98 you can buy a wireless remote for any G-series Panasonic camera on eBay, shipped from Hong Kong. Mine took two weeks to arrive, complete with transmitter, receiver, a cord for the latter and the requisite two batteries. The 23A battery goes in the transmitter/trigger and the CR-2 in the receiver. The short cord goes from the receiver to the socket on the G1. Note that the CR-2 battery is wrapped tightly in plastic which must first be removed. The receiver itself fits in the flash shoe on my G1 but has no contacts of its own. If you are using the flash shoe for something else, like an external finder, or if you are using the in-camera flash, you can Velcro the receiver to some other convenient point on the camera’s body.

Here’s how it looks in practice:

The uWinKa wireless remote. Cord connections from/to the G1 circled.

I tested it at home and it still worked fine from 50 feet away and through several walls, so the claimed range of 100 feet is believable. Flashing LEDs on the remote (taped off in the picture) confirm operation, as does a flashing LED on the trigger. The only thing you have to do is to remember to power up the receiver (camera end) with the on/off switch. There’s a choice of 16 code settings, changed with microswitches on the bodies of both devices, in the event of interference from other RF devices. Both receiver and transmitter are very small, in keeping with the scale of the Panasonic G1. Weight is negligible.

The trigger has a two position switch which is appropriately stiff on mine to preclude accidental switching – instant release or five second delay – which you can use nicely with the 3 or 10 second delay on the G1 to give you a choice of 5, 8, 10 or 15 seconds. The claimed delay is 3 seconds, but mine delivers 5. There’s also a Bulb option. You are meant to hold the button on the trigger for 5 seconds and the shutter should remain open until the button is pressed again. I could not get that to work. Hardly an issue. Finally, a brief press on the trigger button will focus the lens but not release the shutter. That worked for me. There’s an extendable antenna on the transmitter for longer range use. It’s extended in the picture, above. There’s also a release button on top of the receiver but I can’t say I have found a use for it, though it works fine.

All except the Bulb option works perfectly. The only hitch I encountered was that I had to reverse the provided cable from receiver to camera to make it trigger the shutter. The behavior is repeatable suggesting that there’s a diode in the small box in the connecting cable which transmits current in one direction only. The cable bears no directional markings so if yours does not work simply reverse it. While I haven’t tried it, I would be prepared to wager that this device will work fine on any camera which has a three pole mini-coax socket on the body. Try at your own risk.

The accessory shoe for mounting on the camera is flimsy; you can remove it by removing the one black Philips screw retaining the bottom cover and then the two chrome ones retaining the shoe from the inside. Use a fine flat file to ‘machine’ down the retaining prongs thus exposed (they are unnecessary should you decide to restore the shoe, as the two retaining screws prevent rotation in any case), thus procuring a plane base, and use industrial strength Velcro to stick the remote to some convenient flat part of your camera instead. One warning – Velcro adhesive refuses to adhere to the rubberized body on my G1!

Or, as the French might so elegantly put it, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. That one,, for the 5D, is quite a bit larger than the one profiled above.