Sensor design is still in its early days.

A friend of the blog, 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