Category Archives: Micro Four-Thirds

Panasonic’s μFT cameras

Fighting for dynamic range

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs

Lightroom 2 to the rescue

Sometimes there’s no alternative but to restore dynamic range using some manipulation at the processing stage. The Panasonic G1’s smallish sensor does not help in the dynamic range department – the Canon 5D’s, almost four times the area, is better in this regard.

The following is a case in point – I exposed for the brick wall, which is in bright sun, knowing the fire truck would be lost in gloom. Exposing for the fire truck would have burned out the wall and foreground.

After round-tripping the image from Lightroom 2 into PS CS2 to correct leaning verticals (Image->Transform) I saved back into Lightroom and used the Brush with AutoMask switched on to outline the garage bay, first hitting Option-O (this toggles mask visibility) to see exactly what I was masking. Then a quick tweak of exposure and an overall increase in red saturation and the picture was finished.

Here’s the ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Lightroom 2:


Shadow recovery – before and after

As the shape I was outlining had straight edges, I reduced the ‘feather’ setting to zero for a hard edged mask.


Fire truck. G1, 31mm.1/200, f/9, ISO 160

When God gives you lemons, make lemonade ….

From light to bulk

Canon 5D, Micro Four-Thirds

Quite a contrast

I took our boy to a show of Russian and Chinese 1950-era aircraft the past weekend and, because detail was the order of the day, took along the 5D and a couple of lenses.

Quite a change from the G1 when it comes to bulk and weight!

The 5D has marginally better shutter and focus response, though unless sports action is your thing, it’s not a significant difference. On the other hand, the 5D is much noisier (the camera, not the images!) and of course weighs several times as much. The 5D’s viewfinder seems positively dim after the G1’s EVF, although it renders colors and dynamic range more realistically outdoors. Indoors, while the G1 may show some noise, it is in a different league. I simply fail to understand why so many commentators have criticized the G1’s EVF for noise in poor light. Which would you prefer? A dim image in a 5D or like camera, or a really bright and easily discerned one in the G1 with a touch of noise? No contest. Maybe these critics should try to take pictures with their charges?


Commie prop. 5D, 200mm ‘L’ at f/3.5, ISO 250

It was an interesting exercise. Simply stated, comparing digital and film eras, the 5D is to medium format what the G1 is to the Leica M. With the 5D grain is not an issue and just about anything you snap will enlarge to a print size of choice. The G1, like 35mm film equipment, needs greater care. If you are going to push the size of your prints and the ISO setting, be prepared for compromises. The difference is likely to be less as time passes and technology marches on. While film peaked in quality years ago, digital is just getting started.

The G1 kit lens

Micro Four-Thirds

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.

Runner

Micro Four-Thirds, Photographs

iISO does its thing

The iISO function in the Panasonic G1 (“intelligent ISO”), according to the wretched instruction manual which ships with this otherwise fine camera, does the following: “The ISO sensitivity is adjusted according to the movement of the subject and the brightness”. (Page 79). I use this setting in my default setup for street snaps.

Here the CPU in the camera elected 1/500 second to freeze the running boy and an enlarged view in Lightroom confirms that his shirt is, indeed, tack sharp.


Runner. iISO, Panasonic G1

It’s a two edged sword, however. If you want movement blur, it has to be switched off or, much better, simply set the large mechanical mode dial on top to Shutter Priority, in which case iISO is switched off, though that fact is buried in a footnote in the instruction book. As I wrote earlier, Panny must have had some real live photographers involved in the design of this fine camera. Too bad they weren’t involved in the writing of the manual.

A note on AE lock: You can elect whether the ‘AF/AE Lock’ button on the top rear of the body locks focus, exposure or both, much as you can on the Canon 5D, my other ‘serious’ camera (though the G1 is to the 5D as a Ferrari is to a Mack truck). In both bodies I have set the button to lock exposure only, as focus can be locked with a first pressure on the release button of either.

Canon does this right. The AE lock lasts for some 10 seconds – ample time to recompose and take the snap.

The G1 gets it wrong. You have to keep the button depressed to maintain exposure lock until you press the button. That makes for some strange contortions of the hand.

The alternative in the G1 is to enable ‘AF/AE Lock Hold’, a separate choice in the Custom menu, but they got that completely wrong. Yes, it does lock exposure (and/or focus depending how you set ‘AF/AE Lock’) but the camera’s settings remain locked to your exposure even after the shutter is released. You can only unlock things by again depressing the button on the back of the camera. If you opt for a minimal viewfinder display as I do, you don’t know that your exposure is still locked until you notice a super bright or dim screen when making the next picture. You then scramble to unlock things only to find that your subject has gone ….

What Panny should do is change the firmware so that, with ‘AF/AE Lock Hold’ enabled, the lock is released after the exposure is taken. Let’s hope they change this, as selective exposure reading is a useful tool with dynamic range-challenged digital sensors.

Getting greedy

Micro Four-Thirds, Photography

What the future holds

If I am right that Panasonic will be surprised about the number of pros and serious snappers buying their G1 as a second camera, then they are thinking very hard right now how to further poach on Canon’s and Nikon’s up-market turf.

Look at how they have got to where they are.

First, they link up with Leica to design lenses for their point-and-shoots. Instant credibility with rich old guys and journalists, though ‘credibility’ and ‘journalist’ probably make no sense used in one sentence. They download Leica’s intellectual property on traditional lens design, then move on. It’s no accident that the word ‘Leica’ is notable for its absence from the splendid kit lens on the G1. Leica is on record as saying that they disapprove of software correction of optical defects (these guys would be a shoo-in at the Pentagon with that sort of intellectual firepower) and Panny, of course, knows better. They simply fix what ails the very compact 14-45mm kit zoom at the back end. The result is a near total absence of the two bugaboos of the Leica lens on my LX-1 – barrel distortion at the wide end and chromatic aberration everywhere. It’s the Software, Stupid.

Second. they make a few trial runs at Electronic View Finders which are better forgotten – like the one in the Lumix L1 – using full size, clunky and heavy Leica lenses. They realize that their state-of-the-art technology in their professional movie cameras is the answer, so they invent micro four-thirds and incorporate that EVF technology into the next two designs, the G1 and the GH1 (a G1 with video added). Now they have a great finder system, no mirror and no prism required.

Third, they state that the G1 is positioned for the upgrade amateur market. Last I checked, the Japanese are not stupid, and I do not necessarily buy that spin. On reflection, it seems to me that the G1 is as much a Trojan Horse as the original two door Honda Insight with its small 3 cylinder engine was to the car business. The Insight, a rolling test bed sold at a loss and proved the viability of a hybrid battery/internal combustion power plant as much as the G1 will convert skeptical advanced photographers to EVFs.

Fourth …. what is fourth? I don’t think that needs much of a crystal ball, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Panny already had working prototypes. Remember how they said they were retaining the prism hump in the G1 to make users feel comfortable? After all, all the ‘prosumer’ DSLRs from the competition come with one and if you are Johnny Come Lately to the game, you might as well start out by looking like the competition before you change the world. Remember also how Panny said that they could have made the G1 significantly smaller but decided not to? Partly because, I suspect, big equals good for the American consumer and partly because you can only make the body so small before it becomes hard to handle. The G1 is at the cusp on that point. So they can make the G1 a little larger, drop that dumb pentaprism hump and make it with a full frame sensor. Add credit card sized, long life flat batteries along the lines of the ones used in the latest Apple notebook computers and convert all those dated Leica full frame lens designs to lighter, smaller, aberration loaded variants with software taking out the defects and you have a shot straight at the big Canons and Nikons. (I suppose I should add Sony, but they are not really a player in the pro leagues, innovation having seemingly deserted the company). Only Canon, Samsung and Sony have the capital to compete and both Canon and Sony have access to high quality EVFs in their professional video cameras used extensively by the news media. So, I suppose it really boils down to Canon being the target as I see Nikon pretty much dead on the vine for lack of capital. Camera design as it is played today dictates that capital is king.

Imagine that new camera. With one body, a 1,000 exposure battery and maybe two or three IS lenses – 14-28mm, 28-90mm and 90-400mm, the lot weighing maybe 4 lbs., with a 7 fps exposure rate and an even better, faster EVF than the one found in the G1. A world beater. And who cares if the lenses say Leica on the front or not? Based on my early experience with the kit lens in the G1, Panasonic have got modern lens design down cold.

I am getting greedy, it’s true. Greed, as always, has a price.


Burger king. G1, kit lens @ 14mm, 1/640, f/4.5, ISO 100

I’m hoping the X1 full frame Panny with an EVF will be a tad slimmer.

A note on the manufacturing location of the G1: As with many new products designed by the Japanese, early production is in Japan by local workers. Eventually this frequently changes to China, Taiwan or some other place with lower quality standards – just like with Hondas and Toyotas. Both the body and lens in my G1 kit say “Made in Japan” so I would encourage you to look for those labels if you are a buyer. After all, you no more want a Chinese made G1 than you want an American made Honda.