Exploiting movie quality.

It’s no great secret among amateur movie makers that the Panasonic GH2 MFT still camera is also a state-of-the-art movie camera.

Click the picture for more.

The above link will take you to a full description of the GH2’s movie capabilities and will also allow viewing of movies made using the camera. The appeal of the GH2 over the (still waiting for mine!) G3 is that it accepts professional microphones, as opposed to limiting the user to a poor built-in one.

Now Panny has done something very smart in its recent announcement of two lenses which are clearly aimed at movie makers. With a software update the GH2 will be able to use power zoom with these optics, with variable zoom speeds. This makes for smooth zooming and a professional result. Two lenses have been announced, the ‘X’ in each designating the power zoom option.

• G X 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 Asph.
• G X 45-175mm f/4-5.6 Asph.

These give an aggregate zoom range of 28 to 350mm FFE which will fulfill most movie making needs. Add an ultra wide (where no focussing is needed) and you are set.

With the addition of these optics it seems to me the GH2 (and G3 or GF3 but not earlier models) user has a still camera which will make a ‘no excuses needed’ semi-pro movie camera at very modest cost.

A friend writes:

Video – I share your enthusiasm for the development of high quality video in still cameras – I’ve enjoyed “one camera, two media” for the last ten years or so. On the other hand, I feel that 1080P AVCHD is a triumph of marketing over quality. Others have tested it against 720P MP4 and found the latter sharper; I’ve confirmed this informally and now get 1920×1080 playback using 1440×1080 MP4. Using MP4 you can make routine edits without rendering, which takes minutes instead of hours, and saves a generation. Here is a sample below (converted to Flash on Vimeo. The Algae scooper in our lagoon is kind of interesting too. (Editor’s note: ….and clearly designed by Rube Goldberg!).

Click to view.

Two new lenses.

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I have but three lenses for my Panasonic G1 and that’s pretty much all I need.

Two are from Panasonic, with OIS built in – the stellar 14-45mm kit lens and the wonderfully compact 45-200mm. The third is from Olympus and it’s the ultrawide zoom, the 9-18mm MFT.

While the Olympus zoom suffers from barrel distortion to varying degrees, click this link and you can download my profiles to remove these distortions in LR3 or in Photoshop. Unlike for the Panasonic lenses, the G bodies do not correct distortions from the Olympus lens range, so if it matters you have to do it manually. It takes seconds for the occasional architectural snap which requires such correction. That apart, I have found the 9-18mm to be an outstanding optical performer, indistinguishable in practice from the excellent Panny 14-45mm kit lens as far as definition goes.

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The Olympus 9-18mm is an indication that Oly is getting serious about making better lenses for its underwhelming Pen MFT bodies. I write ‘underwhelming’ as any camera whose primary mode of viewfinding requires the user to hold it arm-outsrteched, inches from his face, is not a serious camera for this photographer. First, I like to actually see what I’m viewfinding. Second, adding Oly’s clunky clip on EVF makes the whole thing bulkier than any G-series Panny with a built-in (and outstanding) EVF. Third, I prefer to remain unobtrusive. And last, I would rather not look like a dork. The sole advantage I can see to Oly’s bodies is that OIS is built into the body, meaning it works with any lens, whereas with the Panny lenses, selected lenses have OIS built into the lens. The Oly 9-18mm has no OIS but it is hardly missed at those focal length on my G1.

Now Olympus has announced two very interesting lenses for MFT – the 12mm f/2 (24mm FFE) fast ultrawide and the 45mm f/1.8 (90mm FFE) portrait lens.

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Priced at $800 and $400, respectively, and available in July and September 2011, these fill two important niches, but it’s the latter lens which especially interests me. Since selling my 5D outfit, which included Canon’s simply superb 85mm f/1.8 portrait lens I have lacked a wide aperture portrait lens.

Sure, I can emulate shallow depth-of-field by selectively blurring details in Photoshop, when they are rendered too sharp with the Panny kit lens at 45mm. At 45mm the Panny kit lens is a modest f/5.6 and often has too much d-o-f for head-and-shoulders portraits. But using PS in a studio portrait to keep the eyes sharp and the ears blurred is not so easy. The Oly 45mm is a full 3.5 stops faster than the kit lens at 45mm so will afford far greater control over (shallow) depth of field. Thus it interests me greatly.

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It remains to be seen whether these new Oly lenses are up to the performance of the 9-18mm, but at the prices asked I would guess that the quality will be fine. Obtrusive chrome finish? Who cares what color it is in the studio? Size? The Panny kit zoom at 45mm protrudes some 3.4″. Best as I can tell, the 45mm f/1.8 is much more compact, protruding maybe 2.5″ or as much as the kit zoom at 14mm, its smallest size. So this promises to be a truly compact portrait lens but with enough barrrel to permit support from underneath the lens. Lack of OIS? I’ll be using it with my Novatron studio flash outfit so camera shake is not an issue.

It will be a long wait to September for my 45mm f/1.8!

Curiously, the machining of the Oly’s focus collar is identical to that on my first portrait lens, bought in 1972, the estimable 90mm Elmar f/4 for my Leica M3:

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The Oly’s technology is just a tad more sophisticated. The Elmar was f/4, manual focus, manual aperture (the aperture ring rotated with the focus collar!), was twice the length of the Oly and the lens head unscrewed for use on bellows and close-up devices. There were no electronics in sight and construction was serious chrome coated brass. A fine optic which ran me £32 or $492.61 in today’s money. So the Oly is almost 20% cheaper!

The best street snapper yet?

With today’s announcement of the Panasonic G3, scheduled to ship in June, Panasonic may have created the best street snapping camera yet. What follows is largely viewed from that perspective.

Some history. The Panasonic G1 was the first Micro Four-Thirds camera. Like the first iPad, there was so little wrong with the design that there have been few compelling reasons to upgrade. The GF1 and GF2 bodies deleted the eye-level finder, rendering the body largely useless for serious photography. The short lived G10 used a cheapened EVF and was discontinued shortly after release. The G2 added a movie mode and a touch screen – the latter the ‘push’ rather than the true touch type in the iPad and iPhone. A solution looking for a problem. The costly GH1 and GH2 bodies added sophisticated movie modes with the GH2 sporting the second sensor design in the G range, all the others having shared the one from that original G1. That sensor brought more megapixels and reviews suggest that the noise levels are now down to those in APS-C cameras.

The Panasonic G3 – complete with strange model designation.

While the G3 does not get rid of the faux prism hump, it is nevertheless of great interest to street snappers. My G1 has seen more pictures taken with it in my 21 months of ownership than any camera I have ever owned, and I have been banging away for some 50 years now, since I was a kid. My shot counter shows well over 10,000 exposures. So any improvements to the G1 make my radar screen. Nearly everything I have been reading about the G3 suggests it’s worth upgrading to one, especially as I now have no back-up camera, my Canon 5D gear all sold in favor of the smaller, lighter Panny and its three lenses – the Oly 9-18, the 14-45 kit zoom and the 45-200 Panny, all superb and all very light and small.

Here are the major changes in the G3 compared to the G1:

• The body is smaller, the unnecessary hand grip slimmed down. Smaller is always better.
• The battery is smaller at 7.3mAh vs. 9 mAh, or 20% less. As I routinely get over 400 exposures on a charge with the G1, getting ‘only’ 320 is hardly an issue.
• The EVF eye proximity sensor is gone – this would switch off the LCD when the camera was raised to eye level. No problem. The only time I use the LCD it when formatting an SDHC card; otherwise it remains folded with the screen in to the body.
• The focus mode dial top left is gone. I use AF all the time so I don’t care and there’s still touch manual focus when the shutter release is part depressed and the focus mount is touched. Apparently the MF enlarged area now appears in a window so that should make this even more useful.
• The AEL/AEF lock button is gone. Not good, but there are two programmable function buttons in its place where the AEL function, which I use quite a bit, can be assigned.
• All the dumb-as-it-gets scene modes have disappeared from the mode dial. Hooray. Let’s also hope they made the click stops more robust.
• The single shot/motor drive/delayed action lever has disappeared and is now a menu choice. I use single shot only so it does not matter.
• The mode dial now has two Custom settings – wonderful. I will set one at ISO 400, the other at ISO 1600.
• As with the G2, the thumb wheel is on the rear, not on the front as with the G1. I cannot tell you how frustrating the placement of the one on the G1 is – I am still frequently depressing it accidentally, going into +/- exposure mode, when all I want to do is change the aperture (I snap only in aperture priority mode).
• The square format mode has been dropped (no problem) but there’s still a choice of 4:3 or 3:2 – the latter essential for one brought up with 35mm Leicas. That’s all I use.
• The body is rumored to use an alloy frame, replacing the plastic one. Nice, I suppose.

Sadly, no blue model is available, the silly choices being white, red or brown. All ‘Yecch’ colors. Black is the way to go.

As with all previous Panny MFT bodies, there is no OIS shake reduction. That’s built into select Panny lenses. Only Olympus MFT bodies have in-body OIS.

There’s some sort of setting to blur backgrounds which I have yet to understand. No matter – I simply use Auto Blurâ„¢.

The simplified mode dial on the G3.

But the most important changes are under the skin. First, Panny claims that the speedy autofocus in the G1/G2 is now even faster, and comparable with that found in most DSLRs. This may actually make that slow focusing dog, the 20mm Panasonic lens, useable. I returned mine after a trial run which delivered 30% of my pictures out of focus. For comparison, the kit lens has a focus failure rate in my hands of maybe 1%. Second, the new 16mp sensor, likely a variant of the one found in the costly $900 GH2 body, has been installed. That probably means one to two stops less noise and should substantially clean up noise at 1600 ISO. My G1 with kit lens ran me $640, whereas the G2 is $700.

I have ordered a black body only for $600 and will write more when I have had a chance to wring it out. The learning curve should be low, owing to the similarity in the bodies, and I already know my three lenses are just fine for what I do, so I’m optimistic that things should work out well, with the G1 moving to the role of back-up body. Mechanical noise? No way of telling until I try it, but let’s hope it’s the same or less as in the G1, which is a very quiet camera. Indeed, the low frequency of the noise emitted by the G1 puts any M Leica to shame.

Part II is here.

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.