An interesting quirk.

As I mentioned in my first article on the Panasonic 45-200mm lens for the G1/GH1/GF1, the first thing I did was to update the software for that lens and the 14-45mm kit lens and, in the process, also separately updated the software for the G1 body when I saw that was also out of date.

I thought no more of those updates until, out of curiosity, I looked in Lightroom to see how many snaps I had retained (post cull) with the 45-200 since getting it. Well, it turns out that, based on the dates of pictures, Lightroom was pretty clueless about which lens had been used on the G1 until those updates were made! Now the lens used is correctly recorded when the picture is taken but until then it’s all ‘Unknown Lens’ – 99% of which will have been with the kit lens in my case. So either the lens or the camera software updates – I don’t know which – did the trick and now I have the comfort of knowing which lens was used.

G1 lens metadata from Lightroom.

Quite what use that information is in practice I’m not quite sure, but at least it is there. So if that sort of thing matters to you, it pays to make the software updates in a timely manner.

As of now I’m only aware of one reason not to make the G1 body software updates. Versions after 1.2 (I’m not dead sure which version but I seem to recall it was 1.3) will not work with non-Panasonic branded aftermarket batteries**. Given that the saving on grey market batteries is trivial, I hardly regard this as an issue but, then again, both my batteries are Panny branded so it’s easy for me to say that.

** If you are bound and determined to save $30 and prepared to accept the risk that the ‘fix’ may be broken with later software updates, you can buy an aftermarket battery for $22 here.

Monty Python to the rescue.

One reason the news is always bad is because good news is boring.

Never was this made clearer than by the fellows at Monty Python who, responding to this sad fact, crafted a ‘Good News’ news broadcast. The presenter, big smile and all, repeated variations on the theme ‘And in more good news today, no wombats were killed on the freeway’.

And chat boards are, for the most part just like the news and hospital waiting rooms. Both specialize in bad news. You don’t go there when all is hunky dory.

So it’s difficult to make sense of the fairly common complaint on Panasonic G1/GH1 discussion fora that has it that Panny’s best and brightest suffers from a potentially fatal defect whereby a strap lug will detach itself, leaving your favorite in pieces on the concrete sidewalk. I mean, ‘No strap lug detached itself today’ is right up there in wombat country. You won’t read about it. It’s a skewed sample whose statistical significance is impossible to determine.

Anyway, here’s hoping yours remain attached. Using a wrist strap doubles the load, of course, so I have $650 set aside in case one of my lugs fails and that I fail to prevail over the schmuck warranty lawyers at Panny USA. (It’s not personal Panny – I administer equal opportunity offense to the whole profession).

A view of the future.

The traditional approach to optical design has always been to try and correct aberrations in the glass. As apertures get larger and focal lengths get shorter, this gets ever harder to do, so you end up with ridiculously oversized lenses, their bulk further compounded by the need to clear flapping mirrors through the use of ever more complex retrofocus designs.

Some of the results of these design dictates can be seen in gargantuan lenses for full frame DSLRs, best illustrated by showing their weight and bulk. Some examples (weight in ozs, dimensions in inches – length x diameter, volume in cubic inches):

• Canon 14mm f/2.8 L II: 20 ozs, 3.7″ x 3.2″, 29.7 cu. in.
• Canon 24mm f/1.4 L: 20 ozs, 3.4″ x 3.7″, 36.5 cu. in.
• Canon 35mm f/1.4 L: 20 ozs. 3.4″ x 3.1″, 25.7 cu. in.
• Nikon 14mm f/2.8 ED: 24 ozs, 3.8″ x 3.4″, 34.5 cu. in.

Things get worse when you get into wide zooms:

• Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 L: 22 ozs, 4.4″ x 3.5″, 42.3 cu. in.
• Canon 17-40mm f/4 L: 18 ozs, 3.8″ x 3.3″, 32.5 cu. in.
• Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 EF-S:35 ozs, 5.2″ x 3.9″, 62.1 cu. in.
• Nikon 17-35mm f/2,8 EF-S: 27 ozs, 4.2″ x 3.3″, 35.9 cu. in.

Without doubt these are some of the finest optics made but take two or three of these in your shoulder bag and you won’t be snapping away for too long before exhaustion sets in.

The other design alternative, of course, dictates smaller sensors which bring with them shorter focal lengths and less bulk. But take that thinking all the way and you get what Panasonic has done with its lens range for its micro-four thirds range of cameras – the G1/GH1 and GF1.

That approach, simply stated, is one of “Get the optics to be as sharp as possible and hang the aberration corrections. Fix all uncorrected defects using software”.

I was thinking how best to illustrate this (the preview of the imported file in Lightroom already has the aberration corrections applied) when it struck me that PTLens has the ability of showing corrected as well as uncorrected images – by comparing JPGs (automatically corrected in Lightroom or Silkypics) with RAW (uncorrected) originals generated in the camera; seconds later I had exported an image taken with the G1 and the 14-45mm kit lens at 17mm (34mm equivalent on full frame) and show the results below. Mouse over the image to see the uncorrected original (Note: The mouse over effect works fine on my Mac with Safari and Google Chrome but not with Firefox or Camino, so please use one of the first two browsers if you have difficulty seeing the images below on a Mac. If you use Windows, please let me know what works so I can post that information here).

You can see the remarkable amount of software correction applied quite clearly with software removing severe pincushion distortion. Now these lenses are not as fast as the monsters profiled above, but look at the trade offs in terms of size:

• Panasonic 7-14mm f/4: 11 ozs, 3″ x 3″, 21.2 cu. in.
• Panasonic 20mm f/1.7: 3.5 ozs, 1″ x 2.5″, 4.9 cu. in.
• Panasonic 14-45mm f/3.5-f/5.6: 7 ozs, 3.4″ x 2.4″, 15.4 cu. in.
• Panasonic 45-200mm, f/4-5.6: 13 ozs, 4″ x 3″, 28.3 cu. in.

These are enormous differences – even greater when the lower weight of the body is added in – and means that you can carry a G1 and a three zoom lens outfit all day without tiring. Weight of the three zooms with the G1 body? 38.5 ounces. By comparison, a Canon 5D body without lens weighs 31.5 ounces. And your 35mm full frame-equivalent focal length range for the G1 kit is an astounding 14-400mm!

My point here is twofold. First, the future of lens design lies with software, not glass. Second, the only good camera is the one you have with you and I can assure you it’s a whole lot easier to take the G1 and a couple of lenses on a hike than it is to take a full frame DSLR similarly equipped.

For comparison, here’s a snap using the overrated Canon 24-105mm L lens on a 5D body – I say ‘overrated’ because it is a nightmare for architectural photography. The approach adopted by Canon/Adobe Lightroom is to leave the extreme barrel distortion at 24mm uncorrected, necessitating a round trip through PTLens or the like to straighten things up. The imported image in Lightroom shows extreme curvature of lines parallel to the edges at 24mm..

Panasonic’s approach is, I believe, the future of lens design and I expect all leading manufacturers to embrace this methodology during the coming decade.