Let’s hope for a GF2.

The 43Rumors site speculates that the Panasonic G1 has been discontinued.

That wouldn’t surprise me. The camera lacks the GH1’s movie mode (not a factor for me but doubtless bad in those tabular comparisons beloved of gearhead sites) and two years in a field with rapidly changing technology is probably as long a life as anyone can expect.

What would make me trade? Well, I’m hoping for a GF2 – meaning a body shaped like the GF1 with the deletion of the pop-up flash, this being replaced by the G1’s excellent electronic viewfinder – much in the same location as on the rangefinder Leica M models. The EVF can only get better and marvelous as the G1’s finder is, Panny can improve on its tendency to blow out bright lights as well as reduce the noise in lower lighting. The noise thing is, however, way exaggerated by the mass media. Which would you prefer? A near invisible traditional DSLR view or a noisy but bright one from an EVF?

Come to think of it, why not a slimmed down version of Panny’s own failed L1 which was overpriced and offered mediocre sensor quality and a lousy EVF in an oversized package? I would think that by now Panny has realized that the original marketing focus on point-and-shoot upgraders is too narrow and that the whole micro-four thirds thing is now becoming a very serious threat to all those gargantuan DSLRs out there.

The GH2/G2 – take an L1 and remove 30% of the bulk and weight.

And while you are at it Panny, please add a real click stopped ISO dial on the top plate and make that darned wheel less easy to depress so that I cease constantly going into exposure correction mode when all I want to do is change the aperture or shutter speed.

If, on the other hand, the G2 is just a warmed over thing with more buttons, I can see adding another G1 as a back-up when the body only price drops to $300.

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the 14-45mm kit lens and, in the process, also separately updated the software for the G1 body when I saw that was also out of date.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.