When you consider the incredible flexibility offered by digital capture (unencumbered by the physical need to put the film behind the lens and to advance it frame by frame) it’s perhaps surprising that the digital interchangeable lens camera has remained so firmly rooted in a basic design that hasn’t changed since the 1950′s. The single lens reflex does its job very well, but building a camera around a mirror box seriously ties the designer’s hands – not only in the physical size and shape of the body, but in the lenses too (the distance to the sensor means retrofocus designs are needed to overcome the distance from the sensor to the flange).The reasons for this seemingly dogmatic attachment to the single lens reflex are fairly obvious; the main players in the market have a vested interest in maintaining compatibility with legacy lenses and offering as seamless a transition from film to digital as possible for their millions of existing users. Besides, it’s a lot easier to design a body that works in the same way SLRs always did than to launch an entirely new lens system.There have also been some technological barriers to deal with; the lack of digital displays good enough to produce an electronic viewfinder that can even get close to a good mirror and prism, and the fact that current phase-detect autofocus systems won’t work without a mirror being the two most commonly cited.It is perhaps unsurprising then, that the first company to challenge the SLR hegemony is Panasonic, a manufacturer with no legacy film SLR system to support and a share of the digital SLR market so small that it’s relatively easy to simply drop it and move on. We strongly suspect that the L10 will be the end of Panasonic’s brief foray into the standard Four Thirds System and that – for all the joint development statements – it was Panasonic, not Olympus that was the driving force behind the introduction of Micro Four Thirds.Image quality was, generally, a very pleasant surprise. The G1 uses a Four Thirds sensor and although it’s a new sensor that’s not been used previously in another Four Thirds camera, we would have expected at least a comparable image quality to the current Olympus DSLRs. And the G1 certainly did not disappoint us – far from it. In good light it produces consistently high image quality out of the box, there’s not really a need to play with any of the parameters. At the camera’s standard JPEG settings G1 images show natural tones and colors and hardly any artifacts. Image detail is impressive indeed. The G1 pulls visibly more detail out of a scene than the conventional Four Thirds DSLRs that we have tested before and is on par with the very best in the entry level DSLR bracket such as the Canon 450D. Shooting in RAW will get you even more detail and generally clean output.At higher sensitivities things get naturally a bit more difficult but Panasonic’s well balanced noise reduction does a pretty good job. In low light the G1 cannot quite keep up with the very best entry-level DSLRs but performs solidly and produces images that show an appealing balance between noise reduction and detail retention, only the very highest sensitivity setting should probably be reserved for emergency occasions.The G1 is certainly not without problems. One of the biggest is the limited lens support: there are currently two dedicated zooms, neither of which is that fast (aperture wise) and an adaptor for standard four thirds lenses, most of which don’t autofocus (and are ridiculously out of proportion to the tiny body). Another is price, though we don’t consider the G1 to be overpriced – it’s just relatively expensive when compared to the rest of the market. Less easy to forgive is the performance of the electronic viewfinder in low light – if you do a lot of low light shooting you’ll be yearning for a return to simplicity and clarity of an optical viewfinder and a good old fashioned mirror.Another point worth mentioning is the lack of a video recording capability. There are no apparent technical reasons for leaving out something you get in a fifty buck point and shoot compact, and we’ve no doubt it will hurt the G1′s sales; particularly since Panasonic has already shown prototypes of a ‘G1 HD’ version of the camera that does offer video capture.The G1 is a slightly curious camera; it is technically innovative but it’s far from revolutionary; it simply replaces one means of getting the image into the viewfinder for another one, and the result brings some benefits (it’s small, has some clever features and is darn cute) but also some disadvantages. It certainly doesn’t reinvent the digital SLR, because it’s designed to look, handle, operate and feel like one, and it’s still far from pocketable. But it’s an impressive debut for a system we think has huge potential, and everyone here that used it, without exception, fell for its undeniable charms.If you can live with its limitations the G1 is an appealing and viable DLSR alternative that’s a lot of fun to use and is capable of superb results. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for the Micro Four Thirds system when a slightly less conservative approach to camera design is applied. Share and Enjoy:

Panasonic Lumix G1 Digital Camera

Panasonic Lumix G1 Digital Camera is a post from: thedigitalcam.com