Wednesday, 5 August 2009

praise for my G1

having been a film user for some decades I have been 'leery' of digital in its ability to do well on people portrait situations. I've been using (and writing about) digital cameras since about 2000 and I have owned quite a number of digital cameras (read: I'm not against the idea) since I started.

The G1 however is the first camera I've owned which has passed the print test where I just can't fault it and nothing gives it away as looking digital even with a JPG straight out of the camera.

At my god daughters christening a few weekends ago I took this image of the little girl:

siiri

Now all that happened for this image was that my wife took the media card out of the camera to the local department store and got some prints made for the grandparents (nothing big, about 5x7 size). No processing at all. She showed them to me before posting them off.

Now I've done quite some testing and evaluation before I sold my 10D and other Canon gear but unexpectedly this print has really sold me on how well it really works. I just know that the print will do well at A4 size too.

So casting aside all my normal "testing criteria", I'm just so impressed with this image over and above almost everything I've had because it just works without any intervention.So for ordinary "mums and dads" I'm now sure that this little camera will do what anyone wants of it in terms of image quality.

I bet the E-P1 is just as good
at

3 comments:

  1. Eric5 August 2009 at 23:21

    I've used quite a few digital cameras over the past 8-9 years and I must say that the Panasonic G1 is the first in which I've been very pleasantly surprised at the quality of the jpegs out-of-camera. With all my other cameras, I've almost always had to resort to raw capture with significant post-processing.

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  2. Charles Maclauchlan21 August 2009 at 07:38

    Chris:
    being a fan of small quality imagers I've enjoyed reading your G1 experiences. I'm a big WA lens fan so I never even considered the camera but it was recently pointed out to me that there is a 7-14mm lens available for this camera. I'm wondering if you've had any experience with this lens.

    Charles maclauchlan

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  3. obakesan21 August 2009 at 16:26

    Charles

    yes, that's right, I don't have that lens, although I considered it. I bought the Olympus 9-18 zoom and a 4/3rds to micro 4/3rds adaptor. I'm quite pleased with the lens optically but it is a bit 'sluggish' on Autofocus compared to my Panasonic kit lens.

    Some discussion from owners of the Panasonic lens can be found
    here
    and here

    Its a good topic for a blog entry so I'll try to put together my thoughts on the 9mm ... summary is that its optically nicer than my Tokina 12-24, perhaps not as robust and much lighter to carry.

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