GF1 confirmed to be real...

[amateriat]

And, remember, Contax tried that before. Fat lot of good it did them.


- Barrett

 

[kuzano]

Olympus pulled a coup with the rollout of the EP-1

Olympus pulled a coup with the rollout of the EP-1

Well, with the GF1, Panasonic has addressed the three main criticisms of the E-P1, lack of EVF, low res screen, and slow AF (albeit the EVF sounds pretty useless to me). With an optical VF, sounds like a winner to me.

There seems to be a lot less buzz around this than the E-P1 though... maybe the novelty faded?

I wonder how much "buzz" there would have been without the 50 year Pen anniversary and the tie-in and retro styling virtually identical to a vintage Pen. I'm thinking that was a stroke of genius on Olympus' part, having had a number of Pen's over the years. It's actually quite interesting when you consider that the half frame 35mm measurement is almost identical to the sensor in the M43 and 43 cameras.

The GF1 is a bit of a sleeper by comparison, except for those who are truly perceptive on features and function. Most of the mass market for P&S wouldn't be capable of differentiating between the standard fare of point and shoot and these serious small camera's with interchangable lenses.

For most of them, if it don't have a hump, it's not really a pro or semi pro camera... That's what 40 years of SLR film camera's have taught the masses. We can attribute a good portion of the early adopter market on the G1 to the "hump", useless or not, ugly or whatever. Personally the "hump" never bothered me, but I am only a quasi-rangefinder user anyway. I would never allow archaic cosmetic nuances steer me from a camera that does a good job. Same with the lack of an eye level viewfinder.

I've had about six Olympus 4/3 DSLRs, and am truly surprised at how much I am using liveview on my current cameras.

 

[Tom Diaz]

Yeah. Spec sheet says it's made of metal. Also on the Panasonic site there's a white version.

Quote from Panasonic website

"The DMC-GF1 comes in a choice of body colors: true black, active red, sleek silver, and clean white. With other body parts crafted of finely textured aluminum, it has a high-quality appearance to be attractive while it is exceptionally practical design. The DMC-GF1 is absolutely the camera that gives every photographer a pleasure to own."

The white version wasn't on the DPreview site. Hopefully it's offered in the U.S. I'd love to own that one.

I had missed that about the metal. S'good!

Tom

 

[Tom Diaz]

You could have put your G1 lens on the EP-1 and it would have focused just as fast as the G1. Or kept the EP-1 and bought the faster focusing Panasonic lenses (like the 17mm) for it when they are released?


There are a couple of things that caught my attention in the recent posts. One is the seeming need for IS in the body. No camera needs IS, no photographer needs IS. I mean, what did anybody do before IS, or has some new avenue opened up in photography just because of IS? I'd say carry on as before and buy the camera that most suits your needs, because no camera will suit all of them. And adding a fast Leica lenses to the GF1 won't make it slower. I wonder if the M9 will have IS?

Then there is kshapero's tongue in cheek (?) assesment of the complication of modern digital cameras. It was only a couple of hundred years ago that the human brain had to use far more processing power in finding enough to eat and survive than it does today in reading the instruction book of a camera. If anything the 'intuitive' part of the brain should be bigger and emptier than ever before in human evolution because of the ease in which most of us live. Surely some of that unused capacity can be used to simplify down what you need and don't need in a modern cameras functions?

🙂

Steve

The one experiment I did try was the Olympus 17mm on the Panasonic body. It did not focus any faster. I tried the Panasonic 14-50 on my E-P1 but did not try any street shooting with that combination.

Anyway, yes, I could have, but why would I want to? I think it's fine if people think the E-P1 is fast enough for them. I maintain that it could have been faster, as is the Panasonic, and that for the money, I should have been satisfied with the performance.

On the street, here is what happened with the E-P1 in autofocus mode: You walk along. Something catches your eye. You raise the E-P1 to shooting position and firmly press the shutter button. One-thousand two- and then the shutter fires, by which time your subject has changed. Granted I could work around that by putting it in manual focus and then zone focusing or hyperfocal focusing. The G1 is fast enough so that I don't have to do that AND it has an EVF for accurate eye-level framing . (What a concept.)

Tom

 

[photogdave]

Got Canadian pricing from Leo's today:
$769 body (same price as G1 with 14-45mm)
$1059 w/ 20mm 1.7 lens
Not bad considering it can shoot HD video and the G1 can't. I probably won't buy one but I'll surely try it out at the store.