by Miserere

  

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The Start of an Era

January 2009. That was the month the first micro-4/3 camera went on sale: The Panasonic G1 [cue ominous music]. Its DSLR exterior belied the revolution within, for this was the first advanced digital camera to feature a large sensor but do away with the mirror-box and prism of traditional SLRs, thus allowing the designers to build a smaller camera without sacrificing IQ. According to interviews at the time, Panasonic decided to follow the external DSLR shape because research showed that buyers would prefer the familiar shape. I don’t know if they did or not, but what followed in the next few months is a marketing department’s wet dream, as G1 cameras flew off shelves the World over, spurred on by a cottage industry of adapters that had people attaching just about any lens ever produced on the G1. To many film-era Leica users it must have felt like Heaven, as they were now able to mount their tiny S and M mount lenses on a digital body without having to shell out many thousands of dollars/pounds/yens for a Leica M8 or M8.2.

Thus began The Era of MILC.

A short 18 months later, Panasonic are back with the G2, which looks very much like the G1, and makes me think the marketing department at Panasonic sent the engineering department a memo saying don’t fix it if it ain’t broken!. The main changes are the addition of video (in the form of 720 HD, with an onboard mono mic and external stereo connector), a touch-sensitive rear screen, focus mode dial and the control wheel having been moved to the rear of the camera (and it’s now also clickable like a button). On the inside there is the usual “new image processing engine!” that all manufacturers are forced to say when they deliver a new camera (is it a law?) but they’ve basically kept everything the same, which is not a dig on Panasonic considering how well the G1 worked. they’ve also bundled in a new kit lens, which is now 3mm shorter on the long end of the focal range (42mm vs 45mm), but lighter (though not smaller!). I’ll take lighter any day of the week (and twice on Sundays).

  

Panasonic G2 Main Specifications

• Sensor: 12MP Live MOS (2x crop factor)
• Sensor dimensions: 18 x 13.5 mm (3:4 aspect ratio, other ratios available as in-camera crops)
• Shutter speeds: 1/4000s — 60s (1/160s max. flash sync. speed)
• 3fps max. shooting speed
• RAW shooting (Panasonic’s propriety RAW (yes, *.raw!))
• Rear screen: Full swivel 3.0″ (3:2 aspect ratio) touch-sensitive TFT LCD, 460k pixels
• Electronic viewfinder: LCD 1.44 million dots, 100% coverage, 1.4x magnification
• ISO range: 100 — 6400
• Built-in flash
• Hotshoe
• No in-body stabilisation (optical stabilisation available on select lenses)
• 720 HD video
• SD/SDHC/SDXC card
• Weight: 428g/15.1oz (body, battery and SD card), 590g/20.9oz (with 18-55mm lens)
• Dimensions: 124mm x 84mm x 57mm (4.9″ x 3.3″ x 2.2″), not counting the protruding EVF, 74mm (2.9″) deep counting the EVF

  

What’s in the Box

• G2 with 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS lens
• Li-ion battery DMW-BLB13PP (7.2V, 1250mAh)
• Li-ion battery charger DE-A49
• USB and video cables
• Shoulder strap
• Lens hood and pouch
• Plastic stylus
• 4 Instruction manuals (one for each of English, Spanish, French and Portuguese languages)
• Warranty card

  

  

A Warning about This Review

The G2 offers a number of “intelligent” options in both movie and still mode (turned on by the press of the iA button, read all about it here), where the camera guesses what you’re up to and modifies your settings accordingly. I did not go through every possible scenario testing how well this worked; I simply used the camera as I generally would any other camera and relied on my intelligence to use the appropriate settings. That said, I will mention that you can set the mode dial to SCENE, press the iA button and not have to worry about anything on the camera ever again. This will appeal to many who know nothing about Photography and are thus scared of the big bad DSLRs, and it’s iA functionality that Panasonic will use to sell this camera to those people. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think my readership is composed of these inexperienced shooters, so I focused on using the camera as an advanced amateur would.

So to finish up with my warning, I do want to make clear that this is a great camera for beginners who don’t have a clue about what they’re doing, because they can start using it straight away in iA Mode and, if they choose to learn and grow into Photography, they’ll have a very complex camera available to them that they’ll find almost impossible to outgrow.

  

Direct Access Buttons

This camera is a smorgasbord of direct access buttons, levers and other little things that go click. Like I said earlier, you can see many of your shoot settings just by looking down at the camera, which I find immensely helpful. Below is a table with the major functions you might expect to change most often and how you access them on the G2. The camera offers a customisable button labelled Fn (see table below for functions you can assign to it) but there is also a quick menu button, aptly called Q. MENU that accesses a large number of functions and which always returns to the last one you used, even after turning the camera off. I had it set to metering mode.

  

Autofocus

The G1 was already noted by reviewers to be a fast autofocuser, pretty much single-handedly destroying the myth that contrast-detect autofocusing is inherently slower than phase-detect. It’s only slower when done wrong, and Panasonic figured out how to do it right. Not having used a G1 I cannot compare, but I can say that the G2 seems to focus as fast as my DSLR (sorry, no nerdy tests were conducted to prove this, I was too busy taking photos), and that’s fast enough for me. This is AFS I’m talking about; AFC is a different game, and this is where phase-detect always wins because it knows whether the subject is moving towards or away from the camera. As contrast-detect systems go, AFC is OK. I fully expect this to be the next area engineers will work on to improve contrast-detect AF systems.

Within either AFS or AFC you can choose 4 different modes to select the focus area:

1. Single point: There are 4 different sizes to choose for the AF area (all square) and it that can be placed almost anywhere on the FoV, either with the touchpad arrows or with your finger on the screen. When focus is achieved the square turns green.
2. Auto: The camera chooses what it wants to focus on and lets you know by placing a green rectangle (not square!) over it briefly.
3. Tracking point: You choose a subject, half press the shutter button and the camera locks onto it and follows it as it moves across the FoV (or it stays stationary and you move the camera). Nice theory, but when I used to try tracking cyclists from across the road it failed miserably. It’s useful for focusing on a flower, for example, and then changing the composition while maintaining focus on the flower. The same use could be made with portraits, but for that see below.
4. Face detection: Works well and is useful for street shooting, not just portraiture. It will also pick up furry faces, to the joy of cat photographer Flickr over. I haven’t tested it on fish, so if you do, please let me know how it turns out. There is a limit to how small a face can be within the frame; as long as the face takes up at least 1/108^th of the frame, the camera can detect it. I didn’t just make that number up, I actually tested it. In this mode the camera starts looking for faces within the frame without you having to press anything and marks them with a yellow square. When you half press the shutter release it will focus on the faces and the square of the most important face in focus turns green while the rest remain white. You can also register up to 6 faces that the camera will remember and will give focus priority to whenever it sees them in the frame. I kid you not.

  

Shutter Lag

As I’ve done before, I checked for lag between Life (an event seen directly by my eyes) and the shutter, and lag between an image on the LCD/EVF and the shutter. I’m happy to report that I found a consistent lag in all three cases and it was under 200ms.

  

EVF and Manual Focus

There is a myth floating around that EVFs are terrible to focus with, and you might even lose your eye if you use one. At the very least you’ll go blind. Turns out none of this is true, so please tell all your buddies at the local camera club that EVFs are good, m’kay? Tell ‘em Uncle Miz said so. Why the preamble? Because EVFs actually help you to better focus manually, acting like the old fashioned microprisms did on manual focus SLRs, except that instead of having the microprism as a collar in the center of the viewfinder, now your whole viewfinder is fill of microprisms. Add to that the fact that you can magnify the view of almost any part of the frame and you’ve got yourself a very precise focusing system. To magnify the view you turn the focus ring on the lens, which activates the manual focus functions; the initial magnification is 5x, which can become 10x at the turn of the wheel dial (or pressing the soft button on the screen). My only gripe is that sometimes I would prefer to have no magnification, but the only way to achieve this is by going to page 3 of the Custom menu and selecting OFF for the MF ASSIST option—hardly a solution when you need it in a hurry.

Another thing this EVF has going for it is size, as it’s noticeably larger than any APS-C camera’s OVF I know of. It doesn’t follow quick-moving objects as well as it should, but I’m confident that faster refresh rates in the future will make EVFs acceptable to even diehard old-schoolers. The EVF on the G2 is strongly marching in that direction.

The EVF turns on automatically when you raise the camera to your eye, a feature that works very well and quickly.

  

EVF Blackout

EVF’s are much maligned because of their long blackouts after taking a shot, typically lasting more than the blackout caused by the mirror in an SLR. I ran some tests with a stopwatch taking a photo, then taking another the moment the blackout was over. The average time difference on the stopwatch was 0.7s, which is black out time plus my reaction time. Even if we assume I’m really quick and have a reaction time of 0.1s, that gives us a worst-case scenario for black out of 0.6s. If that seems long, you can make it even shorter by half-pressing the shutter release button which brings the EVF image back about 0.2s faster, making the blackout last around 0.4s. Whether this is a good value or not will depend on what you shoot, but I suspect it will be a non issue for most people. Better news still, I performed the tests shooting RAW, whose larger files take longer to dump to card than JPEGs, so you might even get a shorter blackout if you shoot JPEG. Try it at home and let me know!

In case it needs saying, I had auto review turned off.

  

Rear Screen

First of all, let me get this over with: The touch screen feature? It’s a gimmick. I tried to like it and find it useful, but I didn’t find anything I couldn’t do better and/or quicker with the 4-way keys. Plus, I always ended up with finger marks on the screen which are annoying in bright light. I use a touch screen phone and and happy with it, but it just doesn’t make sense on the camera. Plus, I had to use my left hand, which meant I had to move it from its position under the camera, pick around with my finger, then put it back. I just found it a lot easier to use my thumb.

Moving on, the screen is crisp, bright and full of good information if you so wish, including a histogram that you can place anywhere on the screen (the one time using my finger was nice). There’s not much else I can say, really. It just works!

Thanks to its swivelling capabilities it can be turned facing inwards, thus protecting the screen. When in this position it is turned off (naturally) and you can use the camera like a regular DSLR composing through the EVF only. In this case, the EVF remains turned off until you put it to your eye. Nice.

  

Live View Ramping

This is something I find annoying. The LCD and EVF both tend to keep a constant brightness no matter what the prevailing light or your shooting settings are. What this means is that if you’re not paying attention to the histogram you can frame a shot and find out when you replay it that it’s over or under exposed; you’ll be annoyed because in live view it looked fine. When focusing manually in low light, ramping (turning up the gain of the sensor) can be useful to make a dark scene brighter in the finder/LCD, but in most situations it is not; that’s my opinion at least. The easy thing to do would be to make this a custom option and please everyone.

  

Auto ISO

Argh! What an annoyance! By default the highest ISO available in Auto ISO is 400. You have to go into page 3 of the REC menu and into item ISO LIMIT SET to change this. Here’s the kicker, by default it is set to OFF…which I thought meant ‘no limit on ISO’, but no, apparently in Pannyspeak it means ‘ISO 400′. The options for this item are OFF, 200, 400, 800 and 1600, which means that in Auto ISO you will never be able to shoot at 3200 or 6400. I’m still scratching my head over this.

  

Menus

There are lots of them, and I didn’t always find things where I expected them to be, but this is no different to any other camera. On the plus side, the abundant menus and submenus mean the camera is highly customisable and offers some obscure yet useful features like the ability to turn off noise reduction for long exposures (astro photographers will like this) or pixel refresh, a function that looks for dead pixels and maps them out.

  

The Kit Lens

Panasonic rolled out a new kit lens for the G2, which is lighter than the previous version. It is a 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 OIS, meaning it’s optically stabilised. There are reviews elsewhere on the net about this lens, so I’ll just say I found it good and usable, not to mention light. It does have a plastic mount (which is becoming endemic to kit lenses) but in the weeks I used it it didn’t become an issue. As for the optical stabilisation, in a quick test I carried out I found I gained about 3-3.5 stops of shutter speed, and this was shooting via the rear LCD—I might have been able to gain another half stop using the EVF.

  

Shooting with the Panasonic G2

It always makes me smile when I can look down at a camera and see right away what my settings are. The G2 doesn’t have a top LCD, but there are so many hard switches that most of what I need to know is there, and it’s quick to change, even when the camera is off! When I first picked up the camera I was not blown away by its ergonomics, and after many weeks of shooting with it, I’m still not. I don’t like the deep grip (many love it, so seek a second opinion) and the cool-looking matte finish is a bit slippery and marks easily with finger/nose grease. My final gripe about the ergonomics is the strap lug on the right-hand side, which digs into my forefinger joint where in joins the hand. Not that there’s any way to solve this as you cannot move it anywhere else that would not get in the way. The only solution I see is for Panasonic to not use a lug, but a simple slot.

Leaving the ergonomics behind, let’s concentrate on using it to take photos. Because of all the quick access buttons, dials and levers, changing settings on the fly is quick and easy…once you’ve memorised where everything is! The camera is responsive and I never felt like it was holding me back, but I sometimes missed shots because I had to stop and think about where a setting was. This is definitely a camera with a steeper-than-usual learning curve for the advanced photographer, but the rewards are plentiful once you’ve mastered its controls and are worth the effort. The shutter release button has a slightly spongy first-stage press, but the second stage is firm so accidental photos are unlikely to happen. This philosophy of hard, firm buttons permeates the rest of the camera, making unwanted changes of settings very difficult. Even the power switch is designed in such a way that it’s easy to quickly flip it with the thumb to turn the camera on, but a bit tricky to turn it off, practically guaranteeing you’ll never turn it off accidentally. The mode dial doesn’t have a lock but is also firm and requires commitment to turn.

I found that the full swivel screen made the G2 incredibly useful for street photography, as I could use the camera at belly level and look down to take photographs. This seemed to make people not realise I was photographing. And not just from the belly, but you can also shoot at right angles, not to mention the obvious above-head shooting allowing you to frame shots even if there is a crowd in front of you (or a brick wall). I think more and more cameras are going to be coming out with swivel screens. Did I mention how much I liked it? Now when I pick up a camera with a fixed screen I feel like something is missing.

My main gripe with this camera was the aforementioned LCD/EVF ramping, making it almost imperative to have the histogram display turned on all the time. Before I became used to this problem (yes, I find it a problem) I under or overexposed a few photos. It didn’t help that I was using the Samsung NX10 (my review here) during the same period of time, and the Sammy doesn’t ramp.

To end on a positive note, I’ll say that despite its very few shortcomings, the G2 is a well-thought-out camera built with the photographer in mind. Not just any photographer, but every photographer, making it a great camera for both the starting shutterbug and the seasoned shooter.

  

Some Sample Images

Straight from the JPEG engine, shot in ‘Vibrant’ color mode. Click for full size (12MP) so you can pixel peep all you want. Those shot at 20mm were done so with the 20mm f/1.7, the rest were with the kit zoom.

  

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3. Review – Olympus Pen E-PL1, Part 2: Using the Camera
4. Review – Samsung NX10, Part 1: First Impressions
5. Review – Pentax K-x Part 3: Conclusions