Panasonic G1 Review

Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 Design

Roll-over the various controls and features with your mouse for a brief description.

Panasonic G1 Front View
The Panasonic Lumix G1 has a familiar design similar to a compact SLR, but the lack of a mirror box and optical viewfinder means it technically isn’t an SLR at all.

Panasonic G1 Left View
(Shown here with the compact 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 image-stabilized G-series kit lens.)

Panasonic G1 Right View
Note the nice divot for the middle finger in the Panasonic G1’s grip, and the slanted shutter button. There’s also a thumb grip at the back.

Panasonic G1 Top View
A fairly traditional top layout for a compact model here.

Panasonic G1 Back View
Here you see the Panasonic G1’s excellent 3.0-inch swivel LCD. Since most of the controls are on the right, both your eye and your thumb can find them easier for quick activation.

Panasonic G1 Bottom View
The metal tripod socket is centered with the lens.

Panasonic DMC-G1 Operation

At first the Panasonic G1’s user interface seems a little befuddling, because some common functions didn’t have external buttons visibly labeled. Exposure compensation is a prime example; there’s no button labeled with a +/- symbol on the camera’s body. To adjust the exposure, you can either push on the front control dial and then turn it, or press the Q.Menu button and scroll among the options there. Unless you’ve previously been in the Q.Menu and scrolled to another option, the exposure compensation control is the first one you’ll see after pressing the Q.Menu button. The adjustment scale is laid out horizontally, but you must hit the up/down buttons to adjust the exposure setting. This seems counterintuitive; the horizontal scale suggests the use of the left/right arrows or the front control dial, but instead these scroll through the various options on the Q.Menu.

While we found the G1’s user interface a little counterintuitive, a good many first-time users will just leave the camera in Intelligent Auto mode, making the point moot.

Once we became accustomed to the Panasonic G1’s controls, we found that the user interface worked well. Because it would leave the Q.Menu cursor (option selection) on the function you last used, it tended to drop us back to where we wanted to go more times than not. Pushing the front dial to access the exposure compensation control was very fast and quickly became second nature. The My Menu’s keeping of our last five menu selections close at hand saved our delving into the extensive menu system for most choices while we were shooting. At the end of the day, we found the Panasonic G1 a very pleasant and responsive camera to shoot with.

The four navigation buttons access oft-used commands, including ISO, white balance, AF mode, and a special function button can be assigned to any of several options. Pressing the Preview button gives you a Depth-of-field preview by stopping down the lens to the current aperture, and pressing the Display button immediately after puts the G1 into Shutter speed preview mode.

Panasonic DMC-G1 Record Mode Display

The Panasonic G1’s rear-panel tilt-swivel 3-inch TFT color LCD monitor can be used for image review, status display, menu display, and as a viewfinder for image framing.

The illustrations below (courtesy of Panasonic) show what information is displayed on the G1’s LCD monitor (or electronic viewfinder) in Record Mode when used to preview. In most cases, the displays are identical, though there are a few items that are only displayed on the LCD monitor, as noted in the table footnotes below. (Click here to open a copy of the table describing the callouts in a separate window, if you want to keep it handy while you scroll through the illustrations below.)

LCD Monitor Style (Initial Display)

Monitor Style (Recording Display)

Viewfinder Style (Initial Display)

Viewfinder Style (Recording Display)

Panasonic DMC-G1 Record Settings Display

We have somewhat mixed feelings about using the rear panel LCD as a settings display. While it provides a much larger area than the more typical small black and white data readouts, it also consumes more power. The Panasonic G1’s battery life is a bit below average when compared to most consumer SLRs, and would arguably be better if it didn’t require the main LCD screen to be lit so much of the time. While you can use the EVF as the primary viewfinder display, the info display shown above right isn’t available there, and the status overlay that appears in the EVF is much less detailed than that shown on the rear-panel LCD. All that said, though, we do really like the amount of camera information that the G1 makes available on its rear screen, and you can easily disable this screen with a press of the Display button.

The illustration below (courtesy of Panasonic) shows the setting information available via the G1’s Quick Menu:

The following table documents the information for all display illustrations above:

Panasonic G1 Playback Mode Displays

The Playback button on the rear panel accesses Playback mode, where you can review captured images. Pressing the Display button cycles through displays showing basic information about the captured image (aperture, shutter speed, size, JPEG quality, flash use, ISO, and sequence number), a screen showing a small thumbnail and more detailed exposure information (adding exposure compensation, white balance, focus and exposure modes, image stabilization setting, color space, and full file number to the above), a screen with a small thumbnail and RGB + luminance histogram displays, and finally an image with no information overlay at all.

In playback mode, rotating the command dial located on the front of the camera just below the shutter button zooms in or out on the image being viewed. You can zoom in up to 16x (in steps of 2x), and pan around the full image via the arrow keys.

When you zoom out beyond the full-image display, you can see displays of 12 or 30 thumbnails, or a calendar-based display that organizes images in groups by the date captured.

Panasonic G1 Optics

Panasonic G1 – The First Micro Four Thirds Camera

Given that the Panasonic G1 is the first Micro Four Thirds camera to be announced, it might be good to take a quick look at just what Micro Four Thirds is all about.

Panasonic and Olympus’ Micro Four Thirds standard is aimed at allowing a significant reduction in the size and weight of interchangeable lens digital cameras, achieved by eliminating the bulky mirror box from the design. With the mirror box gone, the “back-focus distance” (or back focal length) of compatible lenses can be reduced. Technically, back focus distance is defined as the distance from the vertex of the lens’s rear element to the sensor, but for practical purposes, it’s easier to speak in terms of the distance from the lens-mounting flange to the sensor surface. In the existing Four Thirds system, this dimension was 40mm; for Micro Four Thirds, it has been slashed to just 20mm. Obviously, this change allows for a significant reduction in the size and weight of the camera body while retaining the same sensor size.

Smaller Lenses: This shot compares the G1’s 14-45mm kit lens with an Olympus model of almost identical specs, but designed for the standard Four Thirds system. The two are about the same length, but the Micro Four Thirds lens is noticeably smaller in diameter. The difference in lens size is even more apparent as you move to more telephoto focal lengths.

That’s not the only benefit, though. As well as smaller and lighter camera bodies, Micro Four Thirds offers the possibility of a significant reduction in the size and weight of the lenses, too. While the physical size of a lens depends somewhat on the size of the image circle it must produce, it turns out to depend even more strongly on the back focus distance the lens was designed for. Reducing the back focus distance can significantly decrease the length of the lenses needed to cover the area of a Four Thirds image sensor. Lenses for the new system can also be somewhat smaller in terms of diameter as well, and indeed the new mount is some 6mm smaller (44mm vs 50mm) than that called for in the original Four Thirds standard.

Thinner: The Panasonic G1 doesn’t use a traditional SLR mirror box, so the body can be thinner. Shown here are the Panasonic L10’s Four Thirds lens mount, mirror box and sensor assembly (left) versus the G1’s Micro Four Thirds lens mount and sensor assembly (right).

Removing the mirror box does have some potential disadvantages, though. Obviously, it removes the possibility for any Micro Four Thirds camera to offer a true through-the-lens optical viewfinder, with no way to divert the optical path to the viewfinder between exposures. Hence, Micro Four Thirds cameras will be limited solely to using a Live View function as seen on certain recent digital SLRs, where data streaming from the image sensor can be displayed on an LCD display, electronic viewfinder, or both. For similar reasons, with nowhere to put a phase detection autofocus sensor, Micro Four Thirds cameras are limited to using contrast detection autofocus. While this can offer higher focusing accuracy, and negates problems with front or back focusing, contrast detection has in the past always been slower than the phase detection systems found in digital SLRs. When we were first briefed on the Panasonic G1 in June of 2008, the Panasonic engineers said that AF speed was a key design goal of the new camera. Now that we’ve been able to test a production sample of the camera, we’re happy to report that, while it’s a bit slower than most entry-level consumer SLRs, it’s very much in the same ballpark. (In fact, the our lab crew have all commented that it feels faster than its objective timing numbers indicate; it’s a very responsive-feeling little camera.)

With the G1, it’s also impossible to track a moving subject in Continuous capture mode, because the camera does not return to Live View mode between frames. While 3.18 frames per second doesn’t make the G1 a great camera for action shooting to begin with, it’s an important factor to mention.

Still, the Micro Four Thirds system promises interchangeable-lens cameras with good performance at significantly smaller overall sizes. With the Panasonic G1, early indications are that the platform is off to a solid start.

Panasonic G1 Lens System

Because of the changes in flange diameter and back-focus distance, the new Micro Four Thirds system will require its own lens line. With the G1, Panasonic has announced the first two of what they promise will grow to become a broad line of lenses in the years to come.

Two things immediately struck us upon seeing the Panasonic G1 and its lenses for the first time. First of all, these lenses really are a lot smaller than equivalent ones in the current Four Thirds world. The second thing that caught our eye were the lens flanges: The two lenses introduced with the G1 both feature solid metal mounting flanges, a relative rarity in entry-level removable-lens cameras, and something that speaks well for their build quality.

The first two lenses in the G-series lineup are a 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 image-stabilized zoom and a 45-200mm f/4.0-5.6 tele zoom that also sports Panasonic’s excellent Mega OIS stabilization. On the G1, these lenses will be equivalent to 28-90mm and 90-400mm lenses on a conventional 35mm film camera. That’s a really excellent range, and the image stabilization will be particularly welcome when you get out to the 200mm (400mm equivalent) end of the tele zoom.

In the US, Panasonic currently plans to offer the G1 only in a bundle with the 14-45mm lens; the 45-200mm will be available separately. (Body-only and two-lens bundled versions will be offered in other parts of the world, but at least initially, the G1 will only be sold as a one-lens bundle in the United States.)

We were fortunate to obtain and test samples of both the 14-45mm kit lens and the 45-200mm tele zoom lens while we still had the G1 body in-house. We expected it to perform well, but the Panasonic 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 ASPH LUMIX G VARIO (click that link to see our test results on SLRgear.com) performed splendidly in our tests for SLRgear, and was easily one of the best-performing kit lenses we’ve tested to date. Sharpness was excellent, even wide open, and chromatic aberration and distortion were both very low. DxO Analyzer balked at evaluating the vignetting (shading) on files from the G1 for some reason, but the worst-case shading was a falloff of only about 20% in brightness units relative to the center of the lens.

The results from the 14-45mm kit lens are so good that they’re likely the result of post-capture processing in the camera, similar to what we saw in the Panasonic Lumix LX3. As this is being written in early November 2008, we don’t yet have a third-party RAW converter able to read the G1’s RAW files, so we can’t confirm what’s being done in-camera versus what’s simply the result of good lens design. However they’ve achieved it, though, the Panasonic engineers can be proud of the image quality delivered by the G1 and its 14-45mm kit lens.

As we’re about to publish this review, the lab guys are just starting their testing of the 45-200mm lens. We’ll have its results posted on SLRgear soon: See the page there for the Panasonic 45-200mm f/4-5.6 LUMIX G VARIO for details of that testing as soon as it’s completed.

Coming Attractions
While not giving any specific delivery dates, Panasonic is also promising at least three new lenses next year (2009), a 7-14mm f/4, a 20mm f/1.7 super-compact prime (great for street photography!) and a long-ratio 14-140mm f/4-5.6 OIS “HD” lens. The “HD” indicates that this last lens will support on-the-fly focusing during HD movie recording, on a camera that will also be announced sometime in 2009.

It’s important to note that all the G-series lenses from Panasonic support the G1’s contrast-detect autofocus system, while some current Four Thirds system lenses will not.

Using your current Four Thirds lenses

This brings us to the issue of using current Four Thirds lenses on the new Micro Four Thirds system. It is indeed possible to use all your old glass, by virtue of the MA1 mount adapter, although there may be limitations with some lenses.

Micro Adapter. Standard Four Thirds lenses work via an adapter. Here, the adapter is shown along with the 14-50mm f/3.8-5.6 lens from the Lumix DMC-L10 kit.

The shots above show the MA1 adapter by itself, and attached to the 14-50mm lens that shipped as the kit optic with the Panasonic DMC-L10 SLR. The adapter is quite easy to use, just attach it to the lens and then attach the combination to the camera. Since all it’s doing is adapting between the different flange sizes and adding 20mm of increased back focus distance, the mount adapter needs no optics in it, so it has no effect on image quality, lens speed, or any other optical characteristic.

Use what you have: Here’s the little Olympus 25mm f/2.8 “pancake” lens attached to the G1 with the MA1 adapter. Even with the adapter, it’s still a compact package. With its firmware update, the 25mm Olympus lens worked fine on the G1, although it focused more slowly than the Panasonic kit lens.

That all sounds great, so what’s the limitation? It turns out that not all lenses are able to move their elements quickly enough to work with the G1’s contrast-detect autofocus. Normal phase-detect AF systems are fairly forgiving of focusing speed, because the correct focal distance setting is determined independently of the lens elements’ motion: The camera looks at the subject, calculates the correct focal distance, commands the lens to move, and then snaps the shot once the lens reports back that it’s moved to the correct setting.

With contrast-detect autofocus, though, the lens has to move multiple times, and must come to rest before the camera can take each “look” at the subject, to determine whether the focus is better or worse than it was at the previous focal setting. In order for the overall focus cycle to be performed quickly, the lens needs to be able to shift focal settings very quickly, multiple times per second. This is a demanding requirement, and not all lenses are up to the challenge. Olympus offers contrast-detect AF on some of their recent SLRs, but the feature only works with a few lenses that have focus motors both strong and fast enough to move the lens elements very quickly. Other manufacturers offer contrast-detect AF that works with any of their lenses, but at the cost of very slow AF times. (It’s for this reason that Nikon refers to the contrast detect AF option in their SLRs as “tripod mode.”)

A camera with your lens, Sir?: We couldn’t resist this shot, even if the Olympus 150mm f/2’s firmware hasn’t been updated to work with the G1 yet. The Olympus 150mm f/2 is quite a lens, if you’ve got the money, it’s equivalent to a 300mm f/2 on a 35mm camera.

So, while some current Four Thirds lenses will work just fine on the new Micro Four Thirds system, with full support for AF operation, other lenses will be reduced to “guided manual” focus, in which the user will need to adjust the focus setting, looking to either the viewfinder (less accurate) or the camera’s focus indicator (more accurate) for focus confirmation. And, without a firmware update, some Four Thirds lenses may not work with the Panasonic G1 at all, because the camera won’t respond to movements of the “fly by wire” focus ring on the lens. Fortunately, Olympus (the biggest Four Thirds lens maker by far) has committed to updating the firmware in their lenses to work with Micro Four Thirds standard cameras: Check with your lens manufacturer to see whether your current Four Thirds lenses are compatible.

Kit Lens Test Results

Zoom
Excellent performance with the 14-45mm O.I.S. (Optical Image Stabilized) kit lens.

14mm	45mm	4x Digital Zoom

The Panasonic G1 is sold bundled with a Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 MEGA O.I.S. Micro Four-Thirds lens, the first of its kind. The kit lens possesses a slightly better than average optical zoom range of ~3.2x. The 35mm equivalent focal range is about 28-90mm, because of the G1’s 2x “crop factor”. Results were quite good at 14mm, with minimal corner softness and strong detail throughout the frame. Coma distortion in the trees was quite low, although there is quite a bit of chromatic aberration visible in the corners and edges, almost entirely confined to the blue channel. Results were also very good at the 45mm setting, with a hint of softness in the corners but no sign of visible coma distortion and very little chromatic aberration. The DMC-G1 also offers a maximum digital zoom of 4x. Results at 4x were very soft (not surprising with that amount of interpolation), but almost artifact free. Overall, an excellent result for a kit lens, and the optical image stabilization will come in handy for low-light photography.

Macro
An average area (for an “SLR” kit lens), with excellent detail. Flash throttles down well.

Macro with 14-45mm O.I.S. kit lens	Macro with Flash 14-45mm O.I.S. kit lens

As with zoom performance, the Panasonic G1’s macro performance will depend entirely on the lens in use. However, with the 14-45mm O.I.S. kit lens set to 45mm, the G1 captured an average size minimum area measuring 3.85x 2.89 inches (98 x 73 millimeters). Resolution and detail were excellent, albeit with a little softening in the corners from the lens. (Most lenses have some softening in the corners at macro distances, the G1’s kit lens has less than most.) The Panasonic G1’s flash throttled down for the macro area pretty well, and there was no detectable shadow from the lens barrel, resulting in a surprisingly good exposure with the flash.

Distortion
Low geometric distortion with the 14-45mm O.I.S. kit lens in JPEGs, high barrel distortion at wide angle in uncorrected RAW files.

In-Camera JPEG: Barrel distortion at 14mm is 0.4 percent

In-Camera JPEG: Barrel distortion at 45mm is practically nonexistent

Uncorrected RAW: Barrel distortion at 14mm is 1.7 percent

Uncorrected RAW: Barrel distortion at 45mm is practically nonexistent

When shooting JPEGs, the Panasonic G1’s 14-45mm O.I.S. kit lens produced about 0.4 percent barrel distortion at wide-angle, which is a good bit below average among the cameras we’ve tested, and hardly noticeable in most of its images. At the telephoto end, there was hardly one pixel of barrel distortion, practically imperceptible. This is the tendency for the lens to bend straight lines outward (like a barrel — usually at wide-angle) or inward (like a pincushion — usually at telephoto). We suspected the camera may be correcting distortion in JPEGs (a good thing for JPEG shooters), so we converted RAW files with dcraw, which does not correct for distortion. (SilkyPix and Adobe Camera Raw both apply distortion correction automatically, so their results are similar to in-camera JPEGs.) As you can see, at wide angle, the barrel distortion is very high at 1.7 percent, however distortion at telephoto is still practically nil.

Chromatic aberration
Low to moderate at wide-angle, very low at telephoto when shooting JPEGs with the 14-45mm O.I.S. kit lens. A bit higher in uncorrected RAW files.

In-Camera JPEGS
Wide: Moderate, top left @ 200 percent	Wide: Moderate, top right @ 200 percent
Tele: Low and dull, top left @200 percent	Tele: Low and dull, top right @200 percent

When shooting JPEGs, chromatic aberration in the corners with the Panasonic G1’s 14-45mm kit lens is moderate at the 14mm setting, with 4-6 pixels of moderate fringing. At 45mm telephoto, this distortion is much lower and difficult to detect. (This distortion is visible as a slight colored fringe around the objects at the edges of the field of view on the resolution target.)

Uncorrected RAW
Wide: Moderately high, top left @ 200 percent	Wide: Moderately high, top right @ 200 percent
Tele: Low and dull, top left @200 percent	Tele: Low and dull, top right @200 percent

Again, we suspected the camera may be reducing chromatic aberration during JPEG processing (good for JPEG shooters), and we were right. Above are crops from uncorrected RAW files converted with dcraw. Chromatic aberration is more obvious at wide-angle, however at telephoto it’s still quite low, just slightly more visible than the corrected JPEGs.

Corner Sharpness
Slight blurring in the corners of the frame at wide angle, moderate softening at telephoto with the kit lens. Some shading (vignetting) in the corners at maximum wide angle.

Wide: Slightly soft in the corners (upper left).	Wide: Sharp at center.
Tele: Soft in the corners (upper left).	Tele: Sharper at center.

At wide angle, corners on our test targets were just slightly soft compared to the center. At telephoto, corners showed a bit more softness than at wide angle (with the left side being the softest), and the center was slightly softer as well. There was also some shading (vignetting) at maximum wide angle, as you can see in the top pair of crops: Note how much darker the corner is than the center. An above average performance for the 14-45mm kit lens here, especially considering these shots were taken with the lens “wide open”. (Corner sharpness typically improves when “stopping down” to a smaller aperture.)

The images above were taken from our standardized test shots. For a
collection of more pictorial photos, see our
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 Photo Gallery
.

Panasonic G1 Exposure Options

The Panasonic G1 offers all the exposure options you’d expect in an SLR-class camera, plus a few Panasonic-specific options. Available exposure modes include Program AE, Manual, Aperture Priority, and Shutter Priority modes with shutter speeds from 1/4,000 to 60 seconds available, as well as a Bulb setting for longer exposures up to four minutes. The x-sync speed for flash photography is 1/160 second. A fully automatic mode called Intelligent Auto enables Shake Detection, Motion Detection, Scene Detection, Face Detection, Subject Detection and Light Detection to try to deliver optimum results under a wide range of conditions. The G1 also offers a number of Scene modes, a My Color Mode and a Custom setting where up to three sets of shooting modes and settings can be stored and recalled. See the Modes and Menus page for more details.

While in Program AE mode, you can rotate the front control dial to select different combinations of aperture and shutter speed settings than those normally chosen by the autoexposure system. This is often called Program Shift. If the automatic program would have chosen 1/125 second and f/5.6, you could instead direct the camera to use 1/60 at f/8 or 1/30 at f/11, to get greater depth of field. It’s a very nice touch that’s common on a lot of SLRs these days, and is a handy option for those times when you need some measure of increased control, but still want the camera to do most of the work for you.

Another feature that’s also pretty common, but still very welcome is the electronic analog exposure display visible in the viewfinder data readout as well as on the rear-panel shooting display when the camera is in Manual exposure mode. This shows the amount the camera thinks an image will be over- or underexposed, based on the settings you have selected, and helps you find the best exposure for the subject.

Panasonic G1 ISO Range
ISO sensitivity ranges from 100 to 3,200, adjustable by pressing the ISO button (up arrow) on the back of the camera and then using the up/down or left/right arrow directions of the Multi-Selector to select values from those shown on the display. The ISO number can be adjusted in one-stop (default) or 1/3-stop increments, depending on the ISO increment setting selected in Record Menu 4.

An Auto ISOÂ mode is available, and you can set the upper limit to ISO 200, 400, 800, or 1,600 in Record Menu 4. Intelligent ISO mode detects subject movement, and will boost ISO to increase the shutter speed in an attempt to freeze subject motion. The maximum ISOÂ selected by Intelligent ISOÂ is 800 with the flash off, and 400 with the flash on.

The Panasonic G1 gives you five choices for noise reduction, ranging from -2 to +2, with 0 being the default. It’s not clear if this noise reduction is applied at all ISOs, or just higher ones.

Panasonic G1 White Balance Options
White balance modes on the Panasonic G1 include Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Halogen, and Flash. No Fluorescent preset is provided. Kelvin temperature settings are also available, ranging from 2,500K to 10,000K in 100K steps, as are two Custom white balance settings, for setting white balance from a white or grey card. The effect of changes in white balance settings is shown in real-time, on the LCD monitor or EVF.

In most of the white balance modes, you can fine-tune the color by pressing the down arrow. You’re then presented with a x/y axis graph with which you can adjust between Amber and Blue levels and Green and Magenta levels by using the four arrow buttons.

In Kelvin white balance mode, the up/down directions on the Multi Selector or the front dial adjusts the Kelvin temperature with numerical readout, while a scale shows the color temperature relative to existing presets.

Custom white balance is set by selecting one of the two Custom White Balance settings, pointing the camera at a neutral white or grey card under the lighting you’ll be shooting in, filling a frame in the center of the display with the reference target, and then pressing the Menu/Set button.

You can also bracket white balance exposures. The bracket setting is performed using the fine-tuning adjustment values, and three images are taken when the shutter button is pressed once. An Amber to Blue axis sequence can be selected, or a Green to Magenta axis sequence.

Panasonic G1 Metering Options
The Panasonic G1 offers three metering modes, selected via the Metering Mode option in the Quick Menu or Record Menu 1: Multi-pattern, Center-Weighted, and Spot. The default Multi-segment metering mode takes readings throughout the image to determine exposure, using an array of 144 zones covering the bulk of the frame. Center-Weighted gives precedence to the center of the image while reading the whole frame. Spot metering, useful for high-contrast subjects, bases the exposure reading on the very center of the image, letting you set the exposure based on a small portion of your subject. You can lock an exposure reading by pressing the AF/AE Lock button on the back panel. Halfway pressing the Shutter button also locks exposure (and focus in AFS mode).

The Panasonic G1’s Exposure Compensation adjustment increases or reduces the overall exposure from -3 to +3 exposure values (EV) in one-third stop increments, and like White Balance, the effect of Exposure Compensation is simulated on the preview. An Auto Bracketing feature captures multiple shots with different exposures. See the Drive Mode section on Auto Bracketing below for more details.

Panasonic G1 Drive Modes
The Panasonic G1 offers a variety of shooting modes via the Drive Mode lever under the Mode Dial on of the camera’s top panel. Drive options include Single Shot, Burst, Auto Bracket and Self-timer. The Burst Mode has rate options for “H” (3 frames-per-second) or “L” (2 frames-per-second). Auto Bracket lets you take a sequence of 3, 5, or 7 shots with either 1/3 EV or 2/3 EV exposure variation steps. The sequence can be selected from “0/-/+” (default/underexposed/overexposed) or” -/0/+” (underexposed/default/overexposed). The Self-timer mode offers 10 seconds, 10 seconds with 3 pictures taken at 2 second intervals, or 2 seconds. All Drive Mode options are set in Record Menu 3.

Panasonic G1 Film Modes

Pressing the Film Mode button lets you choose from nine preset “Film Modes,” which have different characteristics such as contrast, saturation, sharpness, and noise reduction. You can also define two of your own. Here’s how Panasonic describes the available Film Modes:

You can see the effect of the various preset Film Modes on our Still Life target, on the Panasonic G1’s Test Images page.

Multi Film is like a Film Mode bracketing feature, that lets you define up to 3 types of Film Modes to be used in a bracketing sequence.

The images above were taken from our standardized test shots. For a
collection of more pictorial photos, see our
Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 Photo Gallery
.

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Panasonic G1 Performance

Panasonic G1 Image Quality

Color

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Good color and hue accuracy overall, with only minor oversaturation of strong reds and blues. Some issues with orange through yellow, though.

In the diagram above, the squares show the original color, and the circles show the color that the camera captured. More saturated colors are located toward the periphery of the graph. Hue changes as you travel around the center. Thus, hue-accurate, highly saturated colors appear as lines radiating from the center. Click for a larger image.

Saturation. The Panasonic G1 pushes reds and blues a fair bit, and dark greens slightly, while undersaturating lighter greens, cyans and oranges, but it doesn’t oversaturate as much as most consumer DSLRs. The average saturation level is 104.9%, a 4.9% oversaturation, less than that of many competing consumer cameras. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that’s more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. Here, the Panasonic G1 also did well, producing natural-looking skin tones, though just slightly on the pinkish side. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it’s very easy for these “memory colors” to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. The Panasonic G1 did push cyan toward blue, red toward orange, and orange toward yellow. Shifts were relatively slight, but the net result is that colors in the orange through yellow range are less clearly delineated from each other than they would be with a camera having better hue accuracy. The yellow-toward-green shift was also slight, but a bit more apparent in strong yellows in our test images. Nonetheless, overall accuracy was still pretty good. (The blue to cyan shift is very common among the digital cameras we test; we think it’s a deliberate choice by camera engineers to produce better-looking sky colors.) Hue is “what color” the color is.

Saturation Adjustment
The Panasonic DMC-G1 lets you adjust the image saturation, contrast, and sharpness in five steps each. As can be seen below, the saturation adjustment was pretty subtle. We usually argue in favor of more subtle adjustments for saturation on the cameras we test, the Panasonic G1 goes a bit too far in that direction; we’d like to see a bit wider range here.

Saturation Adjustment Examples
-2	0	+2

The table above shows results with the default as well as the two “extreme” saturation settings. Click on any thumbnail above, then click again to see the full-sized image.

See full set of test images with explanations See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sensor

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Very good performance: Slightly warm cast with Auto, very warm with Incandescent, good color with the Manual and 2,600 Kelvin white balance settings. Average positive exposure compensation required.

Auto White Balance +0.3 EV	Incandescent White Balance +0.3 EV
Manual White Balance +0.3 EV	2,600 Kelvin +0.3 EV

Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, color balance was just slightly warm with the Auto white balance setting, though the Panasonic G1 did much better than most digital SLRs in this regard. (While slightly warm, results with the Auto setting are quite acceptable, and many users will in fact prefer a slightly warm look in situations like this, to better represent the mood of the original lighting.) Results with the Incandescent setting were much warmer; the Incandescent setting looks like it might be adjusted to match professional studio lighting, a little odd for a decidedly consumer camera model. The Manual setting produced the most accurate results, though the 2,600 Kelvin setting wasn’t far off the mark either, being just slightly cooler. The Panasonic G1 required an average amount of positive exposure compensation here, at +0.3 EV. Overall color looks good, though the blue flowers look a touch purplish, probably due to the DMC-G1’s tendency to punch up reds a little. ((Many digital cameras reproduce the blue flowers here with more of a purplish tint, so the Panasonic G1 actually performs a little better than average here.) Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.)

Outdoors, daylight
Bright colors overall, though a tendency toward high contrast under harsh lighting. Slightly below average exposure accuracy.

Auto White Balance, +0.7 EV	Auto White Balance, Auto Exposure

Outdoors, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 performed pretty well, with good color but moderate overexposure in the outdoor far-field house shot. The Panasonic DMC-G1 required a bit more than the average amount of positive exposure compensation (+1.0 EV) to keep facial tones bright on the “sunlit” portrait test, but that resulting so many blown highlights that we opted for the +0.7EV shot for our sample image here. That left the model’s face a little dark, but there were still a lot of blown highlights in her shirt. Default contrast is on the high side, but fortunately, there’s a contrast adjustment to help compensate. Overall, good results here, especially when the contrast setting is turned down (see below), but we’d be happier if the camera had gotten closer to the optimal exposure setting on its own.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
Very high resolution, 1,700 ~ 1,800 lines of strong detail.

Strong detail to 1,800 lines horizontal Camera JPEG	Strong detail to 1,700 lines vertical Camera JPEG
Strong detail to 1,800 lines horizontal SilkyPix processed RW2	Strong detail to 1,800 lines vertical SilkyPix processed RW2
Strong detail to 1,800 lines horizontal 2X target, Camera JPEG	Strong detail to 1,700 lines horizontal 2X target, Camera JPEG
Strong detail to 1,800 lines horizontal SilkyPix processed RW2	Strong detail to 1,800 lines vertical SilkyPix processed RW2
Strong detail to 1,900 lines horizontal ACR processed RW2	Strong detail to 1,800 lines vertical ACR processed RW2

Our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,800 lines per picture height horizontally, and about 1,700 lines in the vertical direction in camera JPEGs. Extinction didn’t occur until about 2,700 lines horizontally and vertically (results from 2X target are multiplied by 2). We weren’t able to extract much more resolution by processing the G1’s RW2 files using SilkyPix, but SilkyPix did hold definition in the target lines a bit better than the camera’s own JPEG conversion did, boosting the vertical resolution to about 1,800 line, but making the target lines more distinct at all high frequencies. Adobe Camera Raw (version 5.2) was able to extract out a bit more resolution on the horizontal axis, at close to 1,900 lines, but matched SilkyPix on the vertical axis. Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Good sharpness overall, though slight edge-enhancement artifacts on high-contrast subjects. Moderate noise suppression visible in the shadows.

Good definition of high-contrast elements with some visible sharpening artifacts.	Subtle detail: Hair Noise suppression tends to blur detail in areas of subtle contrast.

Sharpness. The Panasonic G1 captures fairly sharp images overall, though a few edge enhancement artifacts are visible on high-contrast subjects such as the branches in the crop above left. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows some moderate noise suppression artifacts in the darkest areas of the model’s hair, smudging individual strands together, though quite a few strands are visible in the lighter shadows. Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost “watercolor” look appears.

RAW vs In-Camera JPEGs
As noted above, the Panasonic G1 produces fairly sharp in-camera JPEGs using the kit lens. As is almost always the case, quite a bit more detail can be obtained from carefully processing RAW files than can be seen in the in-camera JPEGs. The Panasonic G1’s JPEGs are quite good straight from the camera, but it’s surprising how much more detail is visible after processing in a good RAW converter. Take a look below, to see what we mean:

Camera JPEG (Fine)	RAW via SilkyPix (“Emphatic Sharpness”)	RAW via ACR 5.2 (USM=300%, radius=0.3)

In the table above, mousing over a link at the bottom will load the corresponding crop in the area above. As of this writing (early November, 2008), Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) doesn’t yet support the Panasonic G1, so all we have to compare with is the SilkyPix software that’s bundled with the G1. SilkyPix appears to be a very sophisticated RAW processor that provides lots of control over the image processing it performs. In the crops above, we dialed up the sharpness setting in its demosaicing control panel somewhat, and then used the “Emphatic Sharpness” preset on its sharpening panel. We also applied unsharp masking at the output stage, with an intensity of 100% and radius of 0.3 pixel.

SilkyPix’s processing is far from speedy; it busied-out both CPUs on my dual-core 2.3 GHz Mac G5 for a good 20-30 seconds to process each file. The results were quite impressive though, with very good color (ACR’s color often leaves something to be desired, unless you develop custom profiles for your camera) and really excellent detail. As noted, it’s far from a speedy package to work in, but it does offer batch processing, and patience in learning its settings will be rewarded. (As you can see above, though, SilkyPix’s default exposure and color settings did result in a rather different tone curve and sky color, when compared with the original camera file.)

Update 11/25/08: Added ACR 5.2 converted RAW file. Mouse over the links to compare crops, and click the link to download the full image.

ISO & Noise Performance
Low noise up to ISOÂ 400, moderate to high at higher ISOs.

Default High ISOÂ Noise Reduction
ISO 100	ISO 200	ISO 400
ISO 800	ISO 1600	ISO 3200

The Panasonic G1’s images are quite clean at ISOs 100 and 200; no complaints here. We start to see a very fine, tight “grain” pattern at ISO 400, but detail is still pretty good, with just a bit of chroma noise creeping into the shadows. The grain is slightly more evident at ISO 800, there’s more chroma noise and detail starts to suffer due to noise reduction. At ISO 1,600, we see additional detail loss, purple and yellow blotches, and subtle signs of some horizontal banding in shadow areas. At ISO 3,200, noise grain is much courser and blurring stronger, resulting in a noticeable drop in detail with more obvious horizontal banding. Overall, we were impressed with the Panasonic G1’s high-ISO performance: It seems that Panasonic has learned a few new tricks for noise processing, as the G1’s high-ISO images are markedly improved over those of the earlier DMC-L1, despite the G1’s smaller pixels, and are generally better-looking than we’ve come to expect from Four-Thirds format cameras in the past. (Olympus’ new E-520 does pretty well too, but it has somewhat larger pixels and a coarser grain to its noise patterns.)

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with good overall detail, but somewhat high default contrast and limited dynamic range. Good low-light performance, but metering and autofocus struggled at bit at lower light levels.

+0.3 EV	+0.7 EV	+1.0 EV

Sunlight. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 struggled a bit with the deliberately harsh lighting of this test, as contrast was a little high at its default setting, and the dynamic range seemed limited. Although we liked the tones in the model’s face better at +1.0 EV with the default contrast, we preferred the +0.7 EV exposure overall, as the +1.0 EV shot left so much of the shirt blown out. Depending on the photographer, you could lean one way or the other, pros and advanced users would want to shoot darker, to hold highlight detail. For those DMC-G1 owners that are going to want to just print an image, the +1.0 image would probably produce a better-looking print with little or no tweaking. The bottom line though, is that the G1 had difficulty with the wide dynamic range of this shot.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

Contrast Adjustment
As mentioned previously, the camera’s limited contrast adjustment was at least some help in handling the harsh lighting.

Minimum Contrast
Contrast set to lowest, +1.0 EV	Contrast set to lowest, Auto Exposure

At its lowest contrast setting, the Panasonic G1 did a better job of preserving highlight detail, maintaining fairly natural-looking skin tones, and holding more in the shadows, but the limited dynamic range makes it perform a bit below average in this regard.

Contrast Adjustment Examples
-2	0	+2

The shots above show the results of the minimum, default and maximum contrast settings. While you can see the extremes, it’s pretty hard to evaluate small differences in contrast on small thumbnails like these, click on any thumbnail to go to the full-size image. That said, like the Saturation adjustment, the control for Contrast is a bit subtle in its effect. It seems to basically leave the strongest highlights alone, and then apply a proportional boost to tones as it moves down the tone curve. To make the most of it in a shot like this, you’d want to drop the exposure to hold the highlights and then apply a good slug of contrast reduction (probably the maximum, the steps are pretty small).

The Panasonic G1’s contrast adjustment helps a little with the strong highlights here, but we’d really like to see more steps of this size, to cover a slightly greater range. – And even with the lowest contrast setting, the dynamic range isn’t terribly impressive: While dropping the exposure slightly helped the highlights, and the contrast adjustment opened up the shadows somewhat, the camera still struggles with the deliberately harsh lighting. (Which means it will also have issues with strong, direct sunlight.)

Intelligent Exposure Examples
Low at +0.3 EV	Standard at +0.3 EV	High at +0.3 EV
	Off at +0.3 EV
Low at 0 EV	Standard at 0 EV	High at 0 EV
	Off at 0 EV

Panasonic’s iExposure
The above shots are examples of Panasonic’s Intelligent Exposure (or iExposure) at work. There are three levels of iExposure available: Low, Standard and High, plus Off. The results here were a little unexpected; not so much in terms of what the function was doing as in how it varied when varying the settings from low to high.

To its credit, even with no exposure compensation at all, the Standard and High settings produced quite decent exposures with this very harsh lighting. The Low setting was the surprise: Its results were almost what we would have expected from the High setting: Shadows were opened up considerably, while highlights were either left alone or held back a little. The result is a little unnatural, kind of like using too much of the highlight/shadow tool in Adobe Photoshop. Standard and High appeared to boost the highlights some as well, producing more local contrast, but also losing detail in some of the highlights.

With a positive exposure compensation setting of +0.3 EV, though, the Intelligent Exposure control seemed to blow out the highlights about equally with all three active settings (low/standard/high). It did significantly brighten the shadows, and we suspect consumers would be happier with results from any of the three settings than they would be with the default exposure.

While this is only a very limited test of Intelligent Exposure’s abilities, we think it will be welcomed by many consumers, as it takes some of the burden for adjusting exposure compensation off the shoulders of the user.

Face Detection
Off at 0 EV	On at 0 EV

Face Detection
Just like most Point & Shoot cameras these days (and some DSLRs in Live View mode), the Panasonic G1 has the ability to detect faces, and adjust exposure and focus accordingly. The G1 does it automatically in Intelligent Auto (iAuto) mode, when a Portrait scene mode is selected, or when Face Detection AF mode is selected. As you can see from the examples above, it really works, as the image with face detection enabled is better exposed for the face, however we’d prefer a slightly higher exposure as the mannequin’s face is still a touch dim. Panasonic says the system can detect up to 15 faces in a scene, though we did not test that claim.

Â	1 fc 11 lux	1/2 fc 5.5 lux	1/4 fc 2.7 lux	1/8 fc 1.3 lux	1/16 fc 0.67 lux	1/16 fc 0.67 lux NR=-2	1/16 fc 0.67 lux NR=0	1/16 fc 0.67 lux NR=+2
ISO 100	1.6 sec f3.5	2.5 sec f3.5	5 sec f3.5	15 sec f3.5	30 sec f3.5	30 sec f3.5	30 sec f3.5	30 sec f3.5
ISO 200	0.8 sec f3.5	1.3 sec f3.5	2.5 sec f3.5	8 sec f3.5	15 sec f3.5	15 sec f3.5	15 sec f3.5	15 sec f3.5
ISO 400	0.4 sec f3.5	0.6 sec f3.5	1.3 sec f3.5	4 sec f3.5	8 sec f3.5	6 sec f3.5	8 sec f3.5	8 sec f3.5
ISO 800	1/5 sec f3.5	0.3 sec f3.5	0.6 sec f3.5	1.6 sec f3.5	4 sec f3.5	4 sec f3.5	4 sec f3.5	4 sec f3.5
ISO 1600	1/10 sec f3.5	1/6 sec f3.5	0.3 sec f3.5	1 sec f3.5	2 sec f3.5	2 sec f3.5	2 sec f3.5	2 sec f3.5
ISO 3200	1/20 sec f3.5	1/13 sec f3.5	1/6 sec f3.5	0.5 sec f3.5	1 sec f3.5	1 sec f3.5	1 sec f3.5	1 sec f3.5

Low light. The Panasonic DMC-G1 performed reasonably well in our low light test, capturing acceptably bright images down to the lowest light level we test at, at all ISO settings. This equates to about 1/16 the brightness of average city street lighting at night, so the DMC-G1 should be able to take well-exposed photos in almost any environment you can see well enough to walk around in. The G1’s metering at these low levels wasn’t very reliable though, as can be seen from the somewhat uneven exposures. Color balance was pretty good, though. The G1 offers 5 levels of noise reduction. We show results for the lowest light level at -2 (min.), 0 (normal) and +2 (max.) values in the three columns at the right-hand side above. Noise is low to moderate below ISOÂ 800. At ISOs 800, 1600 and especially 3200, noise is rather high compared to most DSLRs these days, with some horizontal banding detectable in darker areas.

The camera’s autofocus system was able to focus on the subject almost down to the 1/8 foot-candle light level unassisted, which isn’t quite as good as most DSLRs. The DMC-G1 does have an autofocus-assist light option, which should help in darker situations as long as the subject is within range and has sufficient contrast.

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child’s ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) Digital “SLRs” like the Panasonic G1 do much better than point & shoots, but you still shouldn’t expect a quick autofocus lock with moving subjects. (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don’t have a tripod handy.)

Output Quality

Print Quality
Great print quality, good color, sharp 13×19 inch prints from camera JPEGs, 16×20 inch ones from RAW files. (Even 20×30 prints from RAW are very usable for wall display.)

The Panasonic G1’s printed output is really impressive, but to get the best results, you really need to work from its RW2 RAW files. In-camera JPEGs are a little soft looking, due in part to conservative in-camera sharpening, but likely also in part to noise-reduction processing, even at low ISO settings. SilkyPix (the RAW processing software bundled with the Panasonic G1 – Adobe Camera Raw doesn’t support it yet) reveals noticeably more fine detail, particularly in areas of subtle subject contrast. Sharpening the in-camera JPEGs helps some, but never brings out the detail in lower-contrast regions that SilkyPix finds in the RW2 files.

Working from RAW files, we felt that 20×30 inch prints would be entirely acceptable for display at any normal viewing distance: If we got up close and squinted, they were a little soft, but at normal viewing distances of more than a foot or so, they looked crisp and very detailed. The in-camera JPEGs might pass as 20x30s if viewed from a little distance, but looked entirely fine at 16×20, and sharp indeed when printed at 13×19.

ISO 800 shots made really great looking 13×19 inch prints, just slightly soft, and with a little chroma noise to be seen in the shadows. (A good third-party noise reduction program would likely make short work of the little we saw.) ISO 800 prints at 11×14 inches were tack-sharp. At ISO 1,600, we felt that 8.5×11 was really as large as most people would like to print, but that will depend a lot on the subject matter of your photos: ISO 1,600 images with more fine detail and fewer shadow areas would likely look just fine at 11×14. Increasing the noise reduction setting to +2 decreases both luminance and chroma noise, but some soft chroma still remains in shadows. Still, we suspect most users would be satisfied with the resulting 11×14 inch prints. At ISO 3,200, chroma noise becomes much more of an issue, making even 5×7 inch prints problematic if they have much shadow area. – But if you crank the noise reduction setting up to +2, 5×7 inch output looks pretty good, albeit still with some chroma noise visible in the shadows, which is visible even in 4×6 inch prints. (We’d definitely not push them to 8.5×11 output.)

Part of what makes the Panasonic G1’s high-ISO shots print so well is that what noise is there is very fine-grained, so it tends to drop out quite nicely in the printing process. Looking at its images under high magnification, in areas were there’s lots of subject detail (so the anti-noise processing will be dialed back somewhat), it’s apparent that Panasonic has opted to leave a fair bit of fine-grained luminance noise in the final images, rather than trying to flatten it out. This can make parts of its images look rough when you’re pixel-peeping at 100% or larger on-screen; but when printed, the images look great, with plenty of detail, and only modest amounts of noise.

We also found the Panasonic G1’s prints very appealing when it came to color. Colors were bright and attractive, without appearing overdone. If there was any weak point, it might be in the G1’s handling of colors in the yellow to yellow-green portion of the spectrum. Yellows were shifted slightly toward green, while the yellow-greens were shifted a bit toward yellow. The net effect wasn’t anything like a glaring problem, it’s just something we noticed in the colors of the embroidery threads in our Still Life target.

All in all, very impressive print quality from a little camera; The verdict is clear, you no longer have to carry a full-size SLR to get excellent print quality.

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we’ve found that you can only tell just so much about a camera’s image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there’s no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon Pro9000 studio printer, and on the Canon iP5200 here in the office. (See the Canon Pixma Pro9000 review for details on that model.)

Panasonic G1 Super High-Res Electronic Viewfinder

The Panasonic G1’s electronic viewfinder clearly sets a new quality standard for EVFs in digital cameras. The keys to the Panasonic G1’s exceptional EVF performance lie in two technologies. First, the active element of the display is an LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) chip. This technology actually controls the state of the liquid crystals with electric fields projected through the silicon. This means that all the active circuitry can be on the back side of the chip, so the entire display surface is active: With no dead areas between pixels, light is reflected from the entire surface, so there are no distracting black areas surrounding each pixel.

Because the LCOS chip is reflective, you generate an image by bouncing light off its surface, rather than by passing light through it as in a conventional transmissive LCD. It turns out that LCOS chips can also change states very rapidly; fast enough that you can display the red, green, and blue color channels in very quick succession with no blurring or crosstalk between the color channels. Human persistence of vision blends these together into a single pixel displaying a full range of color. Looking into the Panasonic G1’s EVF then, you don’t see individual red, green, and blue stripes or dots — there is no grid — you just see a surface of continuous color, which looks more like an optical viewfinder. To be fair, this isn’t a new innovation with Panasonic: The original Minolta A1 digicam used similar technology, but its EVF had much lower resolution, and considerably lower image quality overall. The concept has certainly been seen before, but the Panasonic G1’s EVF takes the technology to another level.

Light for the G1’s EVF comes from a trio of red, green, and blue LEDs: They strobe on and off in very quick succession (180 times a second, for a 60 frames/second overall refresh rate), as the LCOS chip displays the red, green, and blue image planes in lock-step. I expected to see some tearing of the display, or perhaps a rainbow effect if the subject moved rapidly, but actually saw very little evidence of this.

The second key technology in the Panasonic G1’s EVF is a holographic diffraction grating that’s curved above the LCOS chip. This optical element reflects the RGB light from the LED array onto the LCOS chip’s surface, but lets the light reflected from the imaging chip pass through unobstructed, out the eyepiece and to the user’s eye. Other technologies could be used to make a reflective imager work in a viewfinder, but the holographic grating allowed Panasonic’s engineers to squeeze the whole assembly into an incredibly compact package.

As befits its heritage in the high-end broadcast TV field, the Panasonic G1’s EVF has impressive specs. It has unusually high resolution for a camera EVF, displaying 800×600 (SVGA resolution) full-color pixels. (A total of 480,000 full-color pixels.) Panasonic equates this with 1.44 million dots in a conventional display, as most displays would need three separate dots for each full-color pixel. In practice, the effective perceptual equivalent of 480,000 full-color pixels is more like 960,000 RGB dots, but the fact remains that this is a very high-resolution, very smooth-looking display. As noted above, the G1’s EVF also refreshes at 60 frames/second, so there’s very little flicker or tearing with moving subjects.

Thanks to its LED illumination, the Panasonic G1’s EVF also has a very wide color gamut, covering 100% of the NTSC color space, an unusually broad range for a camera display. As you’d expect, it also covers 100% of the field of view of the camera, since it’s getting its image directly from the camera’s image sensor. Finally the the EVF’s optics give an effective magnification of about 0.7x relative to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera. This is about the same viewing magnification as is found on most higher-end SLRs. In practical terms, it means that with a 35mm lens attached (roughly equivalent to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera), the image in the viewfinder will match what you’re seeing through your other eye. This makes it easier to shoot with both eyes open, so the eye not looking through the viewfinder can give you much better peripheral vision of subjects about to come into the field of view, etc. The viewfinder also offers a generous diopter adjustment of -4 to +4, adjustable via a dial to the left. Infra-red sensors just to the right of the eyepiece are used to detect when an eye is moved close to the viewfinder, to automatically switch between the LCD monitor and viewfinder. An LVF/LCD button to the left of the eyepiece can also be used to switch manually.

Panasonic G1 Full-time Live View

By its nature, the Panasonic G1 is always in “Live View” mode: In that respect, it’s like any point & shoot digicam with the combination of an electronic viewfinder and rear-panel LCD that works as a viewfinder as well. The differences with this camera are that it has interchangeable lenses, focuses a lot faster than the average digicam, and has a larger sensor to provide better low-light performance than typical pocket cameras.

To their credit, though, Panasonic seems to have made more of an effort in the G1 to have the viewfinder display accurately mimic what you’ll see in the final image file once you’ve snapped the shutter. They seem to be trying to go the point & shoot market one better with their viewfinder display accuracy and simulations, and they seem to be succeeding.

The shots above show two options the camera gives you for viewing your subject in record mode. On the left, the subject fills a larger area of the display, but the exposure information is overlaid on the bottom of the image. This gives more image area, but potentially makes the exposure info a bit harder to read. You can instead opt for a smaller view of the subject, putting a sharply contrasting black background behind the exposure readouts, making them easier to see. The row of camera-mode information across the top of the display is always overlaid. The shots above show the display on the rear-panel LCD; the information overlay on the EVF screen is considerably less extensive. (See the Operation tab of this review for illustrations and callouts describing all the information shown on the various displays.)

There are a couple of grid options available, as well as a histogram display with a nifty trick: You can position it pretty much anywhere on the display screen that you like. In the screen shot above, I’ve put it in the lower right corner.

Shutter Speed Preview

Now here’s a feature that really makes you take notice: An LCD preview mode that simulates the effect of long shutter times! It’s super-handy for seeing just how much blur a slow shutter speed will introduce into a scene, and great for finding the best shutter speed to blur subjects like moving water and cars at night; the kind of subject that’s hard to visualize without taking several test shots.

The video at right shows how the Shutter speed simulation works, with a toy car as the subject. We stopped down the G1’s lens and set the ISO to produce a shutter speed in the range of 1/2 – 1/4 second, and recorded the image on the G1’s LCD screen with another digicam. You can see the effect very clearly, it really does a pretty good job of simulating what the final image will look like. (Apologies for the moire patterns on the video, the pixels of the LCD screen and the recording digicam’s video pixels interfered with each other a little.)

Panasonic G1 EVF & LCD User Experience

We have never been particular fans of EVFs over conventional optical viewfinders. Part of this has to do with the relatively low resolution of past EVFs, an issue that EVF in the Panasonic G1 addresses rather decisively. Resolution only accounts for part of our dislike though; the other part is dynamic range, or contrast ratio, to use the term more commonly associated with electronic displays. It’s been our experience that electronic viewfinders generally do a poor job of holding detail in highlights, shadows, or both. We’ve often been frustrated when trying to compose landscape shots that contained important cloud detail with EVF cameras: Areas of clear sky and clouds were often indistinguishable from each other. At the other end of the tonal scale, detail in shadows has often been difficult to pick out.

The viewfinder in the Panasonic G1 seems to do a better than average job at the highlight end of the tonal scale, but we often found detail lacking at the shadow end of the scale. Looking into the EVF, dark areas of the image never became truly black. The effect was similar to what we remember seeing on early model LCD televisions, where the blacks just weren’t very black. Of course, the G1’s live view circuitry amplifies the signal from the sensor whenever you’re viewing a dimly-lit scene, so you can see what’s going on pretty well, even you’re shooting in rather dark surroundings. That’s not the issue, though. Where we had trouble seeing what was going on was in situations where there were both bright and dark portions of the scene, and where there was important shadow detail we needed to see in order to frame properly, but these areas were too dark. There’d be good detail visible down to a certain brightness level, but beyond that would be nothing but a dark grey. We first noticed this with the G1’s EVF, but the effect is present (albeit to a somewhat lesser extent) in the rear-panel LCD as well.

In writing about this, while we noticed a lack of detail in shadow areas in the Panasonic G1’s EVF, we realized that we’d not made this a focus of our testing and analysis in the Live View SLRs we’ve tested to date. In the interest of fairness, we took a quick look back at some of the Live View SLRs we had around the office, to see how much of an issue this is with other cameras. What we found surprised us: There was a wide range of behavior in various cameras’ Live View displays, and camera price wasn’t at all an indicator of performance in this area. Some of the most expensive cameras showed only so-so shadow detail, while some relatively inexpensive cameras produced very clear displays.

Overall, Olympus was the big winner in the shadow-detail derby, as its cameras appear to selectively boost the image amplification in large, dark areas of the frame, while leaving brighter areas untouched. The result is very clear (if a little noisy) shadow detail, even when other parts of the image are very bright. Most other cameras we looked at (Canon 50D, Nikon D300, D700, Sony A350) didn’t seem to adjust image brightness dynamically, and the G1’s LCD actually showed a bit more shadow detail under similar conditions than the Canon, Nikon, and Sony cameras. The G1’s EVF showed considerably less shadow detail than either its LCD screen or the LCD screens of the competing SLRs.

So the bottom line on the dynamic range of the G1’s viewfinders is a bit of a mixed bag: The LCD shows better than average dynamic range and shadow detail, while its EVF shows less than average. The good news is that you have the option of switching to the LCD if you really need to frame for the shadows.

Ultimately, while we prefer an optical viewfinder, the Panasonic G1’s advanced technology offers users the best alternative that’s ever been made available to still photographers.

Viewfinder Test Results

Accuracy
Excellent accuracy from both the electronic viewfinder and LCD monitor.

14mm, EVF	45mm, EVF
14mm, LCD	45mm, LCD

The Panasonic G1’s electronic viewfinder proved very accurate, showing about 100% coverage at both wide-angle and telephoto. The LCD monitor was also very accurate, at about 100% coverage as well. Excellent results here, as you’d expect from electronic viewfinders.

Panasonic G1 Flash

The Panasonic G1’s built-in flash has a guide number rating of 36 feet (11 meters) at ISO 100, translating to a range of about 10.2 feet at ISO 100 with an f/3.5 lens or 6.4 feet at f/5.6. That’s a little weaker than most digital SLRs, which are typically rated at 12 or 13 meters. The Panasonic G1’s flash is released manually by sliding the Flash Open lever toward the front. Raising the flash enables it, though it can be defeated using a menu selection. It never pops up automatically like some models, which can be good or bad, depending on your point of view. A novice would probably appreciate an auto-popup flash, but someone with experience might think it nuisance.

When open, the flash doesn’t extend very high, so at wide angle even the smallest Micro Four Thirds lens casts a shadow when the lens hood is attached. As you can see from our test results below, it clears the 14-45mm kit lens at wide angle without the lens hood in our standard test shots, though you will run into shadows at times. The Panasonic G1 has a dedicated AF assist LED, and unlike the L10’s, the G1’s built-in flash can cannot be used as an auxiliary AF assist, probably because focusing speeds are not quite fast enough. The G1’s flash is disabled by pressing down until it clicks shut.

The built-in flash has seven modes: Auto, Auto with Red-Eye Reduction, Forced On, Forced On with Red-Eye Reduction, Slow Sync, Slow Sync with Red-Eye Reduction and Forced Off. Flash modes are changed via the Record menu, and available settings vary depending on exposure mode. A Digital Red-Eye Reduction feature is offered, which when enabled, will attempt to remove red-eye after the photo is taken, via post-processing. A second curtain synchronization mode is also offered. X-Sync (the maximum shutter speed with the flash enabled) is 1/160 second, a bit below average these days, and there is no mention of a higher-speed FP (focal plane) mode. There doesn’t appear to be wireless flash support, as offered on competing Olympus Four-Thirds SLRs.

The Panasonic G1 allows you to adjust flash and ambient exposure independently of each other, by providing flash exposure compensation between -2 and +2 EV in one-third EV increments. Flash exposure bracketing is not supported, and there is no manual flash mode where output level can be set as a percentage of full power.

Like an SLR, the DMC-G1 also has a dedicated hot shoe, for mounting external flash units, like Panasonic’s DMW-FL360. Olympus flash units such as the FL-50, FL-36, FL-20 should also work, and non-dedicated units can also be used provided they have a compatible trigger voltage and polarity. (Panasonic does not seem to mention the trigger voltage or polarity in the G1’s user manual, though.) The advantages of a good external flash are many: more power for increased range, faster recycle times, longer battery life, reduced red-eye, auto zoom to match coverage to the current focal length, and the ability to adjust the tilt and swivel of the head to allow light from the flash to be bounced off nearby surfaces such as a ceiling, for a diffuse effect. Most external flash units have a more powerful AF assist illuminator built-in than the one on the body, and other useful features such as modeling flash are common on higher end models.

Flash Test Results

Coverage and Range
A moderately powerful flash, but uneven coverage at wide angle. Slightly higher than average positive exposure compensation required.

14mm	45mm
Normal Flash, +1.0 EV	Slow-Sync Mode, Default

Coverage and Exposure. Flash coverage is quite uneven at wide angle, but coverage at telephoto is much more even. Indoors under incandescent background lighting, the Panasonic G1’s flash performed quite well, requiring just slightly more than average positive exposure compensation of +1.0 EV for a bright image. The camera’s slow-sync flash mode required no compensation, though the longer shutter time results in a warmer cast from the ambient background lighting.

Flash Range: Wide Angle
6 ft	7 ft	8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft
1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100
12 ft	13 ft	14 ft	15 ft	16 ft
1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100	1/30 sec f3.5 ISO 100

Flash Range: Telephoto
6 ft	7 ft	8 ft	9 ft	10 ft	11 ft
1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100
12 ft	13 ft	14 ft	15 ft	16 ft
1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100	1/30 sec f5.6 ISO 100

ISO 100 Range. Flash power remains pretty strong to about 13 feet at wide angle. At telephoto, the flash starts out a bit dim at our shortest distance of 6 feet, increases in brightness until about 11 feet, then gradually gets dimmer from there. The increasing brightness from 6 to 11 feet is odd: The flash exposure system seems to have been fooled somewhat by light reflecting back from the light parts of the target, possibly the reflective pot lid.

Manufacturer-Specified Flash Range
Wide Angle	Telephoto
10.2 feet ISO 100	6.2 feet ISO 100

Manufacturer-Specified Flash Test. Panasonic rates the G1’s flash with a GN of 11 meters at ISO 100. That works out to about 10.2 feet at an aperture of f/3.5 and 6.2 feet at an aperture of f/5.6. In the shots above, the DMC-G1 seems to perform exactly as Panasonic says it will at wide angle, providing a bright exposure at the rated distance, however, as we saw in the flash range series above, the telephoto shot is a bit dim at 6.2 feet.

Note: Our standard test method for flash range uses a fixed setting of ISO 100, to provide a fair basis of comparison between cameras. With the above test, we’re also looking at whether their stated specification rings true.

Panasonic G1 High ISO Noise Reduction

The Panasonic G1 offers 5 levels of noise-reduction settings also allow you quite a bit of flexibility in choosing how you want to make the trade-off between subject detail and noise levels. The combination of shooting with NR turned down to the lowest setting (-2) and using a good noise-filtering program after the fact can produce very clean images with lots of fine detail in them.

See for yourself how the noise reduction works under daylight-balanced lighting. Click on any of the crops below to see the corresponding full-sized image.

High ISO Noise Reduction Comparison Daylight-balanced illumination
	-2	-1	0	+2
I S O 4 0 0
	-2	-1	0	+2
I S O 8 0 0
	-2	-1	0	+2
I S O 1 6 0 0
	-2	-1	0	+2
I S O 3 2 0 0

The above crops show the effects of four (-2, -1, 0 and +2) of the Panasonic G1’s five levels of noise reduction available, under the studio HMI lighting we use to simulate daylight. To our eyes, the default (0) level of noise reduction strikes a good balance between noise and subtle subject detail, although the red fabric swatch presents a real challenge, as it does for virtually all cameras we test. Cranking the noise reduction setting up to +2 produces very smooth-looking images, while still maintaining good detail in areas of high local contrast (as seen in the circular scale), but a lot of detail is lost in areas of subtle contrast (the red fabric swatch is a particularly challenging subject, and the detail loss there is worse than you’d find in most real-world examples). At the other end of the scale, the -2 noise reduction setting leaves a lot of noise in the image, but also leaves the subject detail largely undisturbed: Use this setting if you have good third-party noise reduction software; with appropriate processing, the result could be quite good.

But how does the G1 compare to other compact SLRs? The following table compares default NR settings to the Canon XS, Nikon D60 and Olympus E-420, all 10MP models which have the advantage of fewer pixels (and hence potentially lower image noise, but at the cost of some resolution). In the case of the Canon and Nikon, they have larger APS-C sized sensors as well. Still, we think these comparisons are important because the G1 is being positioned as a step-up camera for consumers migrating from point & shoot digicams. The G1 is more expensive than any of the cameras in this group, but its small size and appealing design may entice many consumers who may have been considering one of its less-expensive competitors.

High ISO Comparison with 10MP SLRs Daylight-balanced illumination
	CanonXS	Nikon D60	Olympus E-420	Panasonic G1
I S O 4 0 0
	CanonXS	Nikon D60	Olympus E-420	Panasonic G1
I S O 8 0 0
	CanonXS	Nikon D60	Olympus E-420	Panasonic G1
I S O 1 6 0 0
	CanonXS	Nikon D60	Olympus E-420	Panasonic G1
I S O 3 2 0 0	N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.		N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.
	N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.		N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.
	N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.		N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.

Up to about ISO 800, the Panasonic G1 competes very well with the other cameras in this particular comparison, although the Canon Rebel XS consistently beats all the others (the G1 included) in terms of the crispness of its images. The G1 is arguable the equal of the XS in the detail it resolves, but images from the XS show crisper-looking edges, particularly in areas of high contrast. (The G1 holds the edge in the always-problematical red fabric swatch.) At ISO 1,600 and above, though, the G1’s default noise suppression has more difficulty with the red swatch, and luminance noise in the flat grey background increases noticeably. (Looking at the first set of samples though, the -1 noise reduction setting restores a lot of the lost detail in the red swatch, albeit at the cost of higher noise in the grey background.) At ISO 3,200, the Nikon D60 is the only one of these competitors left in the running. The D60 shows somewhat less noise in the grey background, and at least a smidgen of detail in the red fabric swatch, but the G1 wins easily in terms of fine detail shown in the circular scale.

Overall, the Panasonic G1 puts on a good high-ISO showing against its 10-megapixel competitors, although the Canon Rebel XS wins handily in all ISO levels it competes at.

Now, let’s see how the G1 compares to other 12-megapixel SLRs, such as the Canon XSi and the Nikon D90, both of which have larger ASP-C size sensors, and which also sell closer to the G1’s price point. (The Canon XSi is a bit less expensive than the Panasonic G1, the Nikon D90 sells for quite a bit more.)

High ISO Comparison with 12MP SLRs Simulated Daylight
	CanonXSi	Nikon D90	Panasonic G1
I S O 4 0 0
	CanonXSI	Nikon D90	Panasonic G1
I S O 8 0 0
	CanonXSI	Nikon D90	Panasonic G1
I S O 1 6 0 0
	CanonXSi	Nikon D90	Panasonic G1
I S O 3 2 0 0	N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.
	N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.
	N/A ISO 3,200 not supported.

Here again, the Panasonic G1 holds its own quite well up to about ISO 800. The D90 keeps the grey background quite a bit cleaner, albeit at some loss of detail in the red fabric, while Canon’s XSi again has the edge in crispness.

At ISO 1,600, the G1 loses significant detail in the red swatch, and its luminance noise in the grey background is higher than either of the other cameras (the Nikon D90 wins big on that score). That said, though, while the G1 has more luminance noise than the XSi, the XSi shows considerably more chroma noise. The XSi doesn’t provide a setting of ISO 3,200, but the Nikon D90 does, and handily defeats the G1 at that extreme ISO level.

All in all, we felt that the Panasonic G1 held its own against SLRs with APS-C size sensors pretty well, frankly much better than we’d expected. Up to about ISO 800, it was really a toss-up between the various competitors, but the G1 gave up some ground at ISO 1,600, particularly to the Canon cameras. At ISO 3,200, the Nikon D60 beat it in some areas, but clearly lost out when it came to fine detail. The Nikon D90 beat it across the board, but also sells for almost 60% more than the G1 at street prices. At the end of the day, a very credible performance from the Panasonic G1; Panasonic’s engineers clearly seem to have gotten a handle on high-ISO noise-reduction processing.

Panasonic G1 Imatest Results

We routinely use Norman Koren’s excellent “Imatest” analysis program for quantitative, thoroughly objective analysis of digicam test images. I highly recommend it to our technically-oriented readers, as it’s far and away the best, most comprehensive analysis program I’ve found to date.

My comments below are just brief observations of what we see in the Imatest results. A full discussion of all the data Imatest produces is really beyond the scope of this review: Visit the Imatest web site for a full discussion of what the program measures, how it performs its computations, and how to interpret its output.

Here’s some of the results produced by Imatest for the Panasonic G1:

sRGB Accuracy Comparison
Panasonic G1	Canon XS	Nikon D60	Olympus E-420

The Panasonic DMC-G1 showed good color accuracy, with only minor oversaturation of bright reds, deep blues and some greens. The G1 actually undersaturates some yellows and greens. Hue accuracy was also very good, with most of the hue shift occurring in the cyans, reds, and oranges. Average saturation was 104.9% (oversaturated by 4.9%, mostly in the reds and blues). Average “delta-C” color error was 6.47 after correction for saturation, which is quite good, just a small step down from the best cameras we’ve tested. (Delta-C is the same as the more commonly referred to delta-E, but delta-C takes into account only color differences, ignoring luminance variation.) All in all, a very good color response for this class of camera. Mouse over the links below the illustration above to compare results with recent entry-level SLRs.

Adobe RGB Accuracy Comparison
Panasonic G1	Canon XS	Nikon D60	Olympus E-420

As is true of most SLRs, when using the Adobe RGB color space (which provides a much wider gamut, or range of colors that can be expressed), the Panasonic G1 delivers more highly saturated color, though the increase compared to sRGB is not as stark as with most cameras. Average saturation was 105.6% which is only slightly greater, and average saturation-corrected hue error was 5.96 “delta-C” units, which is actually slightly more accurate than the sRGB result. Again, mouse over the links below the illustration above to compare results with recent entry-level SLRs.

This image shows how the Panasonic G1 actually rendered the colors of the MacBeth chart, compared to a numerically ideal treatment. In each color swatch, the outer perimeter shows the color as actually captured by the camera, the inner square shows the numerically correct color after correcting for the luminance of the photographed chart (as determined by a second-order curve fit to the values of the gray swatches), and the small rectangle inside the inner square shows the numerically correct color, without the luminance correction. This image shows the very good hue and saturation accuracy, as evidenced by the fact that the small rectangles are almost invisible against the luminance-corrected colors in the larger square swatches. The as-captured colors are a little bright for many blues, and a little dark for some warm tones, notably yellows and oranges. We did notice some yellows looked a little dull in some of our test images (see the yellow embroidery thread in our Still Life target), but felt that the overall visual impact of the G1’s color was quite positive. If Panasonic could just clean up their handling of the range of spectrum from orange through yellow-green, the G1’s color would be truly impressive.

There’s a lot in this particular graph, a lot more than we have room to go into here. (This set of plots has also changed a little in the more recent versions of Imatest. Some of the plots that were shown here previously are now shown in other Imatest output. Since we largely focus on the Noise Spectrum plot, we’ll only show the graphic above, which includes that plot.)

In comparing these graphs with those from competing cameras, I’ve found that the Noise Spectrum graph at lower right is the most important. Cameras that manage to shift their noise spectrum to higher frequencies have much finer-grained noise structures, making their noise less visually objectionable. In the graph above, this would show up as a noise spectrum curve that remained higher on the right side, representing higher noise frequencies. The champion at this was (and still is) the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II, which produced remarkably fine-grained image noise, even at very high ISOs.

Chroma Noise. Middle Gray MacBeth patch, magnified 400% with levels adjusted to emphasize ISO 100 chroma noise.

The Panasonic G1 does a pretty good job of keeping plenty of the luminance noise energy (indicated by the black line) at high frequencies. What little low-ISO luminance image noise that’s there is quite fine-grained as a result. Chroma noise, though, is much higher, especially in the red and blue channels, some of the highest noise values we’ve seen in the DSLR category. When inspecting low ISO G1 images very closely, you can see blotches of chroma noise in neutral colors, such as the darker gray patches in the MacBeth chart (see the exaggerated example at right – NOTE that this is exaggerated 400% over the original file data). While the Panasonic G1 did quite well at high ISO shooting, we did see quite a bit of chroma noise in shadow areas. Cranking the noise reduction setting up to +2 alleviated a lot of this, but we’d have been happier if it wasn’t there in the first place.

Above is the same set of noise data at ISO 1,600. Here, the Noise Spectrum graph is shifted quite a bit toward the left-hand, lower-frequency side than it was at ISO 100, coarsening the “grain” of the image noise patterns quite a bit. The red, blue and green channels still exhibit a bit more noise at the low end of the frequency spectrum, but, interestingly, are much lower relative to the luminance noise, tracking it closely at all but the lowest frequencies. We were a little surprised to see this; that the differential between chroma and luminance noise was actually lower at high ISOs than at low ones. – Particularly given that our perception was consistently that chroma noise was the biggest issue at high ISO settings. Perhaps this is because the luminance noise tended to be so fine-grained, while the red and blue-channel noise tended to be blotchy. (Even though the luminance curve in the figure above is shifted quite a bit toward the left, low-frequency side relative to the curve at ISO 100 we saw earlier, the G1 still spreads much more of its noise energy to higher frequencies than is common.)

Here’s the same set of noise data at ISO 3,200. Here again, the Noise Spectrum graph is shifted even more toward the left-hand side, coarsening the “grain” of the image noise patterns further.

This chart compares the Panasonic G1’s noise performance over a range of ISOs against that of other cameras. While we continue to show noise plots of this sort because readers ask for them, we each time point out that the noise magnitude is only a small part of the story, the grain pattern being much more important. Here, we can see that the Panasonic G1’s luminance noise magnitude starts out about average relative to its competition, and increases at a fairly constant rate as ISO climes to 800, where it ends up close to most of the pack. However, at ISOs 1,600 and 3,200, G1 luminance noise levels are much higher than the rest. Do keep in mind these measurements are taken with each camera set at default settings, so the shape or position of the curve could be influenced by the settings you choose to use. The Panasonic G1 offers five levels of noise reduction, with the above data collected using the default, middle level. Also, while the G1’s luminance noise at ISO 1,600 is higher than its competitors, the fine-grained structure of it meant that it was less visible in prints, at least up to 8.5×11 inches in size.

Panasonic G1 Dynamic Range Analysis

A key parameter in a digital camera is its Dynamic Range, the range of brightness that can be faithfully recorded. At the upper end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is dictated by the point at which the RGB data “saturates” at values of 255, 255, 255. At the lower end of the tonal scale, dynamic range is determined by the point at which there ceases to be any useful difference between adjacent tonal steps. Note the use of the qualifier “useful” in there: While it’s tempting to evaluate dynamic range as the maximum number of tonal steps that can be discerned at all, that measure of dynamic range has very little relevance to real-world photography. What we care about as photographers is how much detail we can pull out of the shadows before image noise becomes too objectionable. This, of course, is a very subjective matter, and will vary with the application and even the subject matter in question. (Noise will be much more visible in subjects with large areas of flat tints and subtle shading than it would in subjects with strong, highly contrasting surface texture.)

What makes most sense then, is to specify useful dynamic range in terms of the point at which image noise reaches some agreed-upon threshold. To this end, Imatest computes a number of different dynamic range measurements, based on a variety of image noise thresholds. The noise thresholds are specified in terms of f-stops of equivalent luminance variation in the final image file, and dynamic range is computed for noise thresholds of 1.0 (low image quality), 0.5 (medium image quality), 0.25 (medium-high image quality) and 0.1 (high image quality). For most photographers and most applications, the noise thresholds of 0.5 and 0.25 f-stops are probably the most relevant to the production of acceptable-quality finished images, but many noise-sensitive shooters will insist on the 0.1 f-stop limit for their most critical work.

The image below shows the test results from Imatest for an in-camera JPEG file from the Panasonic G1 with a nominally-exposed density step target (Stouffer 4110), and the G1’s settings such as Contrast (0) and iExposure (Off) at their default positions.

Here, we can see that he tone curve shows pretty gradation in highlights, but the shadow end trails off more abruptly. These are pretty good numbers for a Four-Thirds sensor, but lag behind results from the larger APS-C sensors the competition uses.

Above are the results with iExposure adjusted to the Low setting. It produced a slight increase at the highest quality, but a very subtle effect.

Above are the results with iExposure turned at the Standard setting. This time, actually a slight decrease at the highest quality. Again, a very subtle effect.

Above are the results with iExposure turned at the High setting. A pretty nice looking curve, and higher overall dynamic range (10.8 EV), but the noise in the darker patches of the step-chart that were boosted limits the Imatest score at the highest quality level.

Unfortunately, Adobe Camera Raw, our standard RAW converter does not yet support the Panasonic G1, so we couldn’t test the results from RAW at the time of writing (early November 2008).

Turning to the Panasonic G1’s RAW files, we opened RAW version of the iExposure Off file discussed above in SilkyPix (Adobe Camera Raw didn’t support the G1 yet, as of this writing), and played with the highlight recovery and contrast controls to bring out more steps of the Stouffer 4110 target. With SilkyPix’s default noise reduction settings, the result was about a third of a stop more dynamic range at the highest quality level.

Suspecting that noise in the shadows was the primary limiter of the G1’s dynamic range, we processed the RAW file through SilkyPix again, this time with fairly strong noise reduction applied. The result was a dramatic jump in dynamic range, a full 1.2 stops improvement over the camera JPEG. This underscores that the G1 is capable of delivering excellent image quality and dynamic range, when working from RAW files, and when using good noise reduction software. We didn’t list the SilkyPix results in the table below, as they can’t really be compared with those from Adobe Camera Raw; the processing parameters were likely wildly different.

The illustration above shows the results from Adobe Camera Raw 5.2, with Auto settings (slightly better results are likely possible with manually tweaking). As can be seen, the score at the highest quality level increased over camera JPEGs to 7.32 f-stops, while total dynamic range increased to 10.9 f-stops.

Dynamic Range, the bottom line:

The net result was that the G1 performed well when compared against most current Four-Thirds models, but lags behind most DSLRs with APS-C size sensors. The G1 lags behind some other Four-Thirds cameras in RAW mode, because the smaller pixels from the higher-resolution 12-megapixel sensor results in increased noise, which knocked the Imatest score down at the highest quality. This is the same reason it lags behind APS-C models.

To get some perspective, here’s a summary of the Panasonic G1’s dynamic range performance, and how it compares to other digital SLRs that we also have Imatest dynamic range data for. (Results are arranged in order of decreasing dynamic range at the “High” quality level.):

The results shown in the table are interesting. One of the first things that struck me when I initially looked at test data for a wide range of DSLRs, was that here again, purely analytical measurements don’t necessarily correlate all that well with actual photographic experience. There’s no question that the Fuji S3 Pro deserved its place atop the list, as its unique “SR” technology did indeed deliver a very obvious improvement in tonal range in the highlight portion of the tonal scale relative to competing models of its day. (Amazing that it’s now surpassed by even consumer-level models using today’s technology.) I was also surprised to see the analytical results place the original Olympus E-300 as highly as they did, given that our sense of that camera’s images was that they were in fact noisier than those of many other DSLRs that we looked at. In the other direction, I was quite surprised to see the Nikon D2x place as low on the listings as it did, given that we found that camera’s shadow detail to be little short of amazing.

One thing that’s going on here though, is that we tested each camera at its base ISO setting, which should produce best-case noise levels. This is in fact what many photographers will be most interested in, but it does perhaps place some of the Nikons (like the D40) at a disadvantage, as their lowest ISO setting is 200, as compared to the ISO 100 settings available on most other models.

Panasonic G1 Resolution Chart Test Results

The chart above shows consolidated results from spatial frequency response measurements in both the horizontal and vertical axes. The “MTF 50” numbers tend to correlate best with visual perceptions of sharpness, so those are what we focus on here. The uncorrected resolution figures are 1,832 line widths per picture height in the horizontal direction (corresponding to the vertically-oriented edge), and 1,716 lines along the vertical axis (corresponding to the horizontally-oriented edge), for a combined average of 1,774 LW/PH. Correcting to a “standardized” sharpening with a one-pixel radius increased vertical resolution by quite a bit, but horizontal resolution increased only slightly, resulting in an average of 2,000 LW/PH.

The Panasonic G1 delivers excellent resolution, very competitive with other 12-megapixel DSLRs currently on the market. Its images straight from the camera show a lot of detail, and even more can be extracted with careful RAW processing.

To see what’s going on, refer to the plots below, which show the actual edge profiles for both horizontal and vertical edges, in both their original and corrected forms. Here, you can see that a nearly ideal amount of in-camera sharpening is applied in the horizontal direction (undersharpened by only 4.82%, explaining why standardized sharpening wasn’t able to improve on the MTF 50 numbers much), while in-camera sharpening is not as aggressive in the vertical direction (12.5 % undersharpened). Despite the “undersharpening” reported by Imatest though, there is a noticeable “bump” visible in the horizontal edge profile. (A very slight one in the vertical edge profile, but probably negligible.) You should thus turn the camera’s sharpening down a little for optimal results when sharpening in-camera JPEGs post-exposure in Adobe Photoshop or other image editing software.

Panasonic DMC-G1 Modes and Menus

Capture Modes: When powered on, the Panasonic G1 defaults to Record mode. The Exposure Mode dial on top of the camera sets the main shooting mode, with the following options:

• Intelligent Auto: This mode places the camera entirely in control of the exposure, though the user can adjust the exposure compensation and determine the flash mode.
•  Program AE (with Shift): This mode places the camera in control of both aperture and shutter speed, while the user has access to all other menu functions. Once the camera’s exposure system has been activated by half-pressing the shutter button, the user can shift the aperture value and shutter time by rotating the front dial. (The overall exposure remains the same, but you can ask the camera to use a larger or smaller aperture or faster/slower shutter speed.)
•  Aperture Priority: Lets the user control the aperture setting while the camera selects the best shutter speed. (The aperture range varies with the lens in use.)
•  Shutter Priority: The opposite of Aperture Priority, allows the user to set the shutter speed, from 1/4,000 to 60 seconds, while the camera selects the most appropriate aperture setting.
•  Manual: Provides complete user control over the exposure, including both aperture and shutter speed settings. A Bulb shutter setting also becomes available in this mode, allowing variable length exposures for as long as you hold down the shutter button, to a maximum exposure time of four minutes.
• Custom: Up to three sets of shooting modes and settings can be stored, and are accessed quickly in this mode.
• My Color Mode: Lets you adjust color, brightness, or saturation of the image on-screen. (That is, the preview image shown on the LCD will reflect the color adjustments you’ve selected.)
• Scene Mode: Adjusts camera settings (color rendering, flash mode, etc.) to optimize for different subject types: Sunset, Party, Babies (including keeping track of birthdays for two different children, so the Panasonic software can display the child’s age along with the photo), and Pets.
• Night Portrait: Allows slower shutter speeds to be used with flash. Balances the foreground subject illuminated by flash with the ambient light of the background. Sub-options include Night Portrait, Night Scenery, Illuminations (outdoor lighting at night), and Creative Night Scenery, which allows changes in the aperture value for special effects.
• Sports: Adjusts ISO and controls shutter speed to freeze fast-moving subjects. Sub-options include Normal Sports (intelligent ISO control & high shutter speeds), Outdoor Sports (the same, but lower ISOs for shooting in good lighting), Indoor Sports (favors higher ISO speeds for indoor lighting), and Creative Sports (allows direct control of shutter speed).
• Macro: This mode is for close-up pictures of small objects, enhancing color in flowers, etc. Sub-options include Flower, Food, Object and Creative.
• Scenery: Optimizes settings to produce sharp, colorful landscapes. Sub-options include Normal, Nature, Architecture and Creative, the latter allowing control of the shutter speed. (Perhaps for deliberately blurring motion of waterfalls, fountains, etc.)
• Portrait: Optimizes camera settings to reproduce warm, soft skin tones against a slightly blurred background. Sub-options include Normal Portrait (large aperture and soft skin tones), Soft Skin (introducing additional color-based blurring of skin areas by the camera’s processor), Outdoor Portrait (compensates for backlighting), Indoor Portrait (intelligent ISO control to prevent blurring) and Creative Portrait (allows direct control of aperture setting).

Playback Mode: The Playback button on the rear panel accesses Playback mode, where you can review captured images. The left and right arrow keys, as well as the up and down keys, scroll through the images on the card. You can enlarge captured images or display them in an index format for quick viewing.

Panasonic G1 Menus

Pressing the Menu button provides access to the camera’s full menu system. The following options are available in most camera modes as menu tabs down the left side of the display. (Full auto mode greatly reduces the available options, to simplify camera operation.)

Panasonic G1 Record Menu:

Panasonic G1 full Record menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Record menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Record menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Record menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 Playback Menu:

Panasonic G1 full Playback menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Playback menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 Custom Menu:

Panasonic G1 full Custom menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Custom menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Custom menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Custom menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Custom menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 Setup Menu:

Panasonic G1 full Setup menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Setup menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Setup menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 full Setup menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

Panasonic G1 My Menu:

Panasonic G1 My Menu layout
(note, large download for dialup users)

The Panasonic DMC-G1’s My Menu shows the five most recently-used menu options, handy for accessing frequently-used controls quickly. Unlike some My Menu features, you can’t explicitly assign controls to this menu, rather, the most-recently used ones appear here automatically.

Panasonic G1 Introduction

Hands-On Preview: 09/12/08
UPDATE 10/2/08: We’ve gotten our hands on a G1 prototype that’s final hardware/late firmware, and put it through its paces timing-wise. It’s pretty zippy, check out the Performance tab of this review for all the details.
UPDATE 10/23/08: Test shots from a production-level G1 posted! Click on the Samples tab for all the test images we’ve taken so far, including links to select RAW files.
UPDATE 11/04/08: Full Test Results posted from a production unit! Click on the Optics, Exposure and Performance tabs and subtabs for all the details, and stay tuned for the full review.

At the start of August, 2008, Panasonic and Olympus Corp. — its partner in the Four Thirds coalition — jointly announced the development of a new standard for interchangeable lens cameras, dubbed “Micro Four Thirds.” At the time, we described the news as perhaps the most significant camera-related announcement of the year. Just over a month later, the Panasonic G1 has been unveiled as the first Micro Four Thirds product. That Panasonic was first to bat for Micro Four Thirds, rather than its imaging industry partner Olympus, is newsworthy in itself. It shows just how seriously the consumer electronics giant is taking digital imaging, and indeed how much acceptance Panasonic now has in a market once dominated by the traditional camera companies. Just a little under five years since it first became a Four Thirds partner — and only two years after it shipped its first digital SLR — Panasonic is now in the position to really push development forward in a big way.

We’ll discuss the Micro Four Thirds standard in a bit more depth below, but let’s first take a look at the camera, which is certainly looking like an impressive debut for the new standard. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 definitely fulfills the size promise of Micro Four Thirds, coming in at 0.25 – 0.3 inches (6 – 8mm) smaller in every direction than the current joint title-holders for world’s smallest digital SLR, Olympus’s identically sized Four Thirds-system siblings the E-410 and E-420. Body-only weight is just a scant 0.2 oz (5g) more than that of the E-410, which is the current record-holder for the crown of lightest digital SLR. So it’s not quite the lightest we’ve seen for an interchangeable-lens digital camera, but definitely very close.

In this svelte frame, the Panasonic G1 has placed a 12.1-megapixel Live MOS image sensor with 4-channel readout, and a newly developed Venus Engine HD imaging processor. Together, these are capable of providing a 60 frames-per-second Live View function, as well as three frames-per-second shooting for up to 7 Raw or unlimited JPEG frames (to the available card / battery capacity, obviously). Panasonic has included a Supersonic Wave Filter dust reduction system in the Lumix G1, as seen in past Four Thirds cameras, which helps to clear dust from the image sensor and avoid the possible adverse effect on image quality.

As well as accepting Micro Four Thirds lenses, the Panasonic G1 can also use existing Four Thirds lenses courtesy of a special converter. Obviously this won’t be a totally optimal solution, since Four Thirds lenses will be larger and heavier (and there’s the slight added size and weight of the converter to take into account as well), but it will likely prove a useful stopgap measure for photographers shooting with both systems, especially until a wider selection of Micro Four Thirds lenses are available. (Note though, that not all current Four Thirds lenses are able to support contrast-detect autofocus: Some current Four Thirds lenses will only support manual focus on the G1.)

Two Micro Four Thirds lenses have been announced alongside the Panasonic G1: a LUMIX G VARIO 14-45mm/F3.5-5.6 ASPH/MEGA O.I.S. lens, and a complementary LUMIX G VARIO 45-200mm/F4.0-5.6/MEGA O.I.S. lens. The names should immediately suggest it, but it bears mentioning anyway: both of these first Micro Four Thirds lenses include mechanical image stabilization, important given that there’s no provision for stabilization in the camera body itself. The 14-45mm lens will be included in the camera bundle, and the 45-200mm lens will be available for purchase separately.

On its rear panel, the Panasonic G1 sports both a large 3.0-inch LCD panel with a resolution of 460,000 dots that’s mounted on a tilt-swivel mechanism allowing viewing from a wide range of angles, as well as an electronic viewfinder (or EVF). Knowing that this would have to compete with the true optical viewfinders on digital SLRs, Panasonic has wisely selected a rather impressive EVF display. Using a responsive Liquid Crystal on Silicon design that is alternately front-lit by a trio of red, green and blue LEDs some 180 times per second, this display has an impressive 800 x 600 pixel resolution with full color at every pixel location, and no gaps between pixels. (Most electronic viewfinders have adjacent red, green, and blue dots for each pixel, and gaps between pixels, resulting in a perceived loss of quality and “graininess” that makes them off-putting). The LCOS display takes advantage of the human eye’s persistence of vision, to provide a high-res full color image at the same 60 frames-per-second rate that the live view is being streamed off the Panasonic G1’s image sensor.

Focusing is achieved by contrast detection using data streamed from the image sensor, with either single or continuous modes available. There’s a choice of 23-area or single-area autofocusing, with the latter allowing the AF spot to be positioned anywhere in the frame. There’s also a face detection AF mode, and AF tracking is possible. While contrast detection AF systems are generally quite a bit slower than the phase detection AF found on most digital SLRs, Panasonic is claiming focusing speeds in the order of 0.3 to 0.4 seconds from infinity to two meters, using the kit lens.

The Panasonic G1 offers the regular Program, Aperture-priority, Shutter-priority, and Manual modes you’d expect to see on an interchangeable lens digicam, and also includes an improved version of the Intelligent Auto mode that we’ve seen on some of the company’s past compact camera models. There’s also a nifty Aperture and Shutter Speed Preview function, which simulates the effect of changes to either variable, allowing novice photographers to see what the effects of their adjustments will be. ISO sensitivity ranges from 100 to 3,200 equivalent plus Auto ISO, and there’s also an Intelligent ISO function which determines if your subject is in motion, and then raises the sensitivity as necessary to freeze the action. Shutter speeds range from 60 – 1/4,000 second, plus a bulb setting which is limited to a maximum of approximately four minutes, and x-sync is 1/160 second or less. Metering is achieved with a 144-zone multi-pattern system, and offers a choice of intelligent multiple, center weighted, or spot metering modes. The Panasonic G1 offers both a built-in, seven-mode popup flash with a guide number of 11 meters at ISO 100, as well as an intelligent hot shoe to cater for external flash strobes such as Panasonic’s FL220, FL360, or FL500.

The Panasonic G1 stores images on Secure Digital cards (including the newer SDHC types), and is also compatible with MultiMedia cards. The Panasonic G1 draws its power from a proprietary 7.2V, 1250mAh lithium-ion rechargeable battery pack that’s rated for about 350 shots per charge when using the electronic viewfinder, or 330 shots when using the LCD display, both figures complying with CIPA testing standards, when using the kit lens. Connectivity options include both USB 2.0 High Speed for computer connection, and both standard and high-definition video. For standard-def television, there’s NTSC / PAL switchable composite video output, while high-def is achieved via a MiniHDMI Type C (version 1.3b) connection.

Panasonic will be selling the Lumix G1 digital camera in the USA from mid-November 2008. The Panasonic G1 will be sold as a kit which will include the camera body in either black, red, or blue colors, plus the previously described 14-45mm Micro Four Thirds-mount lens, battery with charger, and a software bundle including PHOTOfunSTUDIO viewer 2.1 E and SILKYPIX Developer Studio 3.0 SE. A second Micro Four Thirds lens, the aforementioned 45-200mm model, will be available separately during November 2008. Pricing for all of these products has not yet been disclosed, but is expected to be announced in early October.

What Exactly is Micro Four Thirds?

Given that the Panasonic G1 is the first Micro Four Thirds camera to be announced, it might be good to take a quick look at just what Micro Four Thirds is all about.

Panasonic and Olympus’ Micro Four Thirds standard is aimed at allowing a significant reduction in the size and weight of interchangeable lens digital cameras, achieved by eliminating the bulky mirror box from the design. With the mirror box gone, the “back-focus distance” (or back focal length) of compatible lenses can be reduced. Technically, back focus distance is defined as the distance from the vertex of the lens’s rear element to the sensor, but for practical purposes, it’s easier to speak in terms of the distance from the lens-mounting flange to the sensor surface. In the existing Four Thirds system, this dimension was 40mm; for Micro Four Thirds, it has been slashed to just 20mm. Obviously, this change allows for a significant reduction in the size and weight of the camera body while retaining the same sensor size.

That’s not the only benefit, though. As well as smaller and lighter camera bodies, Micro Four Thirds also offers the possibility of a significant reduction in the size and weight of the lenses, too. While the physical size of a lens depends somewhat on the size of the image circle it must produce, it turns out to depend even more strongly on the back focus distance the lens was designed for. Reducing the back focus distance can dramatically decrease the length of the lenses needed to cover the area of a Four Thirds image sensor. Lenses for the new system can also be somewhat smaller in terms of diameter as well, and indeed the new mount is some 6mm smaller (44mm vs 50mm) than that called for in the original Four Thirds standard.

Thinner: The Panasonic G1 doesn’t use a traditional SLR mirror box, so the body can be even thinner. Shown here are the Panasonic L10’s Four Thirds lens mount, mirror box and sensor assembly (left) versus the G1’s Micro Four Thirds lens mount and sensor assembly (right).

Removing the mirror box does have some possible disadvantages, though. Obviously, it removes the possibility for any Micro Four Thirds camera to offer a true through-the-lens optical viewfinder, with no way to divert the optical path to the viewfinder between exposures. Hence, Micro Four Thirds cameras will be limited solely to using a Live View function as seen on certain recent digital SLRs, where data streaming from the image sensor can be displayed on an LCD display, electronic viewfinder, or both. For similar reasons, with nowhere to put a phase detection autofocus sensor, Micro Four Thirds cameras are limited to using contrast detection autofocus. While this can offer higher focusing accuracy, and negates problems with front or back focusing, contrast detection has in the past always been slower than the phase detection systems found in digital SLRs. Panasonic claims to have addressed this in the Lumix G1, and our first impression is that they’ve achieved their goal.

Bottom line, the Micro Four Thirds system promises interchangeable-lens cameras with good performance at significantly smaller overall sizes. With the Panasonic G1, early indications are that the platform is off to a solid start.

Panasonic DMC-G1 Hands-On Preview

by Dave Etchells

I first saw a very early prototype of the Panasonic G1 back in June of 2008, when I and a handful of other key editors from around the world were briefed on the Micro Four Thirds concept in Osaka, Japan by Panasonic engineers and product planners. At the time, I was quite taken by the G1’s physical appearance and compact size, but had reservations about the concept of a high-end digital camera that would be restricted to contrast-detect focusing (the main reason digicams have such poor shutter response relative to SLRs). Now that I’ve been able to hold and shoot with a fully functional sample, I’m happy to say that many of my concerns have been addressed. Our final judgement on the Panasonic G1 will of course depend on how a production sample performs in our laboratory and shooting tests, but indications so far are very encouraging. Even with the rather preliminary firmware that exists at this time, the camera seems to perform quite well, and image quality frankly appears higher than I had anticipated. Read on for more about my experience with this first G1 sample:

While its compact size is one of its primary selling points, the first thing that really caught my eye about the Panasonic G1 was its overall elegance, more so than its spare dimensions. The camera has a two-part wrapping, with the bulk of the exterior covered in a slightly soft-feeling material that can be either black, dark blue, or dark red. I’m not normally a fan of color on cameras (and would probably still opt for the all-black version myself), but have to admit that the blue and red versions look awfully classy. It’s hard to define, but something about the Panasonic G1’s design just makes you want to pick it up and hold it in your hand. I think it might have something to do with the way light reflects softly from the matte finish of the camera’s covering, but whatever the reason, Panasonic’s designers deserve high praise for the work they did on this camera body.

Then too, while I’m not a big fan of colorful cameras, I don’t really fit the profile of the Panasonic G1’s target market. This is a camera that’s been designed specifically to appeal to people moving up from point & shoot cameras, but who’ve been put off by the size and complexity of typical SLRs. I expect the colored bodies will be very popular with a lot of soccer moms and other women who’d prefer a camera that’s a bit less aggressively masculine looking than the stereotypical big, black SLR.

Smaller: The Panasonic G1 is smaller than the Olympus E-420, but weighs about the same. The G1 is 4.9 x 3.3 x1.8 inches (124 x 83.6 x 45.2mm) and weighs 13.6 oz (385g) for the body only, while E-420 measures 5.1 x 3.6 x 2.1 inches (130 x 91 x 53mm ) and weighs 13.4 oz (380g). Micro Four-Thirds lenses are also smaller and presumably lighter, too.

Though it is slightly heavier than the E-420, the Panasonic G1 is smaller than any current SLR body. The images above show the G1 posed next to an Olympus E-420, one of the smallest SLRs currently on the market. The difference in size isn’t dramatic, but it’s enough that the Panasonic G1 does feel smaller and more compact when you hold it in your hand. This shot also illustrates how much smaller the Micro Four Thirds lenses are than equivalent ones for the normal Four Thirds system: The two lenses above have nearly identical specs (14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 on the left, 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 on the right), but you can see that the Micro Four Thirds lens is noticeably smaller, despite its inclusion of lens-based image stabilization.

So, while the Panasonic G1 is definitely smaller than the smallest SLR on the market, it’s not (yet) pocket-sized. On that topic, a senior Panasonic product planner who briefed us on the camera said that they actually could make even smaller bodies using the Micro Four Thirds standard, but they were concerned that US users in particular would find them too small. I suspect that’s the case in general, but I’d bet that a really small “rangefinder-style” Micro Four Thirds camera would find a lot of takers among people looking for a very small camera for street photography and other traditional rangefinder uses.

Despite the Panasonic G1’s small size, though, its large grip makes it well-suited to a range of hand sizes. The shot above shows a woman’s hands holding the camera, so it’s easy to see that the grip isn’t so big as to be awkward for people with small hands to hold. Surprisingly, though, I found it quite comfortable to work with, despite my long-fingered appendages. Another well-executed design element.

The shot above also shows the tilt/swivel LCD screen extended. This is a beautiful screen; it’s big (3 inches) and bright, and quite sharp, with 460,000 dots of resolution. There’s also an auto-brightness option that will brighten the screen by as much as 40% when you’re in bright light. Any LCD is hard to read in sunlight, but the G1’s brightness boost does help some.

Panasonic G1 Full-time Live View

By its nature, the Panasonic G1 is always in “Live View” mode: In that respect, it’s like any point & shoot digicam with the combination of an electronic viewfinder and rear-panel LCD that works as a viewfinder as well. The differences with this camera are that it has interchangeable lenses, focuses a lot faster than the average digicam, and has a larger sensor to provide better low-light performance than typical pocket cameras.

To their credit though, Panasonic seems to have made more of an effort in the G1 to have the viewfinder display accurately mimic what you’ll see in the final image file once you’ve snapped the shutter. They seem to be trying to go the point & shoot market one better with their viewfinder display accuracy and simulations, and based on my brief time with a prototype, seem to be succeeding.

The shots above show two options the camera gives you for viewing your subject in record mode. On the left, the subject fills a larger area of the display, but the exposure information is overlaid on the bottom of the image. This gives more image area, but potentially makes the exposure info a bit harder to read. If you’d like, you can instead opt for a smaller view of the subject, putting a sharply contrasting black background behind the exposure readouts, making them easier to see. The row of camera-mode information across the top of the display is always overlaid, Panasonic perhaps figuring that this data is less critical on a shot-by-shot basis, and so not worth spending the screen real estate to put a black background behind it.

There are a couple of grid options available, as well as a histogram display with a nifty trick: You can position it pretty much anywhere on the display screen that you like. Here, I’ve put it in the lower right corner.

Now here’s a feature that really made me take notice when I saw it: An LCD preview mode that simulates the effect of long shutter times! The shot above is a simulation that I lifted (with permission) from a Panasonic presentation, because the simulation apparently isn’t output on the NTSC video output: I couldn’t capture it with the little frame grabber I had along when I was checking out the G1 prototype sample. (We’ll try to capture an actual example with a video camera aimed at the screen, once we get a production model to test.) This will be great for novices learning about the effects of shutter speed on their shots, as it makes those effects “what you see is what you get” in the viewfinder. In the prototype demo, we pointed the camera at little race cars running around a track, and the increase in motion blur as we reduced the shutter speed was quite obvious. Pretty slick!

We’ll have more about the Panasonic G1’s user interface in another day or two, but for now we’ve prepared a page showing its operating modes and menu layouts. See our Panasonic G1 Modes and Menus page for those details.

Super High-Res Electronic Viewfinder

The keys to the Panasonic G1’s exceptional EVF performance lie in two technologies. First, the active element of the display is an LCOS (liquid crystal on silicon) chip. This technology actually controls the state of the liquid crystals by electric fields projected through the silicon. This means that all the active circuitry can be on the back side of the chip, so the entire display surface is active: With no dead areas between pixels, light is reflected from the entire surface, so there are no distracting black areas surrounding each pixel.

Because the LCOS chip is reflective, you generate an image by bouncing light off its surface, rather than by passing light through it as in a conventional transmissive LCD. It turns out that LCOS chips can also change states very rapidly; fast enough that you can display the red, green, and blue color channels in very quick succession with no blurring or crosstalk between the color channels. Human persistence of vision blends these together into a single pixel displaying a full range of color. Looking into the Panasonic G1’s EVF then, you don’t see individual red, green, and blue stripes or dots, you just see a surface of continuous color. To be fair, this isn’t a new innovation with Panasonic: The original Minolta A1 digicam used similar technology, but its EVF had much lower resolution, and considerably lower image quality overall. The concept has certainly been seen before, but the Panasonic G1’s EVF seems to take the technology to another level.

Light for the G1’s EVF comes from a trio of red, green, and blue LEDs: They strobe on and off in very quick succession (180 times a second, for a 60 frames/second overall refresh rate), as the LCOS chip displays the red, green, and blue image planes in lock-step. In playing with the G1, I expected to see some tearing of the display, or perhaps a rainbow effect if the subject moved rapidly, but actually saw very little evidence of this in my limited time with the camera.

The second key technology in the Panasonic G1’s EVF is a holographic diffraction grating that’s curved above the LCOS chip. This optical element reflects the RGB light from the LED array onto the LCOS chip’s surface, but lets the light reflected from the imaging chip pass through unobstructed, out the eyepiece and to the user’s eye. Other technologies could be used to make a reflective imager work in a viewfinder, but the holographic grating allowed Panasonic’s engineers to squeeze the whole assembly into an incredibly compact package.

As befits its heritage in the high-end broadcast TV field, the Panasonic G1’s EVF has impressive specs. It has unusually high resolution for a camera EVF, displaying 800×600 (SVGA resolution) full-color pixels. (A total of 480,000 full-color pixels.) Panasonic equates this with 1.44 million dots in a conventional display, as most displays would need three separate dots for each full-color pixel. In practice, the effective perceptual equivalent of 480,000 full-color pixels is more like 960,000 RGB dots, but the fact remains that this is a very high-resolution, very smooth-looking display. As noted above, the G1’s EVF also refreshes at 60 frames/second, so there’s very little flicker or tearing with moving subjects.

Thanks to its LED illumination, the Panasonic G1’s EVF also has a very wide color gamut, covering 100% of the NTSC color space, an unusually broad range for a camera display. As you’d expect, it also covers 100% of the field of view of the camera, since it’s getting its image directly from the camera’s image sensor. Finally the the EVF’s optics give an effective magnification of about 0.7x relative to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera. This is about the same viewing magnification as found on most higher-end SLRs. In practical terms, it means that with a 35mm lens attached (roughly equivalent to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera), the image in the viewfinder will match what you’re seeing through your other eye. This makes it easier to shoot with both eyes open, so the eye not looking through the viewfinder can give you much better peripheral vision of subjects about to come into the field of view, etc.

All in all, the G1’s electronic viewfinder clearly sets a new quality standard for EVFs in digital cameras.

Panasonic G1 Intelligent Auto Mode: “Trust IA”

The Panasonic G1 has the usual PASM set of exposure modes (Programmed, Aperture priority, Shutter priority and Manual exposure), plus Auto, but also offers what Panasonic calls Intelligent Auto. Panasonic introduced IA mode on their digicams a year or two back, and has continued to refine it since then.

The idea behind Intelligent Auto is really what “Auto” mode should have been all along: The camera does its utmost to figure out what sort of subject you’re shooting and the conditions you’re shooting under, then adjusts its settings to deliver the best picture possible. This turns out to be a lot easier said than done, though, given how easily most camera’s Auto modes are thrown off by backlit shots, incandescent lighting, sunsets, even macro subjects. (Why should we have to tell the camera to switch to macro mode? Can’t it figure out that the subject is too close for normal focusing?)

In the Panasonic G1, the engineers responsible for exposure and white balance have continued to extend the camera’s intelligence in figuring out what it’s being asked to do. Intelligent Auto in the G1 has six sub-functions that look at different aspects of the image being viewed, making its decisions accordingly. These include:

• Shake Detection – Mega O.I.S. turns on automatically to reduce blur from handshake.
• Motion Detection – When the camera detects a moving subject, Intelligent ISO Control boosts the ISO setting to reduce blur from subject motion.
• Scene Detection – Intelligent Scene Selector recognizes common shooting conditions such as Night Scene, Macro, etc., and adjusts white balance, exposure and focus accordingly.
• Face Detection – If the camera detects faces in a scene, it judges focus and exposure based on them, rather than surrounding objects.
• Subject Detection – AF Tracking can automatically lock-on moving subjects.
• Light Detection – Intelligent Exposure pulls details out of shadows.

Early versions of IA were only a bit better than conventional Auto mode, but with the G1, it’s really possible to “Trust IA,” as Panasonic’s marketing slogan suggests.

Fast (for contrast-detect) Autofocus on the Panasonic G1

When I first heard of the Micro Four Thirds concept, my initial reaction was concern over whether shutter lag wouldn’t be a problem, given the sluggish response times of conventional point & shoot digicams. Without a mirror assembly, there’s no place to put a phase-detect autofocus sensor, and it’s those sensors that account for much of the responsiveness in conventional SLRs. Without a mirror box, Micro Four Thirds cameras would have to resort to contrast-detect AF, generally a much slower focusing process.

You can imagine my delight, then, when I picked up the G1’s prototype, pressed the shutter button and… the camera quickly focused and snapped the picture! It was by no means instantaneous, and I didn’t have any way of measuring the exact lag time, but the camera certainly felt responsive. I’d say it isn’t as fast as a higher-end DSLR, but is certainly in the ballpark relative to entry-level models; exactly the part of the market the Panasonic G1 is aimed at.

While speed has been problematic in the past, contrast-detect AF systems win big time over phase-detect ones when it comes to focus accuracy. Panasonic says that typical phase-detect AF systems can focus to within +/- 100 microns at the sensor plane, while contrast-detect systems routinely achieve accuracies twice that high, on the order of +/- 50 microns. Beyond basic accuracy, though, the fact that the G1’s contrast-detect system will always be judging focus based on what the main imaging chip sees means that it will never have a problem with front- or back-focus, a common issue in conventional digital SLRs.

The contrast-detect approach also lends itself to much greater focus flexibility, including many more focus areas, movable focus areas, face detection and enhanced subject tracking. The Panasonic G1’s default focus system looks at 23 areas across the frame before deciding what to focus on. Alternatively, you can switch to Advanced 1-point AF mode and move a single focus point anywhere in the frame you want it. That single point can also be a spot, normal-sized, large, or extra-large area. Likewise, face detection can recognize a number of faces in the scene, focus on the nearest one, and then use that area to also set exposure. Standard fare for digicams, but something SLRs can only do in Live View mode – And then often somewhat slowly.

The Panasonic G1’s AF system also has a handy AF tracking option: Once you’ve locked onto a subject, it can optionally track the subject wherever it moves in the frame. I can see this being handy for people taking pictures of wiggly kids, pets, or other subjects that rarely cooperate by staying in one place for any appreciable time.

We’re hoping to get our hands on a prototype of the Panasonic G1 soon, so we can test its shutter response in the lab and see just how good it is. I’ll be surprised if its shutter lag is much over 0.4 second though, as it really did feel quite responsive when I played with it, however briefly.

Panasonic G Series Lens System

Because of the changes in flange diameter and back-focus distance, the new Micro Four Thirds system will require its own lens line. With the G1, Panasonic has announced the first two of what they promise will grow to become a broad line of lenses in the years to come.

Two things immediately struck us upon seeing the Panasonic G1 and its lenses for the first time. First of all, these lenses really are a lot smaller than equivalent ones in the current Four Thirds world. The second thing that caught our eye were the lens flanges: The two lenses introduced with the G1 both feature solid metal mounting flanges, a relative rarity in entry-level removable-lens cameras, and something that speaks well of their build quality.

The first two lenses in the G-series lineup are a 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 image-stabilized zoom and a 45-200mm f/4.0-5.6 tele zoom that also sports Panasonic’s excellent Mega OIS stabilization. On the G1, these lenses will be equivalent to 28-90 mm and 90-400 mm lenses on a conventional 35mm film camera. That’s a really excellent range, and the image stabilization will be particularly welcome when you get out to the 200mm (400mm equivalent) end of the tele zoom.

Coming Attractions
While not giving any specific delivery dates, Panasonic is promising at least three new lenses next year (2009), a 7-14mm f/4, a 20mm f/1.7 super-compact prime (great for street photography!) and a long-ratio 14-140mm f/4-5.6 OIS “HD” lens. – The “HD” indicates that this lens will support on-the-fly focusing during HD movie recording, on a camera that will also be announced sometime in 2009.

It’s important to note that all the G-series lenses from Panasonic support the G1’s contrast-detect autofocus system, while some current Four Thirds system lenses will not.

Using your current Four Thirds Lenses

This brings us to the issue of using current Four Thirds lenses on the new Micro Four Thirds system. It is indeed possible to use all your old glass, by virtue of the MA1 mount adapter, although there may be limitations with some lenses.

Micro Adapter. Standard Four Thirds lenses work via an adapter. Here, the adapter is shown along with the 14-50mm f/3.8-5.6 lens from the Lumix DMC-L10 kit.

The shots above show the MA1 adapter by itself and attached to the 14-50mm lens that shipped as the kit optic with the Panasonic DMC-L10 SLR. The adapter is quite easy to use, just attach it to the lens and then attach the combination to the camera. Since all it’s doing is adapting between the different flange sizes and adding 20mm of increased back focus distance, the mount adapter needs no optics in it, so it has no effect on image quality, lens speed, or any other optical characteristic.

That all sounds great, so what’s the limitation? It turns out that not all lenses are able to move their elements quickly enough to work with the G1’s contrast-detect autofocus. Normal phase-detect AF systems are fairly forgiving of focusing speed, because the correct focal distance setting is determined independently of the lens elements’ motion: The camera looks at the subject, calculates the correct focal distance, commands the lens to move, and then snaps the shot once the lens reports back that it’s moved to the correct setting.

With contrast-detect autofocus, though, the lens has to move multiple times, and must come to rest before the camera can take each “look” at the subject, to determine whether the focus is better or worse than it was at the previous focal setting. In order for the overall focus cycle to be performed quickly, the lens needs to be able to shift focal settings very quickly, multiple times per second. This is a demanding requirement, and not all lenses are up to the challenge. Olympus offers contrast-detect AF on some of their recent SLRs, but the feature only works with a few lenses that have focus motors both strong and fast enough to move the lens elements very quickly. Other manufacturers offer contrast-detect AF that works with any of their lenses, but at the cost of very slow AF times. (It’s for this reason that Nikon refers to the contrast detect AF option in their SLRs as “tripod mode.”)

So, while some current Four Thirds lenses will work just fine on the new Micro Four Thirds system, with full support for AF operation, other lenses will be reduced to “guided manual” focus, in which the user will need to adjust the focus setting, looking to either the viewfinder (less accurate) or the camera’s focus indicator (more accurate) for focus confirmation.

Panasonic G1 Live MOS Sensor

Apparently, one issue that led to the choice of a greater back focus distance in the original Four Thirds specification was the problem of self-shadowing on CCD sensors. CCDs have a very significant three-dimensional surface structure, so the tall walls of metallization and insulation around each pixel’s active area can shadow portions of the pixel’s surface if the light arrives at an angle too much off vertical. Designing lenses with a greater back focus distance helps reduce the angle of the light rays around the edges of the sensor, so this was the direction taken by the original Four Thirds committee.

Besides being one of the world’s largest CCD manufacturers, though, Panasonic also makes NMOS sensors (which they call Live MOS). These have much less three-dimensional structure on their surface, and so are less subject to self-shading, making this technology a key part of the Micro Four Thirds system. With a shallower surface structure, you can bring the back of the lens much closer to the sensor’s surface, without having problems with self-shadowing. Other desirable characteristics Panasonic claims for their Live MOS technology are “the superior image quality of a CCD sensor and the low power consumption of a CMOS sensor” — a claim we’ll be putting to the test.

The Panasonic G1 uses a brand new 12-megapixel Live MOS sensor, incorporating several improvements over prior designs. The new chip has a redesigned cell layout, with more active area and therefore higher sensitivity and lower image noise for a given pixel size. It also sports four channels for data readout, necessary to deliver the 60 frame/second Live View images and equally fast autofocus measurement/adjustment cycles required to make the Lumix G1’s contrast-detect autofocus so responsive.

We’ll see how a production sample of the Panasonic G1 fares in our laboratory tests, but I can say now that a few shots I snuck with the prototype at ISO 1,600 looked surprisingly clean; especially for an early-stage prototype. The more I see of it, the more interesting the G1 and the whole Micro Four Thirds concept looks: We’ll be very eagerly awaiting the availability of a production sample, so we can test its performance and share the results with our readers.

Panasonic G1 Dust Reduction

Dust reduction systems are all the rage these days, and for good reason: Dust is public enemy number one when it comes to removable-lens cameras. If a speck of dust got onto a piece of film, one frame would have a spot on it. If a speck of dust gets onto a digital sensor, though, every frame will have a spot. In our experience, dust removal systems are only a partial help: You’re still going to need to wet-clean your sensor from time to time. A good dust-removal system is definitely some help, though, lengthening the interval between manual cleanings.

With the G1, Panasonic has taken dust removal technology up another notch. The shot at right shows the Live MOS sensor mounted behind the cover glass and dust-removal assembly. The piezoelectric dust-removal actuator is the black ring that surrounds the sensor. What’s significant here is that the piezo actuator surrounds the imaging area, rather than being restricted to just a small patch on one or two sides. Panasonic claims that they’re the first company to design a dust-removal unit with the piezo actuator fully surrounding the cover glass. This provides much more uniform and stronger shaking than conventional systems. The increased area of the actuator also let them increase the maximum shaking frequency to 50,000 cycles/second, up from 30,000 cycles in earlier models. The combination of higher frequency and more uniform application of the vibrating force should translate into a noticeably more effective dust-removal system.

Venus Engine HD “Duo”

Next to its image sensor and lens, a digital camera’s image processor is its most important component. Image processing is extremely compute-intensive, and noise reduction in particular gobbles CPU cycles like there’s no tomorrow. Then of course, there’s frame rate: A 12-megapixel sensor generates a lot of data, so it’s a challenge to digest all that and keep up with a three frame per second continuous shooting speed.

The Panasonic G1 not only uses the latest version of the Venus processing engine, the Venus IV, but uses a dual-core Venus chip as well. This is a huge increase in processing power relative to previous Panasonic cameras, and the Panasonic execs seemed rather excited by the dual-core Venus IV. For our part, we’re looking forward to seeing the G1’s images, and hoping that the greater processing power will translate into improved noise performance, without loss of subject detail. Noise processing aside, the Venus IV is impressive just for its ability to move image data around: With a fast SD card, the Panasonic G1 can capture full-resolution JPEG images continuously at 3 frames per second until the card fills up.

Another nice feature of this latest Venus chip is its support of HDMI output, for direct connection to HDTVs for image viewing. With HDTVs appearing in more and more homes, the prospect of producing HD-quality slide shows directly from your camera is increasingly appealing. The shot above shows the HDMI cable plugged into the side of the G1. (Note that the camera’s connector is the mini-HDMI variety: You’ll need to find a mini-to-standard HDMI cable to make the connection.)

Panasonic DMC-G1 Pricing and Availability

In the US, the Panasonic G1 will be available body-only, or in a one-lens kit (kit contents shown above), with the 14-45 mm lens included. Internationally, there’ll also be a double-lens kit available, including the 45-200 mm lens as well, but it appears that that variation won’t be coming to the US, at least not initially. Olympus has had great success in the US market, selling two-lens kit versions of its Four Thirds SLRs at attractive prices. I suggested to the execs present that Panasonic consider bringing the two-lens version to the US as well. We’ll see if they follow my advice or not. 😉 I think the two-lens kit would be very popular with the stereotypical “Soccer Mom,” as the image-stabilized tele zoom would make for great shots of kids’ sports.

The Panasonic DMC-G1 will be on retail shelves by mid-November, 2008. The suggested retail price is US$799.95, which includes the LUMIX G VARIO 14-45mm F3.5-5.6 ASPH MEGA O.I.S. kit lens. The LUMIX G VARIO 45-200mm F4.0-5.6 MEGA O.I.S. telephoto lens will also be available in November, at a suggested retail price of US$349.95.

PANASONIC LUMIX DMC-G1: WORLD’S SMALLEST AND LIGHTEST DIGITAL INTERCHANGEABLE LENS CAMERA*

World’s First Micro Four Thirds System Camera Features Portability, Ease-of-Use and Colorful Blue and Red Models For Personalized Style and Active Lifestyles

Secaucus, NJ (September 12, 2008) – Panasonic today announced the world’s first Micro Four Thirds system camera, the LUMIX DMC-G1, the world’s smallest and lightest digital interchangeable lens camera, weighing in at approximately 385 grams (0.85 lbs).* Based on the new Micro Four Thirds System standard, the LUMIX G1 eliminates the internal mirror structure that defines digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras, thus reducing the size and weight by nearly half.** With the mirror-less system, the G1’s flange back, which is the distance between the mount and the image sensor, has been reduced from 40 mm – as specified in the Four Thirds System – to approximately 20 mm.

The new Panasonic LUMIX DMC-G1 will enhance the advanced photo quality and flexibility made possible by the Four Thirds™ System, and with its innovative design, consumers will appreciate the portability of a smaller camera body and lenses. The G1 will be available in mid-November as a kit with the new LUMIX G VARIO 14-45mm/F3.5-5.6 ASPH/MEGA O.I.S lens. Also available in November, and announced today, is the LUMIX G VARIO 45-200mm/F4.0-5.6/MEGA O.I.S.lens.

“With the LUMIX G1, we are filling a void that has existed for a long time in the digital camera market because consumers wanted the power of an SLR, but previous models were bulky and inconvenient,” said David Briganti, National Marketing Manager, Imaging, Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company. “The LUMIX G answers this challenge as consumers can benefit from the flexibility of changing lenses; a quick Auto Focus; and a sensor that produces high-quality photos. By packing all those powerful assets into an extremely compact body with easy-to-use features familiar to point-and-shoot users, we are excited about G, as it brings new possibilities to the consumer.”

The LUMIX G1 is also the world’s first interchangeable lens camera that will come with color variety – with availability in black, blue and red models – allowing consumers to personalize their style through color, something very popular with point-and-shoot camera models.

For current Four Thirds users with a collection of lenses, an optional mount adapter will allow Four Thirds lenses to be compatible with the LUMIX G1.*** Also, today, with the introduction of the Micro Four Thirds System, Panasonic is announcing a wide-variety of accessories including: External Flash DMW-FL220(GN22); PL Filter: DMW-LPL52; Mount Adapter: DMW-MA1; Battery Pack: DMW-BLB13; DC Cable: DMW-DCC3; Soft Case: DMW-CG1; Soft Bag: DMW-BAG1; Shoulder Strap (Stylish) DMW-SSTG1-A/C/R; Shoulder Strap (Woven) DMW-SSTG2-W; Shoulder Strap (Leather) DMW-SSTG3-T.

The G1 is also compatible with current accessories: External Flash: DMW-FL360(GN36)/DMW-FL500(GN50); ND Filter: DMW-LND52; MC Protector: DMW-LMC52; Remote Shutter: DMW-RSL1; HDMI mini Cable: RP-CDHM15(1.5m), RP-CDHM30(3.0m).

The G1’s compact size can also be attributed to its electronic full-time Live View Finder, as opposed to a conventional optical viewfinder. The electronic Live View Finder, with an impressive and high-resolution 1,440,000-dot equivalent, allows the user to shoot the exact image the camera sees while also displaying information about the camera’s settings through the view finder. The G1 also features a clever built-in eye sensor, so the camera can detect when the user is nearing the view finder and automatically switches off the LCD, thus conserving battery life. Furthermore, the Live View Finder has a large 1.4x (0.7x on a 35mm equivalent) magnification and when using the G1 in manual focus mode, the frame in the view finder or LCD will enlarge by 5x or 10x (can adjust using the dial).

The Live View Finder and the bright 460,000-dot resolution, 3.0-inch LCD provide a 100% field of view, letting the user adjust settings before taking a shot, which is a great learning tool for consumers beginning to use manual controls as they can visually confirm the effects of changed settings. The LCD can also swivel 180 degrees horizontally and 270 degrees vertically, giving the consumer flexibility to take high and low-angle shots, and its Auto Power technology will automatically boost brightness by as much as 40% depending on the shooting condition so it remains visible in all lighting environments.

The G1 introduces a new Contrast AF (Auto Focus) function that is not only accurate and easy to use, but also very fast. Users can choose from a wide-range of AF modes, including multiple-area AF with up to 23 focus areas, 1-area AF with a selectable focus area, Face Detection, and AF Tracking. In the 1-area AF mode, the AF frame size can be changed by simply turning a dial. The G1 also has a Quick AF function that begins focusing as soon as the user aims the camera – no need to wait to press the shutter button halfway. This provides quicker focusing that can help capture the subject before the crucial moment passes.

Users familiar with point-and-shoot digital cameras, and new to the world of advanced interchangeable lens cameras, will benefit from Panasonic’s Intelligent Auto (iA) mode. When in iA mode, the G1 will detect the shooting condition and automatically adjust for the ultimate shooting results. Panasonic’s iA includes the following intuitive technologies.

• AF Tracking – Automatically tracks the subject as it moves, keeping it in focus without the need to hold the shutter halfway down.

• Intelligent Exposure – Helps prevents photos from being under- or over-exposed by analyzing the framed image and adjusting the brightness in areas that are too dark because of dim lighting, backlighting or the use of the flash.

• MEGA O.I.S. – Gyrosensors detect hand-shake and the lens system shifts to compensate, helping to prevent hand movement from creating a blurry image.

• Intelligent ISO – Determines if the photo subject is moving and changes the ISO setting and shutter speed accordingly, thus giving a blur-free photo.

• Intelligent Scene Selector – Senses the ambient conditions and will automatically select the appropriate mode from Scenery, Portrait, Close-up, Night Portrait or Night Scenery.

• Face Detection – Detects faces in the frame (up to 15 faces), even if they are moving, and selects optimal focus and exposure settings so portraits come out clear. Also features Digital Red-Eye correction.

The Panasonic LUMIX DMC-G1, a 12.1 Megapixel camera, also includes the following advanced features.

• Live MOS Sensor – Provides the best of both worlds with high image quality from a CCD sensor, and the lower-power consumption of a CMOS sensor. New technology makes it possible to read four channels of data simultaneously and deliver 60 frames-per-second full-time Live View images.

• Venus Engine HD – New imaging processor enhances noise reduction and provides independent gradation control for each of the R, G and B colors.

• Supersonic Wave Filter Dust Reduction System – Designed to prevent dust from adhering to the image sensor by vibrating 50,000 times per second, the filter repels dust and other particles.

• My Color Mode – Users can freely adjust the color, brightness and saturation while composing shots, allowing for more expressive and creative shots.

• HDMI Output – With an optional HDMI cable, the G1 can connect to an HDMI-capable High Definition television, such as a Panasonic VIERA Plasma or LCD. When connected to a VIERA, using VIERA Link capability, the TV’s remote control can direct the slideshow on the G1.

• My Menu – This new tab automatically stores the five most recently used menu selections for quick, convenient retrieval. The custom-setting can also be used to program a frequently-used function, which can be activated by pressing the down arrow on the cursor key. The color of the menu viewed on LCD can also be changed to three different colors: black, red, blue.

Pricing for the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-G1 and its Micro Four Thirds accessories will be announced in early October.

* As of September 12, 2008.

**Compared to the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-L10.

*** Needs an adapter (available as an optional accessory) to use Four Thirds lenses. Lenses that are not compatible with the Contrast AF function can be used with manual focusing. There are also some limitations to other functions. For details, see the following customer support site: http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/dsc/index.html

About Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company
Based in Secaucus, N.J., Panasonic Consumer Electronics Company is a Division of Panasonic Corporation of North America, the principal North American subsidiary of Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (NYSE: MC) and the hub of Panasonic’s U.S. marketing, sales, service and R&D operations. In its commitment to provide consumers with extensive imaging resources, Panasonic LUMIX established the Digital Photo Academy, a series of nationwide workshops designed to instruct consumers how to optimize the features on their digital cameras and produce high-quality photos. Panasonic is honored to support OUR PLACE – The World’s Heritage, a project that will create the world’s largest photographic collection of UNESCO World Heritage sites, with acclaimed photographers exclusively using LUMIX digital cameras to capture all images. Information about Panasonic LUMIX digital still cameras and its affiliated programs is available at www.panasonic.com/dsc.

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