Lumix G1 - some first pictures

Of course the weather did not improve over the weekend and there wasn't much point in going outside "hunting". But this night the temperature fell below freezing point and today morning everything outside had a nice glaze of frost. I did a quick walk through the garden to take a few pictures. This rose came out particuarly nice. I didn't play around with the program, probably I could have achieved a more blurred background with a wider aperture:



Another nice shot, some latent Hibiscus buds:


I'm hoping for nicer weather now ...

New Gadget: Panasonic Lumix G1

So eventually, after a one-day intermezzo with the D40 (which is definitely a very nice camera!) we settled on the Panasonic Lumix G1. I didn't have much time to play with it yet, but it's really quite a nice camera. It's tiny, and solidly built. It's a huge difference to the D40, which feels a lot more plastic-y. But that's somewhat expected, after all the D40 costs about half of the G1.

I've shot a few test photos indoors and it's not a bad performer there. The view finder is a bit noisy in low light but it doesn't influence usability much. Still, if it gets really dark the frame rate of the view finder decreases a lot. Not sure why, I guess the camera then averages across several frames to keep the noise down.

The auto focus is fast. I have no comparison to DSLR cameras in the same price range, but it's easily as fast as the D40 (which probably doesn't say much).

The flashlight seems a bit weak. Where the D40 tended to overexpose, the G1 is more into underexposing images shot with the flash. Might be a configuration issue, I haven't figured out all the settings yet.

I'm very pleased. I'll try to make a few outdoor shots during the weekend. Hope the weather improves over night, it just started raining again.