Friday, September 12, 2008

Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 - wow that was quick


It was just last month that the Micro Four Thirds format was announced, and today a new camera in this format is already previewed at DPreview. I'm sure this has seriously disrupted business planning at Canon and Nikon. This new camera is the Panasonic G1.

The G1 is basically a prosumer camera with interchangable lenses. It sounds bad to the DSLR lovers but it's a blessing to anyone who want quality without the bulk. It replaced the viewfinder with a huge live view screen. The artificially small and dark viewfinder has always been the marketing tool to get people to buy a more expensive SLR, now the market is turned upside down for sure. The one thing that might bother people is that the normal phase-detection autofocus is replaced by contrast autofocus, so AF speed might slow down. I do have to say the entry-level cameras from all manufacturers all seem to have AF problems, so maybe contrast AF is not such a bad thing (and it's really what-you-see-is-what-you-get since you can see much more clearly what is in focus using the big screen). One striking is that this camera will come in 3 colors: black, blue and red. I think a red camera is so cool. A camera with color might make people less nervous too, which is never a bad thing.