Just Posted: Panasonic Lumix DMC GX1 hands-on preview and video

Have you ever used a camera with a decent touch screen interface? It's very nice being able to place the focus point / zoom on a point just by pressing the screen and having a custom menu you can quickly bring up and change some of the more obscure settings in.

I have a GF2, the only 2 touch screen commands I use are, setting a focus point and mode change. Setting a focus point with your finger is an advantage. All settings can still be accessed thru the 4 way directional buttons even mode changing. But, it is nice the GX1 has the mode dial back.

Latest Phase One digital back has touch interface. Swallow the pill, its there to stay.

Its not about touch interface or lack of, but how it is implemented in the big picture.

NEX-5 is smaller, this Panny is same size as NEX-7 which is a shame considering the Sony has a larger sensor, tilt high-res LCD, hot-shoe, flash and the best EVF to date. The only thing that keeps me from ditching my GH2 for a NEX is a pair of lenses, but giving the trends, this won't last. Panny can't keep bringing out new models with outdated tech and high prices. Sooner or later Sony will come with the right lenses.

Are you listening to yourself or defending some camera (football, soccer … team) blindness. Some are talking decent and mentioning their favorites and needs and it is considerable and thoughtful but some are comparing inappropriate categories to each other like one compared 699$ nex-5n IQ with 7D 1600$; I am not sure why he didn’t mentioned canon flagship 1dX and didn’t compared them.

You mean like the 3 pancake primes, 3 medium sized primes and now the pancake X zoom?

A camera without a viewfinder is like a car with no steering wheel. One day we will have cars with electronic fly-by-wire joysticks, and doubtless these will present all sorts of advantages we never knew we wanted. But still some of us will hanker after that oldfashioned analogue mechanical circle that used to take up so much room in front of the dashboard that the designers got rid of it.
For my money, nothing beats seeing the photograph full in your eye, not on 3" mosaic on the back of the camera.

Edit
Oh, yes, and of course three points of contact holds the camera steadier ;)

Maybe NEX-7 will be for you..

surely you can do the multi-aspect thing yourself? It's just called cropping, no different if it is done in camera, or out. It is almost as daft as not buying a camera because it doesn't have a digital zoom.

Or at least they wish for it.. I expect much more from prosumer.

Usually people complain about lack of selection, that's probably the first time we hear complaints about too many choices, duh!

"capacitive screen means there isnt an extra layer of plastic on the LCD to make the image worse."

You may have meant resistive ;-)

And what capacitive screen is going to buy? Smooth dragging? This is a very small screen, resistive sensor has a lot better precision than capacitive one and therefore is much preferred.

Difficulties to learn something new, Tulo?

yes - i'll never manage to happely buy crap, but that's how things are made nowadays it seems...

"Sounds much louder than a NEX-5n"

Yup, the new-gen Sony cameras all have electronic first shutters, no wonder they're way quieter.

I was about to say, based on the GF2, that you don't have to press select to confirm, but thinking about it while the touched item is selected straight away you need to either press the select button, menu button, or half press the shutter to dismiss the menu.

I can see why it's like this, you may want to change several touch menu items and having to exit and re-enter the menu could get very tedious. Half pressing the shutter to dismiss any current menus is so 2nd nature to me that it didn't even occur to me that I was doing it :)

Having to press a confirmation button also eliminates (or at least greatly minimizes) inadvertent selections. Imagine the number of times you'd end up shooting crap because you just happened to brush some menu item without noticing it.

For me, this is a plus, not a minus.

This too is a new connector because it's sending more data across it (exactly the same case as Sony, really. The only difference is that Panasonic offered an EVF for the last generation of cameras - it seems unfair to criticise them for that).

Well, shame on them for not being more forward thinking when designing the previous EVF interface, would have been nice if the old EVF was also compatible for more choice on EVF size / price.

It seems crass stupidity not to have made the camera compatible with the old EVF, as well as offering a new, better EVF. It goes to the character of the brand.

I'm sure most people who want an EVF would buy the new improved EVF anyway, even if they already have the old one. But if they had bought through choice then they would not feel cheated.

Instead Panasonic squanders long term brand value to make (precious few) extra sales.

It also sends out the wrong signal to wavering potential customers like me looking for signs that it is worth investing in the ecosystem.

"Well, shame on them for not being more forward thinking when designing the previous EVF interface, would have been nice if the old EVF was also compatible for more choice on EVF size / price."

Sometimes it's technically impossible to "forward-think"... in the history of digital electronics or computers, very few "pluggable" technology was future-proof. Think of computer mainboards, for example: it was very rarely that you could install new-generation (I'm not speaking of simple speed bumps, but real generation changes like the 486 -> Pentium -> Pentium II etc. change) stuff (CPU, memory, MPU etc.) into them. (For example, the Pentium overdrive being one of the most known examples.)

but plugging in the old EVF would not require the higher data speeds. All that would be required is for the new camera to recognise the old EVF and accommodate its lower data requirements. I am not suggesting that the new EVF should be backwards compatible for use in the old camera.

I do understand that this requires a smidgeon of extra electronics. But the alternative is to educate the market that the brand will not reward your investment in its ecosystem. That is a lose-lose scenario; the customer stands to write off his investment at each body upgrade, the manufacturer loses the element of tie-in.

Olympus manage their EVF connection to be future proof from the beginning of the E-P2 and the rest of the EPL series. Why couldn't panasonic? So it is technically possible to foresee the future.

There isn't a camera that produces as good jpegs as raw. So if you care about best possible picture, you shoot raw anyway.

"who shoots jpeg if they know what they're doing?"
Pro's do.
They shoot RAW+JPG if they are smart.
Use the JPG normally and use RAW for that special enlargement etc or if the photog blew an important shot.
It saves tons of time.
At least me.
Probably only hobbyists use solely RAW, because they have the time to mess around with the pics.
There's life outside work/photography you know ;-)

I think most guys around this forum are amateurs and not professional photographers.
For personal satisfaction, that's a lot better. Once you depend on the income from your hobby, this hobby usually starts dying.

Pros depend on prostituting themselves to the client's demands. And please, who wants to shoot weddings of complete strangers or has fun doing business portraits and what else is necessary to make a living out of it. Unfortunately, hardly anyone can solely shoot what he personally enjoys.
As an amateur, you do what you want, whenever you want to do it. No time schedules, no financial pressure, no competition, etc. - and so also all the time in the world for RAWs instead of JPGs. ;)

Surely it's quick enough to batch off all the raws as jpegs without doing any additional processing?

Then what's the point if you have no intentions of tweaking the RAW? Who needs the headaches of much larger storage requirements of RAW and the extra time-consuming step if the customer won't notice any difference in the quality if work?

I have a co-worker who shoots Raw. He always messes up his initial camera settings. I shoot jpeg and get it right from the start. So I'd say Raw is for people who don't know how to shoot right the first time around!

@ Double Dust

So anyone not being a professional photographer has to clean the toilets of their boss instead? The rate of unemployment must be high where you are coming from, sorry for that.

You don't seem to understand what I was about to say: The worst you can do to your hobby is forcing yourself into it all the time. In the end, the same is true for most jobs in the long run. But then again, most jobs don't start out as a sheer hobby without any financial interests...

@ Vlad S
I wish every manufacturer would make a JPG engine as good as Oly's. But still, if you want the best results there simply is no way around a 16 bit RAW file.
If you look at some of these excellent pictures, how many do you think are ooc JPGs? - http://1x.com/

@Managarm -- good points! Professional photographer means the one who works for hire and does what business requires. It's a nature of business to make as much money as possible with as little efforts as possible. There is nothing in it relating to artistry or one's best efforts, in fact the opposite, quick-and-dirty is often what is required. An amateur is the one who wants to achieve his personal enjoyment and values artistic work, because he doesn't need to earn a living from it. One has to be sufficiently well-to-do to have a luxury to be an amateur. Hired worker serves to satisfy the needs of those who hired him, not his own.

The reality is that in-camera jpeg engine is very restricted in terms of processing power and available processing time to compete with computer doing raw conversion. I did comparison between in-camera jpegs and default raw-to-jpeg conversion in software, and the latter always won. So even simply by processing a raw batch one can get better results. Of course, when one needs to do extra processing, conversion from raw becomes a no-brainer.
Do most pictures need postprocessing? Let me put it this way, it's rare to see a picture from camera that wouldn't benefit from at least cropping, or contrast, or color adjustment. It's true about the most expensive and the least expensive cameras.