G1 exposure preview

jonathangaillard said:

jonathangaillard wrote:

Yes very much exactly what I was wondering, however it is the most curious thing I have ever heard haha, so pardon me if I ask a few questions

I do understand their position having to compete with optical viewfinders, but gosh it should have just been an option to "show a bright view" instead of making hard to see what you are going to capture... but I digress..

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Yes, I agree with your digression.

My Sony R1 has the "gimme a bright DSLR stylee view" as an option , although it's nowhere near as effective as the G1's bright view.

jonathangaillard said:

First is about the histogram, so if you are in manual mode (the only thing I ever shoot in) and you hit the DOP button and then display, does the histogram then show correctly for what will be captured?

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Hey!! You is a genius mi friend

Was inclined to say no it doesn't because I never bother with the histogram in Manual Mode, prefering to "chimp" (review images). But a little voice whispered in my ear "check before you answer".

And the result......

Well, yes, the Histo does respond correctly but rather slowly when used indoors (because shutter speeds are slow, and the shutter speed simulation is obviously taking up a lot of processor time; I would hazard a guess that in broad daylight you would have a better experience). In fact I found the experience rather horrid. I am curious now, and will try it out tomorrow, or the day after, in daylight.

jonathangaillard said:

Second question is about the preview with DOP and display. Have you used canons live view, since it is the only DSLR I know with real time exposure preview, just to get a feel for how well you think panys is implemented? Also I like the idea of things bluring like they should and is missing in canons implementation because that is the last tick in the includes everything box. But does it make manual focusing difficult because things blur? Of course thats not a big deal I just focus before or after I hit the preview...

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Well, to be honest I pretty much regard any live view (on interchangeable lens cameras) other than Panny's and Oly's as a waste of space, and Sony's as being debateable (super fast, but it ain't off of the sensor thus no depth of field preview and not a realistic representation of noise, etc).

The last time I can remember using a Canon's live view was when the 1D Mk III was introduced, and I know I fiddled with a later cam too but can't remember which.

Sorry I can't be of further help on that one.

As for the G1, as soon as you start manual focusing you will loose the "manual mode live view" feature. So you will have to focus first and then engage the live view feature, or do it the opposoite way around i.e. live view first then focus.

Really, the live view feature whilst in manual exposure mode is just there as an afterthought. It is not something I think you will enjoy using regularly unless you are shooting in broad daylight, as I explained earlier. Panny, have essentially made Manual Exposure work in the old school DSLR way (bright viewfinder view; check image review if you wanna see what you have got; adjust setting to taste if image review is not to your liking). It is not a philosophy I am happy with, but I can well understand why they did it, and grudgingly I think they made the right choice (I just wish they also gave us the option to have real live view too)

jonathangaillard said:

Thanks for the help !!

Anyway I can make sure that the right firmware is there in the store so I can get a hands on with this?

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You need to ensure the camera has firmware v1.1 or higher and ensure the following setting is on:

MENU/SET Button> CUSTOM MENU> page 2> PREVIEW HOLD = ON

Regards,

How is the implementation different on the oly than the pany?

I didn't know about the R1 though, good to know, but the sensor is just to small for me I think... I am not thrilled about the smaller than apc sensor on m4/3rds but I can live with it, if I can get the extra ability to completely see the scene accurately before I take the shot.

Ah thank you for checking before you posted !! much appreciated

You've been a great help, this kind of information is often hard to find, and I really do appreciate your time, there can be some real trolls on these forums so its nice to have a normal human to communicate with once in a while hahaha !

I think I will go to the store and try some shots with the button combos and such to see if this is something I can use regularly. But the only thing different techincally I think I am gaining from going from my canon 1000D/rebel xs at the moment to the pany, is the use of cheap old FAST primes (probably worth the switch right there for the low light ability, and shallow DOF which I looove) and the fact that I have a color accurate and brightness accurate shrouded display to judge things in concert lighting, or right under sun or anything else that would taint an LCD's accuracy. Most of the reviewed features of the pany the canon has, because the live exposure view on the canon is actually very good, I had no idea until the other day haha (never seems to be mentioned as big of a deal as it is to me, because focusing with an optical view finder is damn near impossible). Is there anything you can think of that I am not that would be a huge hindrance besides the possibility of not liking the handling using their workaround?

Thanks again !

My experience, after shooting since early January with the G1, is---in normal to low light, the LCD is pretty doggone close to the shot image. It reflects the EC also. Where I see the LCD/EVF ramp up so that the shot is not the same is in VERY low light. This is shooting with ISO/auto and A (primarily) with the native m43/rds lenses (14-45, 45-200, 17 f/2.8). I have my upper ISO set to 800---and if I"m not happy with the ISO, I override and set my own.

With my MF lenses in low (but not VERY low) light, there is some difference between the LCD/EVF and the resulting shot. I guess this really doesn't bother me much--and suspect this is because I"m a longtime user of the histo on my Canons over the years (you certainly only see the real imiage and can only know with experience what to expect from your settings--and dependent upon the metering/type of metering) AND that experience using the LCD/EVF (I generally use the EVF) lets me have a good feel in tandem with the histo of what that shot will be--same as with my 5D where I have no live view nor live histo but check the histo after the shot.

I prefer being able to have a good image to MF. Its just something I've adjusted to--and don't expect the LCD or EVF in low light to reflect the image. I CAN use the DOF preview button if I'm concerned. I should mention also that the WB/color in the EVF is not always correct (as the LCD is more correct).

Others may not like the way Panny implemented the use of the EVF/LCD. Like all cameras, there are compromises and personal choices and tastes. Its a personal thing.

Diane
--
Diane B
http://www.pbase.com/picnic
G1 gallery http://www.pbase.com/picnic/temp_g1

Diane B said:

I prefer being able to have a good image to MF. Its just something I've adjusted to--and don't expect the LCD or EVF in low light to reflect the image. I CAN use the DOF preview button if I'm concerned. I should mention also that the WB/color in the EVF is not always correct (as the LCD is more correct).

Others may not like the way Panny implemented the use of the EVF/LCD. Like all cameras, there are compromises and personal choices and tastes. Its a personal thing.

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Hello ! thanks for the response, I had actually seen your use of manual lenses in the forum and was going to send you a note !

Interesting to hear about the usuage with you, I am interested in the non correct WB though. Is this a tested thing? Because I remember reading that the EVF had the capability to show much more than sRGB and that the colors were extremely accurate, but who knows if it was a lie.

Also with your extensive use of manual lenses on the G1 (which I am planning as well, as long as tomorrow goes well ) have you tried the DOP + DISPLAY preview to make sure that having your apeture and shutter speed properly shows you the resulting brightness and effects and such as it does with the kit lenses confirmed by plevyadophy?

Also, how do your old primes compare in resolution and CA and such to the kits (when using something like RAW therapee and not a program that removes CA and distortion)? or modern primes for that matter?

Sorry for all the questions but you are a wealth of information like plevyadophy

Thanks !!

ps. gorgeous shots by the way !

jonathangaillard said:

jonathangaillard wrote:
Ah thank you for checking before you posted !! much appreciated

You've been a great help, this kind of information is often hard to find, and I really do appreciate your time, there can be some real trolls on these forums so its nice to have a normal human to communicate with once in a while hahaha !

I think I will go to the store and try some shots with the button combos and such to see if this is something I can use regularly. But the only thing different techincally I think I am gaining from going from my canon 1000D/rebel xs at the moment to the pany, is the use of cheap old FAST primes (probably worth the switch right there for the low light ability, and shallow DOF which I looove) and the fact that I have a color accurate and brightness accurate shrouded display to judge things in concert lighting, or right under sun or anything else that would taint an LCD's accuracy. Most of the reviewed features of the pany the canon has, because the live exposure view on the canon is actually very good, I had no idea until the other day haha (never seems to be mentioned as big of a deal as it is to me, because focusing with an optical view finder is damn near impossible). Is there anything you can think of that I am not that would be a huge hindrance besides the possibility of not liking the handling using their workaround?

Thanks again !

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Gosh, your last question is a difficult one given that my pet hates may not be the same as yours. Anyway, here the things that really p!ss me off with the G1:

• You can't access flash exposure compensation easily, even if using the Control Panel/Direct Access mode (you have to f* k about in trawling through the Setup menus)
• the Setup menus are a God d@mned pain in the butt to me (e.g. the Custom Menus has 5 pages; you have an up and down, as well as a left and right cursor key; common sense would have told the idiot firmware writer that the left and right cursor keys should be used to move from left to right across the screen so as to quickly preview/scan the contents of the page tabs at the top of the screen; but oh no! the idiot firmware wirter decides it would be "better" if we bloody well endured a " death by a million scrolls" by having to scroll through every God damned item from say tab/page 1 to tab/page 3 if what we want is at the end of tab/page 3)
• the My Menu feature is stupidly implemented. Rather than allowing the user to fix their five most oft used features within the My Menu, the d@mn silly camera alters the d@mn list each time you access something on the camera (it stores the last five items you have used, so if you happen to use an item for the first time this year it will end up on the My Menu list. Dumb!!)
• I don't too like the fact that the grid lines disappear as soon as you start moving the AF frame around the screen (they return once you have set the position of the AF frame)
• I hate the fact that the hotshoe is constantly live . Once you put a flash in the hotshoe, and switch the flash on the flash will always fire unless you switch the flash off using it's power button. This is a d@mn pain because, it means that when you switch the flash back on, you have to wait a while for the flash gun to "warm up". I much prefer a system whereby you can keep the flashgun on, and simply disable the hotshoe from sending a signal by smply selecting an option from within the menu system/firmware; the other drawback is that if you have a remote flash trigger attached to your cam, it will always fire if you press the shutter unless it has a "power off" button (I find I have to keep removing mine from the hotshoe if I don't want my flashguns to fire)
• I am not too keen on the Custom (User Profiles) Button being on the same dial as the exposure settings; it shoud be on a seperate dial (in place of the Focus Mode dial, which can easily be relegated to the menus system)
• During image playback, pressing the MENU/SET button does not, as logic tells me it should, take you directly to options related to the manipulation of images e.g. Protect, Rotate etc. Instead the d@mn thing takes you to the top of the main Setup screen. Daft!

Well, those are my pet hates.

Regards

Oh one other quick thing I wanted to ask that I don't think has been specifically asked anywhere is this. If your using a normal automatic lense in the WYSIWYG mode (without gain) I assume that when you stop the apeture down really small but have correct exposure with shutter speed that the view would be of normal brightness showing you the "exposure". However with a manual lense does it do that as well since it doesn't know the apeture? Or does the screen get very dark as witha DOP preview on a normal DSLR through a optical viewfinder?

Thanks again !!!!

ps. just checked my 1000d, if I take of my lense, put it in live view and change the shutter speed (apeture reads 00) then it gets darker and lighter, so hopefully thats how it works on the pany.

I do not have my G1 with me today because the Nikon gear was looking sad sitting on the shelf. Without the camera I can not test what happens when using AE-L and manual settings. If AE-L is locked and then you make adjustments to aperture and shutter does the displayed preview change? I can't remember and use spot metering most of the time anyway.

--
Charles
My family images are at http://www.stakeman.smugmug.com
Be sure of your subject.
Never, force the shot.

plevyadophy wrote:

Thanks for that list. It's a nice summary, and although I'd put them in a slightly different order, they are all real bugbears!

plevyadophy said:

Gosh, your last question is a difficult one given that my pet hates may not be the same as yours. Anyway, here the things that really p!ss me off with the G1:

• You can't access flash exposure compensation easily, even if using the Control Panel/Direct Access mode (you have to f* k about in trawling through the Setup menus)

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I don't do much flash, so this is lower down, but I was at a party the other night, big room bounce flash, I wanted more exposure, and I just couldn't find the compensation, so I gave up.

plevyadophy said:

• the Setup menus are a God d@mned pain in the butt to me (e.g. the Custom Menus has 5 pages; you have an up and down, as well as a left and right cursor key; common sense would have told the idiot firmware writer that the left and right cursor keys should be used to move from left to right across the screen so as to quickly preview/scan the contents of the page tabs at the top of the screen; but oh no! the idiot firmware wirter decides it would be "better" if we bloody well endured a " death by a million scrolls" by having to scroll through every God damned item from say tab/page 1 to tab/page 3 if what we want is at the end of tab/page 3)

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Coming from the FZ50, where up/down takes one consequetively, left/right pages, this is real tedium.

plevyadophy said:

• the My Menu feature is stupidly implemented. Rather than allowing the user to fix their five most oft used features within the My Menu, the d@mn silly camera alters the d@mn list each time you access something on the camera (it stores the last five items you have used, so if you happen to use an item for the first time this year it will end up on the My Menu list. Dumb!!)

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Absolutely - I just haven't tried to deal with this; and it could be useful!

plevyadophy said:

• I don't too like the fact that the grid lines disappear as soon as you start moving the AF frame around the screen (they return once you have set the position of the AF frame)

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I gave up on moving the AF frame, it seemed to get tangled up with AF mode and WB when I needed it! So I keep it central and lock focus and recompose.

plevyadophy said:

• I hate the fact that the hotshoe is constantly live . Once you put a flash in the hotshoe, and switch the flash on the flash will always fire unless you switch the flash off using it's power button. This is a d@mn pain because, it means that when you switch the flash back on, you have to wait a while for the flash gun to "warm up". I much prefer a system whereby you can keep the flashgun on, and simply disable the hotshoe from sending a signal by smply selecting an option from within the menu system/firmware; the other drawback is that if you have a remote flash trigger attached to your cam, it will always fire if you press the shutter unless it has a "power off" button (I find I have to keep removing mine from the hotshoe if I don't want my flashguns to fire)

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Yes, I just accept that I have to power down the gun (at least that works) then because it was mostly charged when I switch on again, it's pretty prompt. Not a big deal for me.

plevyadophy said:

• I am not too keen on the Custom (User Profiles) Button being on the same dial as the exposure settings; it shoud be on a seperate dial (in place of the Focus Mode dial, which can easily be relegated to the menus system)

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Yes, again it's deterred me from making full use of the custom menus.

plevyadophy said:

• During image playback, pressing the MENU/SET button does not, as logic tells me it should, take you directly to options related to the manipulation of images e.g. Protect, Rotate etc. Instead the d@mn thing takes you to the top of the main Setup screen. Daft!

Click to expand...

Daft indeed!

plevyadophy said:

Well, those are my pet hates.

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Thanks, as always you've made me think! I need to make use of some of the features that I'm ignoring!

Mike
--
Mike Davis
Photographing the public for over 50 years
http://www.flickr.com/photos/watchman
G1 FZ50

Ok I tested the g1 in the store a good bit today. Seems that yes with a manual (was a zeiss with an adapter since thats all they had) the exposure preview works just fine. Also just as another has said in this thread, the histogram changes with it as well.

However when in the WYSIWYG mode, when you zoom, it goes out of the mode, as well as when you change white balance or ISO I think also like another said in this thread. That can be worked around but it is cumbersome.

All in all the camera does provide (although a bit difficult to use) a WYSIWYG, which is quite rare with any camera today.

So I have another question now. Silkypix must have all the lens info to do its magic I assume, so the corrections that are made with the kit lenses (to good results) are (still assuming here) not made?

I can find cheap manual primes from 24mm to 200mm just fine but below on the wide end is impossible, so the kit lens might have to suffice for the wide stuff. But if anyone has other options I would love to hear it !

jonathangaillard said:

So I have another question now. Silkypix must have all the lens info to do its magic I assume, so the corrections that are made with the kit lenses (to good results) are (still assuming here) not made?

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Ok wierd I just noticed you can't edit posts here

So on my above quote it meant to say:

Silkypix must have all the lens info to do its magic I assume, so the corrections that are made with the kit lenses (to good results) are (still assuming here) not made with manual lenses ?

jonathangaillard said:

Silkypix must have all the lens info to do its magic I assume, so the corrections that are made with the kit lenses (to good results) are (still assuming here) not made with manual lenses ?

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Correct. In m43 the corrections are actually stored in the lens, passed to the body and then the body stores the correction parameters into the metadata of the RAW file or in JPG mode applies them directly to the image (similarly the RAW preview image generated by the camera will have the corrections applied although the underlying RAW data has not been affected). A compliant RAW converter (Silkypix, ACR, Lightroom, etc.) will take the correction data from the RAW metadata and then apply the corrections after demosaicing.

In the case of a manual lens there are no correction parameters available from the lens so no corrections are applied or stored anywhere.

The key point here is in the m43 standard the correction parameters are actually stored in the lens - there aren't any look up tables in the camera or the RAW converters.
--
Ken W

Rebel XT, XTi, Pany G1, LX3, FZ28, Fuji F30, and a lot of 35mm and 4x5 sitting in the closet...

Ok, thanks for the details. So how would you compare then the quality of an old canon FD prime on a G1 to the kit lenses on a G1 considering one is very well corrected and one is not, but probably has better native glass/spec?

I wouldn't think vignetting is a problem since they are full size lenses, but maybe CA since they are not digitally designed with parallel light out the back and lower resolution because of the date they were made? Just hunches.. what do you think?

Boy things are changing huh?

jonathangaillard said:

jonathangaillard wrote:

Ok, thanks for the details. So how would you compare then the quality of an old canon FD prime on a G1 to the kit lenses on a G1 considering one is very well corrected and one is not, but probably has better native glass/spec?

I wouldn't think vignetting is a problem since they are full size lenses, but maybe CA since they are not digitally designed with parallel light out the back and lower resolution because of the date they were made? Just hunches.. what do you think?

Boy things are changing huh?

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Hi,

The simple solution is to shoot your test shots (assuming you are trying to test/compare your old 50 prime with a microFT lens) in raw and then open the raw files in any raw converter except Silikypix or Adobe Camera Raw (both of which apply the corrections).

BTW, a bit of nerd-like trivia for you: those microFT corrections are applied to the viewfinder and LCD view too (so an ultra-wide angle lens like the 7-14mm shows near zero distortion through the viewfinder)

Regards