GX7 review (my first review!)

Laszlo13 wrote:

<Del>I find Panasonic's equally extensive menu system, without any organization, to be a big mess frankly. You keep have to scroll through 8 pages of menu, without any logical organization. <del>

my one foray into olympus territory (post-film era, that is) was the em5 and i found the menu system nearly impossible to use. to be fair though, the em5 had an unimaginable amount of customizations. for me it was overkill and i sold that camera and replaced it with a gx1, about a $1500 difference in price when you added in some things like the grip system for the oly. anyway, i've already wandered off-topic. i digress, i breathe. [g]

i admit that some of the panasonic menu items don't seem to fit the categories that well, but think of it this way. in program mode there's only 3 categories (the icons on the left-hand side) for 'normal' consideration: record, custom, and setup. you can skip right over or ignore playback and video unless you're specifically wanting those modes. and you shouldn't need to get into setup very often at all once you've setup the camera the way you want stuff like the lcd parameters and the time outs and the sounds and audio to work. so right away you're only dealing with two categories, the record and the custom menu trees.

another great tip i only found in a review (not in the panasonic docs, natch!) was that you can hit the /disp/ button to page through the menu items--you don't have to scroll through those 8 'sections' of the longer category. just hit the /disp/ button 8 times and watch for your option to pop onto the screen in one of the 8 'pages'--after awhile you'll memorize the ones you change often and can go right to it is seconds.

also, there's a menu option that when you return into the menu it'll either start at the first page of the first category (record) or the last item you were in. i found that being able to go to a known (1st page of 1st category) position was more helpful than returning to where i last left except in those cases where i was working on a specific function and having to go back and forth to keep trying it out. after a few time my muscle memory would kick in and i'd know exactly how many 'clicks' of the /disp/ button it takes to get to the item i want once i was in the menu system.

/guy