Panasonic G85 from an Olympus user

Jonathan Gladstone wrote:

If my question is noobish.. please excuse me.

On my G3, it allegedly has a 'live view' mode which to me means that the camera adjusts the view through the viewfinder to be pretty close to what the final image would be (in terms of shutter/exposure)and so forth. It is a selectable Fn button (Fn2?)... which really does not seem to work as advertised.. so I keep the button assigned to AEF/ etc.

(FYI.. as an example on my G3 when I look through the view-finder with my Olym 25mm f1.8 attached, I can see the aperture is set to near f16/f22 so the image that I see through screen will NOT be the final result)

Whereas with the handy-dandy 'training videos' that Panasonic has released, there is a apparently a far clearer mode of seeing (via viewfinder or rear screen) What You See Is What You Get.

In the Olympus world, you can set the EVF/LCD to use the exposure settings to bump the picture and give you an example of how the picture will look if it is shot (without using a flash).  Thus you can look at the image, and dial in the options or the compensation to get a better shot.

Note, this does not stop down the lens to the aperture you selected, there is another option for that.  I'm sure that Panasonic has similar options.

However, if you are using flash or doing a long exposure on a tripod, the screen is likely too dark to be able to use it.  So you flip the first option to light the EVF/LCD as best it can so that you can auto focus in dark situations.

Both are needed, depending on what type of shots you are doing.

And my actual question becomes - "if you have that (above mentioned )feature available to you AND you can see a really good approximation of your final image, why do you then next to have Exposure Compensation in Manual mode, when you can adjust your I, A and S settings really easily?"

Well using flash is one scenario.  The camera won't be able to actually meter the light until it fires off the pre-flashes that are part of the TTL flash to better set the time/power of the flash.  It can use the normal exposure compensation, and the special flash compensation that can override the normal exposure compensation to set up the defaults.