Giving up on Panasonic gx7... I think.

robmarshall77 wrote:

As stated at the beginning of this thread, I'm giving up on this on camera. I say "I think" cos I won't sell it just yet but I never really got on with it. The real testament to this is that I never found myself taking out and using it. It feels awkward and unbalanced in the hand imo, not really super carry around like a great compact, nor reassuring like a dSLR but lost in between. The menus are complicated

Obviously, you've never used a Sony. I came from Canon DSLRs, which had pretty manageable menus, and found the Panasonic menus pretty straightforward. The latter had more settings, which made things a bit harder, but that's just the result of the Panasonics having more features and being more customizable. Sony's settings, OTOH, are a horrible, complicated mess.

and I always found myself having to remember how to change settings, also there are so many of them, something that I thought when I first got the camera would be great.

With pretty much any modern mirrorless ILC, it's worth sitting down with the manual and working through the menus to configure the controls to match your preferred way of working. This can take hours initially and then days or weeks of tweaking, but it makes a huge difference if you can eventually end up with a camera that works the way you want it to. It's also why I can't just pick up my colleague's camera and start shooting...

The photos I did take with it were always a bit *meh*, and I'm sure this is more about me a photographer than the camera, but I never found myself wanting to get better with it. I've got the f1.7 prime (cheap version) and even with this things didn't really improve, images just looked flat (admittedly jpegs, I don't really have the patience for post processing and raw) so maybe this more of my bad!

Um, yeah. I've got tons of images I love from my three GX7s.

Anyway, what have I changed to? Well, I've just bought a used (but mint) Canon g7xii. A strange downward move perhaps, but I'm hoping to get out and take more photos and recreate the buzz I got from using my old s90, which I loved using and gave me great results as and inconspicuous little travel cam and lovely Canon colors. I've read good things about the g7xii so I'm quite excited. What do you all think, am I giving up on m43 too easily?

I think you're expecting an inanimate object to make you a better photographer. That never ends well. OTOH, there's a lot to be said for working with gear that you like.