Great, but not very reliable

Leo "Zoom" wrote:

I own two of these from 2014 or 2015, both second hand. Both are dead now. And I'm bidding again on one - as it's dirty cheap now.

The good. 16 mpix is more than enough (I had 24 mpix full frame berofe). Camera is perfectly ballanced for street photo. S-AF focus is very fast and reliable, but C-AF not so good. It is heavily packed with features. And with f/1.7 primes it is very compact an fun to use. People are often complaining about the focus speed of Lumix 20mm f/1.7 - guys, put it on GX7. Very fast, very small - perfect everyday lens. FHD video is awesome - wish it had a mic input though.

Now the bad - although I don't use them heavily (can't check now, but the shutter count is somewhere in the range of 20000-30000 on both - but I carry at least one everywhere), both rear dials failed, both SD slots failed. Real dial is quite easy and cheap to replace, but for SD slot you have to disassemble almost everything - and I didn't find a replacement part. One has failing front dial around the shutter button. LCD frame cracked on both on bottom left. One has failed motherboard - OK, I fried it myself trying an old third party flashgun on it. But even after that it was still working with reduced functionality. At some point I was trying to make one fully functioning out of two - but when SD slots started to fail on both, I gave up. To be fair - I take out the card very often to download images with the card reader. Also GX7 is prone to dust under AA filter. I had one and I see GX7 on sale with a "non-removable dust" quite often. Actually the dust on my camera fell of by itself after some time.

Mine is from 2013 and all the dials continue to work just fine. I rarely ever use the PUSH operation of the rear dial so I wonder if that has something to do with mine's long term durability?

Also, shockingly, I discovered that I only have about 6,000 shutter actuations on mine. But then I thought about it and did a little test. It turns out that the shutter count only counts mechanical shutter actuations and I primarily use e-shutter so I've definitely taken far more pictures than 6,000 over the course of 7 years.

My camera's only failure was some "dust" getting lodged between the sensor and filter stack. Fortunately, a local camera repair shop disassembled and cleaned the stack for a surprisingly reasonable price (CAD250-ish).

Also, FWIW, I always take the card out to xfer images to my computer.