Panasonic GX1:

The panasonic GX1 is one of the least loved MFT bodies I’ve seen for a long time.  It came out with panasonic’s new 16mp sensor a bit before the OMD arrived.  It was great for the first month or so but then the OMD started shipping and everyone wanted the OMD.  Everyone said the OMD’s IQ was much better and that the OMD as a whole was a much better camera than the GX1…  While some of that is true, I’ll say the GX1 got a bad wrap on it’s IQ for sure. This camera has a wonderful little sensor in it.  W/o putting it’s images side by side at 100% next to the OMD’s you’d be hard pressed to tell them appart on noise or detail.  Where they DO differ is in their out of the camera white balance.  The GX1 is actually quite good WB wise, it’s just that it’s very accurate (where olympus is warmer but people seem to like that better).  The auto focus with the GX1 is VERY fast.  If it’s not as fast as the OMD you’d need a stopwatch to be able to tell a difference (with the same lens).

Where the panasonic falls flat on it’s face is in a few areas.  The first of which for me is that it’s auto ISO logic is terrible.  You can not set the maximum ISO level for auto ISO (it defaults to 3200 which isn’t the end of the world) but even worse is it uses 1/60th of a second as the shutter speed it steps to the next ISO…  This results in motion blur city, I use 1/125th to get non blurry shots of my kids.  The walk around for this is to switch to Tv/S mode and set that to 1/125th.  Where this doesn’t work is in a very dark room where 1/125th, wide open and 3200 isn’t enough light, the camera stays at 1/125th where an olympus or canon would then apply some logic to understand you still want to get a shot and drop the shutter speed down a bit.  Yes I want 1/125th, but I’m willing to go slower ONLY WHEN I’ve maxed out the ISO and I’m wide open already…  And while we’re at it, I could live with 3200 being the max if the logic worked, but because it doesn’t it’d be really nice if 6400 was the max….  And yes I can shoot manually and get around all these issues, but other cameras in this test don’t make me so I’d choose them over the GX1 just for this reason…

Here’s a sub-video-review of the GX1 and EPM2 as well as the 20mm -vs- the 17mm for you if you’re bored with the (massively long) video above:

The few other negatives it has is that it’s FPS is low, there’s no in camera raw processing (so no playing with eyefi unless you shoot JPEGs) and no in camera panorama mode.  Some people have complained that the buttons are very hard to read, which is true, but you learn what does what quick enough and that goes away.  The menus aren’t the best but again they’ll get the job done.  The design of the body is wonderful and I LOVE the grips (front and rear) on this body….  And being that this is a MFT (micro four thirds) body you get access to all the amazing lenses available in this system which is a HUGE plus.  It also has a touch screen LCD which you won’t see me talk much about because I don’t use touch screens on my cameras, especially not capacitance types where I feel like I have to push harder than I should… Pros: Great  body construction (best MFT option IMHO), fast AF, dirt cheap (especially used), great sensor, MFT lens options. Cons:  Terrible “logic” for auto ISO, slow FPS, no raw processing, no in camera pano option, no “safety shift” for exposures, hard to read buttons (but you learn them quickly), ugly menus, resistance touch screen.