Got an awesome new camera strap from Gordy’s last week, so I had to be excessive and take a portrait of my GH1 with the strap.
I have no fancy lighting, so I set a long exposure (3 seconds… the max on my point and shoot) and lit the scene with my MacBook Pro’s screen (the up-lighting) and an iPod Touch (which I had to wave about above the camera). Reflections in the lens are from me waving about a LED keychain with my other hand. Pink highlights are from my magenta hoodie. Worked out quite well!
Also, I’m loving the strap. The new leather starts out stiff and rough, but should wear down nicely (it’s already softening up). The neck pad would feel rough on the skin, except I wear it across my body (one arm through the strap), so it doesn’t even touch the back of my neck. More about it when I actually get to use it more!
Time for some major fist-pumping, kids! Just picked up a Canon NewFD 50mm f1.4 lens for around $40 US (3900 JPY, to be exact). And SWEET JEEBUS the 1.4 aperture is AMAZING!
Using the adapter: The FD’s breech lock needs to engage at the single red dot, rotate to the double red dot (by which I mean the dot that is in line with the dot on the m4/3s mount side), and then push and lock back to and past the single red dot on the mount. For my 50mm lens, the dot on the lens is almost 1cm past the single dot on the lens mount. If you don’t fully tighten the lens onto the adapter, you may not be able to open your lens to the widest apertures.
Fit and finish of the adapter: VERY nice and tight fit onto my GH1. Same for the lens, though it was a bit tricky at first because I didn’t know how to get the breech lock to engage. This particular adapter is very well made out of a solid piece of aluminum. There are a few spots where the aluminum failed to anodize black on mine, but they’re on the inside and don’t bother me.
Lens: Bought used from my local camera store. Was rated “average” quality because there’s some of dust within it, but that sort of thing doesn’t have any impact on the image quality. It’s a very solid, hefty lens, thanks to the metal construction. Since it’s a NewFD, it’s multi-coated as well.
Using the lens: Since this is a lens for a 35mm system, the field of view is approximately twice that of what the GH1’s sensor can capture. That means, it acts like a lens with twice the focal length (100mm) on the GH1. Don’t double the focusing distances written on the lens barrel, though… those work as written. Speaking of which, it is SO nice to have a real manual focus lens, instead of futzing around with the endlessly turning focus on the kit lens. I actually had a sense of where my focus was on this lens, without having to stop and enlarge the focusing area. And did I mention how freaking nice f1.4 is? Because it’s totally awesome.
I was so busy planning this trip that I totally forgot to mention it here, but I took a two-week trip to Tokyo and Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto, Nara) and around Hokkaido (Hakodate, Sapporo, Akan, Obihiro, Daisetsuzan area) two weeks ago. I lugged the camera pretty much everywhere I went, so here are some notes about extensive travelling with the camera:
Watch the SD card door! I had to shove a lot of things into my tiny camera bag, so the GH1 was pretty snug up against everything. Unfortunately, it was so snug that the SD card slot would pop open just from me reaching in to pull out my wallet. The plastic part of the door even completely snapped off of the metal hinge at one point. Luckily, the metal hinge bent back into shape and I was able to snap the plastic door back on without problems. Then I promptly rearranged my bag so the card door faced AWAY from all the things I had to grab out of my bag.
The cheap camera strap has its uses. Namely, it is thin enough that I can just wrap it around one of my wrists as a make-shift wrist strap, which was a much more comfortable way to securely hold the camera in the summer humidity of the Kansai area.
Get a second battery to keep on-hand and have at least one of the batteries fully-charged each day. With that big, shiny LCD and the video recording, the GH1 can’t get too many photos/videos out of a single full battery. It’s also nice because you can review and delete unwanted photos on one battery while charging the other (no need to bring that bulky A/C adapter!).
Get a ball head mini tripod and keep it on you. You never know when you’ll need one of these! I had a super cheap one lying around, decided to bring it on a whim, and found myself using it quite often, not only as a tripod but as a stabilizer as well. With the ball head, I can angle my camera pretty freely, and since the legs extend, I can rest those on my own body to keep the camera from shaking too much. A word of warning, though: I don’t recommend you get a tripod as cheap as mine… mine was NOT designed to hold the weight of a DSLR and would shift out of place quite easily, though I watched it carefully so that my camera never fell.
If you plan on recording ANY video, make sure you’ve got SD cards to spare. It simply takes too long to decode videos to take them off the SD card every single day, so even if you keep moving photos off, you will still slowly lose space on that card.
I was literally running around and shooting photos and videos all day (school parade!), when I discovered a slight issue with the 14-140mm kit lens. (Innuendo warning: I’m too tired to phrase this in a way that WON’T make the gutterminded giggle.)
The zooming mechanism was super tight when I first got it, which made for some really jerky zooming, but meant the lens stayed where you put it if the camera was jostled. After a LOT of use, though (it is my only lens for the GH1 and I’ve shot well over 30,000 photos and many hours of video on it), the mechanism has become really loose. So loose that the lens actually extended halfway while I was running with it pointed down. On the bright side, I now get really smooth zooming in videos… but it’s still a bit disconcerting, and I can only hope it doesn’t get looser…
I’ll keep this simple: this is a list of facts about recording video with the Panasonic Lumix GH1 (Japanese version) that are not immediately obvious and usually not covered by the professional reviews.
Battery life is 163 minutes while recording AVCHD video (1280x720, 60p, EVF only, continuous auto-focus, Intelligent Auto Mode), with 162 minutes of total video recorded (across 3 memory cards). Panasonic’s video recording battery life estimate was 120 minutes. I had some technical difficulties beforehand, which meant I did not start recording on a completely full battery (I probably used up several minutes of recording time), and I also turned off the camera twice to switch between full memory cards (a 16GB and a 2GB), so you could probably squeeze out even more video with a bigger card (32GB or more) and fuller battery.
AVCHD is free from the 4GB FAT32 single-file limit. When your recording goes over 4GB, the GH1 automatically starts recording to a new file, so your full recording can span several files. The recording only becomes one single file when it is imported into a computer and combined by the computer’s software. Therefore, recordings are only limited by the capacity of the memory card (except for the European version of the GH1, which is purposely limited).
Importing/converting AVCHD is time- and space-consuming. All consumer-grade, and most pro-grade, video editing software require that AVCHD be imported to the computer and converted into a format that the software can edit. This can easily take twice the length of the recording and will result in uncompressed files that are MUCH larger than what was on the memory card. So even though you can take 4 full hours of 1920x1080 video on one 32GB card, you might not want to import what may be several hundred gigabytes of video.
Got any more questions about the GH1 or requests for tests? Ask away in the comments! (Please keep in mind that I am not a professional reviewer and do not have much to work with beyond the GH1 itself.)
A pretty silly test run of using the Gorillapod to mount my GH1 to the passenger seat. Worked well, but was boring, so I sped it up 4x, added some crazy effects, and threw some music on in the background (“Missing Link” by the Hives, purposely at a really awful bitrate). iMovie 06 evidently can’t handle 16:9, so the letterboxing got insane… but I like the results.
One month and over 20,000 images later, I’m ready to say a few things about the GH1 that’s sort of like an actual review. (And note that for simplicity, I will just refer to the GH1 as a DSLR, though I realize it technically is not one without the mirror mechanism.)
It is not the best DSLR and not the best camcorder… but still may make you fall in love with it.
At $1500 US for the 14-140mm lens kit (or around $900, body-only), it costs almost twice as much as an entry level camera from Nikon or Canon, but can’t even match those in still image quality becauseit rivals both the price and quality of mid-range SLRs from Nikon and Canon, despite the fact that its Four-Thirds sized sensor is 30-40% smaller than the APS-C sensors those DSLRs (edit note: I stand corrected!). It also has a total of 4 lenses (as of May 2009) that work without an adaptor. But add on one of the many adapters available, and you not only have access to the new Four-Thirds lenses from Olympus, but many inexpensive old lenses from Canon, Nikon, and Pentax’s film days, as well as the top quality, legendary lenses of Leica’s rangefinders (none of which work on the mirror-mechanism, larger sensored DSLRs from Nikon, Canon, etc.). And the ability to shoot full 1080p HD video through some of the best lenses in the world is enough to make some people salivate uncontrollably (just check Flickr for some of the amazing results).
But even then, its video is not perfect. It has traces of the “rolling shutter” effect (where it looks like your whole scene is lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb) and the “jelly” effect (where the edges of the frame seem to wave and jiggle during panning and action-filled shots), which will make those serious about video quality cringe. Even so, amazing results can come from working within the GH1’s limits, as professional filmmaker Philip Bloom demonstrates in his videos.
However, for the “expert” point-and-shooter, this may be your dream camera.
As someone who is used to the limited manual settings and video mode on her point-and-shoot, I’ve personally found the GH1 to be pretty freaking awesome to work with. The Intelligent Auto mode is great for candids and snapshots where you don’t want to think about camera settings. The camera will automatically detect if you’re shooting a close-up or a night landscape or a portrait and adjust settings to suit. The face-tracking AF/AE also makes sure human faces in your shots are properly focused and exposed. It doesn’t work perfectly (it fails of faces are turned downwards, upwards, or otherwise away from the camera, and I haven’t gotten it to detect more than 3 faces at once in candids), but does a good job of detecting even profiles of people, especially if they are smiling.
The rest of the settings are as you would expect on any DSLR. Though I should note that the Movie Mode on the mode dial is actually full manual movie mode. Inexperienced shooters should stick to shooting video in Intelligent Auto or aperture priority mode. The “record” button on the thumb rest lets you easily record a movie in ANY shooting mode… a minus to some with bigger thumbs who may accidentally press the button, or to more serious photographers, but a great ability for the snapshot/candid/documentary shooter, who can now decide on a whim whether to take a photo or record a video.
The rotating screen is one of my favorite parts of the whole camera, since it opens up endless shooting possibilities without the need to shoot blind or guess what your shot will look like. It really encourages you to experiment and get up into places you might not normally go when you’re limited to an optical viewfinder or back-mounted LCD display.
At the same time, it’s also pretty small as DSLRs go. It never feels heavy around my neck and so it’s pretty easy to carry around. Of course, it’s not as tiny and compact as my old point-and-shoot, but it makes the transition to a bigger camera much easier than, say, a Nikon D90 (which is an HD film enabled DSLR around the same price).
Add all that to the plethora of external mics (anything with a standard 3.5mm stereo mic jack) and lens possibilities, and you’ve got quite a bit to experiment with, in a format that invites experimentation by even inexperienced users.
But pro DSLR / camcorder users will probably want to stick to their dedicated rigs.
While I personally think this is a great camera for amateurs or beginners in both digital video and DSLR photography, the price tag tends to scare away most beginners, which is a pity. The camera has a lot of limitations that, as I’ve said before, will make pros cringe.
The electronic viewfinder will be very awkward for the seasoned DSLR shooter (though very familiar to the filmographer), and while the manual focus is very good, it’s slow and less intuitive compared to a conventional DSLR and will take some time to get used to. The image quality, especially in low light and high ISOs, also cannot compare to similarly priced dedicated DSLRs. And I’ve already mentioned its weaknesses with video quality.
In addition, movies are recorded in AVCHD format and limited to as long as your memory card can handle (6/11/09: please see my notes about video recording). Converting these videos, however, will often take longer than the length of the videos themselves. On my 2.4 GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM, a 3 minute video takes around 5 minutes to import, and exporting takes at least double that time.
So where’s that love I was talking about?
When all is said and done, I DO love this camera. My own creative process as an artist is about embracing the limits of a medium and finding creative solutions to still make stuff look pretty dang good. For me, it’s more important to have a camera that is super portable and does both stills and videos well enough, while being both flexible and expandable.
So if you aren’t reliant on having the best image or video quality (you’re better off with $5000+ specialized rigs if you are searching for either), but just want to pursue your creative outlets in a pretty easy and efficient way, you may want to consider the GH1. For everyone else… you’ll probably want to wait for better reviews.
