Excellent color accuracy
Surprisingly solid sharpness
Useless image stabilization
Poor white balance
Introduction
White balance was very poor in both auto and manual settings.
White Balance (6.06)
balance was a significant weakness in the G2’s performance, with disappointing results using both the automatic white balance setting and the custom white balance.
The only real highlight was the cameras’s accuracy in rendering color under incandescent lighting, while using its custom white balance setting. This is often an Achilles heel for digital cameras and it’s nice to see that the G2 fared comparatively well in this regard. With incandescent lighting, the auto setting definitely fared much worse. Even under daylight testing, the G2 didn’t do particularly well compared to the competition. Custom white balance improved things overall, but the results were still disappointing. More on how we test color.
Automatic White Balance (7.37)
Using the automatic white balance setting, results were best in fluorescent and daylight. Of course, these are the conditions under which most cameras usually do well. Compared to most of the cameras we’ve tested, the G2 actually did poorly.
The big surprise was actually incandescent lighting. As always, the camera struggled with this type of lighting, but not as much as the competition did. Sure, colors weren’t exactly accurate (they were, in fact, much warmer than they should be), but compared to a lot of other models, the G2 did quite well.
Custom White Balance (4.75)
Taking a custom white balance eliminated the overall warm skew to color reproduction, but in most cases, the system actually overcompensated, resulting in cool tones across the board. These are disappointing results for any camera.
Shop for the Panasonic DMC-G2
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