Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1

Buttons & Dials

Shooting with the original G1 we found the front control dial was too sensitive, leading us to click it accidentally and change the exposure compensation settings. In the new model there appears to be more resistance, making this less of a problem (though we did slip occasionally). The new point of concern, though, is the movie record button on the top right thumb rest. Keeping your thumb off the button requires a level of delicacy we lacked during fast action shooting, leading to some very peculiar accidental video clips. We did have fewer slips as we spent more time with the camera, but it remains an awkwardly positioned control.

Film Modes

The Panasonic approach to providing preset shooting setting combinations is to group them into nine ‘film modes’ as shown below.

Each of these preset modes can be adjusted for contrast, sharpness, saturation and noise reduction with five available increments (the black and white modes leave out saturation). As discussed in our noise testing section, the handling of noise reduction on the GH1 is more than a little strange. Every other camera we can think of makes this a simple menu selection that covers any color mode you happen to be using and, what’s more, lets you turn noise reduction off altogether to maximize fine detail reproduction. Panasonic asks you to ramp up or throttle down for individual film styles, which doesn’t seem to offer a particular benefit, and refuses to let you turn noise reduction off altogether.

When shooting, there’s a form of bracketing for film type, that takes up to three separate shots in sequence in the film modes of your choosing. You have to take a separate shot for each, which seems odd when it should be simple enough to apply multiple settings to the same image, though using burst mode basically solves this problem.

Another approach to getting settings to your liking is the My Color mode, with its own spot on the mode dial. It’s a fairly basic system, with color, brightness and saturation settings that are adjusted by moving an on-screen slider (with eleven possible positions) for each using the four-way control, with the results displayed as you make changes. The appeal here is the absolute simplicity: you don’t have to know anything about complex photographic settings to move three sliders and stop when you like what you see. And for many users, that will have real appeal.

Picture Effect Samples
Standard Dynamic Nature Smooth Nostalgic Vibrant Standard B&W Dynamic B&W Smooth B&W More...

In-Camera Editing

Pictures can be resized in the camera, a useful tool if you’re planning to email an image. Trimming is also available, but it’s pretty rudimentary: you can enlarge the image on screen, reposition it and crop to match what you see, but you can’t take a vertical crop from a horizontal photo, for example, or change the aspect ratio while cropping. There is an aspect conversion option, but only from 16:9-format shots.

Title Edit lets you add a written label to a photo, or a group of photos at once, that will be displayed as you browse your pictures and imprinted on images. Entering the text is a clumsy project, though, and the results are plain and unattractive. If you could search by the text you entered, that would have been interesting. As it stands, we’ll pass.

Images can also be rotated, and a brief audio notation can be added to a still (you can also record one while shooting). That’s basically all she wrote, a fairly uninspired array of capabilities when compared to the multitude of color, sharpness, contrast, dynamic range and virtual filters available in other cameras (particularly Nikon and Olympus consumer SLRs).

Menu

As with most cameras today, the GH1 uses a two-tier menu system, with a Quick Menu for fast access to settings used while shooting along with a more complete traditional menu system. The Quick Menu is easy to access, with its own dedicated button on top of the camera. The display will differ depending on the LCD view in effect when you call up the menu, though the available settings are the same. If you have the LCD set for one of the two variations of Live View (LCD Monitor style or Viewfinder style), shooting information is overlaid top and bottom on the screen, and pressing Quick Menu makes these items interactive, with drop-down lists of options. Getting to the setting you’re interested in setting is fairly awkward in this view, though, since you have to navigate through each possibility in sequence, starting in the top group and working your way down to the bottom of the screen. If you’re using the full-screen recording information display (and lining up your shots with the electronic viewfinder), the Quick Menu system is far more effective, since all your settings are displayed on one neatly arranged screen and you can move directly to the one you want.

The Menu/Set button in the middle of the four-way controller brings up the main menu system, and the four directional buttons are the basic tool for navigating through it. You can also turn the control dial to zoom you up and down through the individual menus quickly. That comes in handy when faced with menus that can run five screens long. That’s a structure we’re never glad to see, since important options are hidden out of sight until you’ve scrolled down to find them.

Instruction Manual

The 200-page manual is a bit dense but complete and thorough, with a nice introductory section that presents the information you’ll need to start shooting in an easy-to-understand way. As we find so often, the index is a major weakness here. Want to shoot video? It’s not listed under ‘video’ or even ‘movie’ — try ‘motion picture’ instead. Want to improve dynamic range performance? You’d better know that the feature is called Intelligent Exposure, because there’s no listing for dynamic range. This lack of user focus when creating an index makes the entire manual far less valuable.

To download a copy of the GH1 user manual in PDF format, click here.