Customer Reviews

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 12.1MP Micro Four-Thirds Interchangeable Lens Digital Camera Body (Black)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This camera uses inexpensive mount adapters to travel back in time to the world of manual prime glass. You can get incredible optics in full metal bodies for cheap on eBay.

The reason this works on the GF1 is because of the short flangeback distance (distance between the mounting plane and the sensor). The adapters therefore only have to extend other system lenses out to their native flangeback distance. You can't do this on an SLR because it's difficult if the adapted lens needs to be closer to the sensor -- you'll need expensive and distortive optical correction. No other system out there has a shorter distance the m4/3, so for 30 bucks you can use all the Leica and Voigtlander vintage glass you want with virtually no compromise in image quality.

Although this body is much smaller than my Nikons, and the sensor is somewhat smaller, the images are /excellent/. Unless you're printing wall murals, this type camera is essentially as good as an SLR.
My only real issue with the GF1 is the small step exposure bracketing. One needs to crank off 7 exposures to get +/- 2 e.v. bracketed images (unless I'm misreading the manual -- yes, a printed manual, just like in the old days).
I bought the body for less than the gorgeous 20mm lens so I feel like I saved money over buying a body/lens kit.
The other minor issue is the lack of a wide choice of lenses (unless you want to hang your larger SLR lenses on these small bodies). I recently bought the current $200 wide zoom which strikes me as a typical kit zoom, adequate for the money, and half of the price of the fixed wide lens that I really wanted.
I'm well pleased with the GF1. With the 20mm lens it's only 50% larger than an LX5 (I'm estimating) and about 50% more expensive, but the images are SLR quality IMHO.

got a good price for the body only, purchased an adapter and was able to use my old nikkor lens on it. pictures are incredibly good. great starting point for building up my micro four thirds photo collection

Ok maybe not...but with all the hacks for this camera, which once you learn how to install, you might be tempted to. I like shooting photos and video but most camcorders while good for video suck at photos, although they shouldn't since the use large sensors and decent optics.And most cameras while great for photos have only so-so video even the HD capable ones don't seem up to par with stand alone camcorders. So what to do do? I don't want to have to carry both when traveling. I already have an Olympus and Panny micro 4/3 camera bodies along with some lenses, but when I read about the ptools amd lpowell hacks I was curious. So I picked one up for $165.00 on ebay. And started to install the hacks but shot some video before that to compare. Wow these hacks which are free by the way add a whole new level of detail in the video footage. The 100mbits hack is great it is stable and runs so far with no issues and easily matches my camcorder.Be warned though if you shoot in the mpeg mode which offers the fastest bitrate and higher quality you will need a lot of fast high capacity SD Cards, 1 minute of footage uses almost 1gb of space and you will be limited to 4 minute clips at a time. But these hacks also improve the AVCHD bitrate but not at the same level,but instead of usual 13mbits you will boost it to around 30mbits or so depending on what you shoot still a marked improvement and in this mode a 16gb card will give you about 2 hours of video.How much do I like this hacked camera? I am really thinking of selling my other ones which are practically brand new and just use this one since the photo quality is also excellent and on par with the others.

This was the best camera that I have ever purchased. It becomes even better when combined with the pancake lens.

I have been extremely unhappy with this product, have had a string of problems dealing with Panasonic, and was told I had voided the service warranty forcing a wrong size USB cable into the camera, which we all know is not possible. Thank god I still have my wonderful Canon G10