[Leica] First photos with Lumix GF-1 Micro Four Thirds interchangeable-lens P&S

[hlritter at bex.net (Howard Ritter)]

SWMBO decreed (well, would have, had I been insensitive enough to ask) that 
an M9 was not going to be in Santa's bag this Christmas and would not be 
until a few superfluous bodies and lenses have gone to better owners. To the 
idea of a rather less dear, pocketable body to take Leica glass, viz. the 
Panasonic Lumix GF-1, she assented.

The camera appears solid and well-constructed, and the lens clicks into 
place fairly Teutonically. Take it off and you see about a square foot of 
sensor, or so it seems in comparison to the usual P&S sensor (not that one 
ever actually SEES one of those, but one does know, doesn't one?). My first 
reaction on handling the camera was that it's bigger in reality than is made 
clear by photos, barely smaller than my M3 in breadth and height and thicker 
than an M body with a collapsible 50. Just enough smaller than my M8 + 35 to 
make it worth keeping as a second/backup/pocketable body. But it fits the 
hand well and is nicely balanced. It has a vivid and sharp medium-res LCD 
monitor (460K pix, = 70% of the linear resolution of a contemporary upmarket 
DSLR). It takes nice 720p HD video.

The still photos are pretty good too. SWMBO and #1 son and I took a walk in 
a nearby nature preserve today and I came back with a few shots. I've 
uploaded several of them as a demonstration. Not great art, but some are 
pretty and they give you the idea of the camera's capability. All are 
straight out of the RAW converter (SILKYPIX supplied processing software; PS 
CS4 and PSE 6 as well as Apple's Aperture and Preview are baffled by the 
GF-1's RAW format) to TIFF and thence to JPEG for uploading. I've left them 
at full 4000 x 3000 dimensions so you can see detail by viewing at large 
size, and JPEGged them down pretty far to limit size to about 2 MB each, so 
there may be some artifact. All are at ISO 200 with the 20mm (40mm eq) lens. 
On my screen, these photos look to be good for something approaching a 30x 
40 print.

Shortly I'll upload comparisons of different ISO results. Be warned, it's 
disappointingly noisy for a large-sensor camera.

Here's the link: http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/

?howard