Camera Lust 2

[bunn]

 I resisted temptation well last year, and never did buy a Panasonic G1. 

Now I'm glad I didn't, as I have a new lust object, the Panasonic GF1  which is even smaller than the G1 and seems to have tidied up a few loose ends, and in particular, performs gratifyingly well on speed compared to the Olympus Pen which is its closest competitior (I like taking photos of things that move about a lot like birds and running dogs, so that's important) 

Buying one will however require me to understand interchangable lenses, which I've not previously needed to worry about - as the GF1 comes with either a 14-45mm lens smaller aperture, or a 20mm lens.  The 20 mm lens is well reviewed, and comes in a nice pancake format that would make it nice and easily portable, but has no image stabilisation, a fixed focal length, so no zoom, and puts the price up a bit too.   Bigger maximum aperture: better in low light tho.  Current camera sucks rather in low light. 

 Or I could go for the default 14-45mm zoom lens, which comes with image stabilisation and can zoom, but isn't so wee and has a smaller aperture, so might be closer to what I've already got. 

I could add this 45-200mm which would probably be rather good for high speed wildlife/dog pics (I think).  

Or I could give up in  confusion, and stick with my current 4 year old compact ultrazoom, which to be fair, usually does a pretty decent job by my fairly low standards.   I've been reading reviews and information about how to choose lenses, but they all seem to focus on deciding what you want to photograph, and my photos tend to swerve wildly from action to landscape to portrait to closeup...!

Comments

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

A larger sensor of the same quality will always give you better pictures. This is true both in general, and for low light in particular.

Quite apart from that, sensors in DSLRs and other cameras with interchangeable lenses tend to be of better quality than sensors in compact cameras.

In addition, lenses on DSLRs etc tend to be of better quality than lenses on compact cameras.

These last two points are not universal, though.

On your particular search, I have been very pleased with my Olympus E-420 (a “conventional” four thirds camera, rather than a “micro” one), for both size / ease of handling and image quality. It isn’t as small as any of the micro four thirds cameras, but it is still very small and handy. So far, I have not reached the limits of its image quality, and I have been particularly pleased with the quality of ISO 1600 images taken at very low light levels.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought, so was surprised to hear of a DSLR that doesn't perform so well at lower light levels as a compact.

My high ISO images tend to the blobby and muddy :-(

The lens on the FZ7 is a Leica and is supposed to be remarkably good for a compact, but I'm hoping for better things from a bigger sensor...