A hands-on experience
I got a chance to use a friend's so please take that into consideration as since I don't own it I wasn't able to take it through all the paces. But enough to form an opinion.
Firstly, the build. It is nice a compact and feels very well made in comparison to other cameras. I'd say that it feels more like a mid-range DSLR in toughness with the size of a Canon Kiss (Rebel in the US?). Also the camera really feels comfortable in the hand to me. The kit lens is a Leica (14-45mm f3.5-5.6) with very smooth action and good build so framing was nice. The external monitor was very bright and clear like that on the 50D. The view frame is cropped a bit from what the sensor sees and, while bright and having very clear details, I'm not so sure about the Live View style of it since the mirror is gone. It's interesting but slightly cluttered.
Actually using it was very nice. Very responsive, nice to hold. Photos seem nice but the sensor is small on this one so it's with the lens it has a multiplier of 2 (so the lens is effectively 28-90). Nice photos from what I saw but again I didn't go into too much scrutiny.
What I did notice is that it has a little trouble with focusing on things close up. You can see the autofocus going way out of focus and then coming back in. It takes the camera a second or so but this camera uses a new kind of autofocus system since it don't use a mirror.
Another thought to consider is that you will be able to use other 4/3rds lens from Olympus. They have a good variety though I have to wonder with the focusing hesitation how this camera will operation with a macro lens.
Given the sheer novelty of it, along with the nice build and small size, I'd love to buy one since it definitely outshines other low-end DSLRs in my opinion. However, I live in Japan and unfortunately Panasonic decided to release the model here only in Japanese which nearly all cameras released here are bilingual.
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Very capable camera, quick, compact, loads of controls
The Lumix G1 is a pleasure to use. It's very quick and responsive. Lots of manual controls and it has some nice customization features. Most of the common functions have physical buttons, which means that they are quick to find and use. The electronic view finder is ok, but not anywhere as good as a real SLR view finder, but for me I don't expect to use it much. The screen on the back is excellent, bright and clear. The menus are not very well organized, but no worse than most camera menus. The images that I have taken so far are very good, but maybe a touch underexposed, thats easily corrected with the exposure adjustment.
I wish that there were more lenses available for the micro 4/3rds, but I guess thats just a waiting game. The included lens' aperture isn't very wide. I would love to have a wide angle fixed focal length with an nice big aperture like say F1.2 :)
The g1 is small for an SLR like camera, but it's still too big to cary all the time like a pocket camera.
One last thing, the lack of a video mode is quite disappointing, but it is an excellent still camera.
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