Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic Lumix GF1 12.1MP Digital System Camera 20mm Lens Kit - Black

Best described as a camera for keen photographers who want to give their shoulder a rest and leave the heavy SLR at home.

The camera has a good solid feel about it.

I've not had the camera long but for a compact camera it has good image quality. Very sharp and noise free at ISO 100 and 200 and equal to my Nikon D60 SLR. ISO 400 - 800 sees noise but perfectly acceptable levels and I'm more than happy to shoot from ISO 100 - 800. At ISO 1600 things go downhill a bit and noise becomes distracting but just about usable at a push. Noisewise the Panasonic can't compete with my Nikon D60 but does much better than my old compact camera ( Fuji F11 ).

This camera is very good at avoiding purple fringing in images - my compact and even D60 have some issues with it - its when you have a white window against a bright sky and see a bit of weird purple or perhaps blue colour on the edges.

The movie mode doesn't work as well as I'd like with the 20mm lense. Panasonic recommend their HD lense - which costs around £750 on its own! The problem is the camera struggles to auto focus in movies and the autofocusing is noisy and can be heard. Panasonic admit this is a problem and one only solved with their expensive HD lense.

The camera is very customisable - buttons in all the right places making it easy to change essential settings like ISO, shutter and aperture. The manual focus mode is excellent - the best I've seen on a camera. The centre of the image is zoomed in so you can see clearly if things are in focus.

One big bonus is the manual is a printed manual!!!! I hate the usual manual on a CD which just are not as good to flick through as a paper version. Does take a bit of reading of the manual to fully utilise the camera.

The more I use the camera the more I like it!

A fantastic little camera. Have owned one for over a month now and have been delighted with the results. Having previously owned Canon Ixus / Powershot cameras I had decided to upgrade to an SLR but was intrigued by the Micro 4/3 system - I think that an SLR would have spent too much time unused in a box, I wanted something small enough to carry around in a pocket. Having checked out a lot of reviews for the Olympus EP1 and the GF1 I decided on the Panasonic.

Overall I think that the camera is excellent -
* very solid (& heavy!), good build quality - lots of metal not plastic, all marked "Made in Japan" NOT China, gold plated usb connection, lens fitting is excellent
* fantastic picture quality compared to my earlier cameras
* superb menu system & hugely customisable
* excellent colour modes
* ISO performance up to ISO800 (1600 & 3200 not great but you can still get an arty b&w to come out OK).
* 20mm lens performs brilliantly for something so small & light
* Interchangeable lenses are an obvious advantage over compacts & superzooms - as well as the 20mm I bought a 2nd hand 45-200mm zoom which has performed well
* HD video is an excellent bonus - compared with some reviews I have been very impressed. There is an option for HD `Lite' (for TV playback) or HD JPEG (for PC / YouTube etc.) and the image quality is fantastic. You need to play about a bit to get best results and don't expect camcorder quality obviously.

A few drawbacks - I would have preferred inbuilt IS on the camera body. The 20mm is excellent even in poor light but IS would have made it outstanding. As another reviewer has noted, Panasonic need a firmware update to stop the camera defaulting to f1.7. It has an annoying habit, aprticularly in Aperture Priority mode, of defaulting to f1.7 at 100ISO with 1/30sec exposure time. Without stabilisation I cannot take a sharp picture handheld at 1/30 & need to manually adjust the ISO to a higher setting which I think the camera should be doing automatically. It can also default to f1.7 at 1/1000 exposure on bright days in Auto mode - again easily adjusted manually but a bit annoying. Keep an eye out for firmware updates from Panasonic, I imagine there will be more to come

Overall though I wouldn't hesitate to recommend.

My recommendations for accessories:
* Lowepro Rezo 60 Digital Camera Pouch - Black is an excellent case for the camera + 20mm. Lowepro Apex 120AW Shoulder Bag For Digital Cameras/Camcorders - Arctic Blue is a good case for the camera + additional lenses.
* You'll need at least a Class 6 SDHC card of at least 16gb (1 minute of HD recording can be 250mb). I use a Transcend 16GB SDHC Class 6 Memory Card works very well in the camera.
* This is very light compare to an SLR, even with a 45-200mm lens. I use a very lightweight Manfrotto tripod (either this one: Manfrotto Modo Tripod or something very similar).

The GF-1 is as small as you could reasonably expect and pleasing to use. The 20mm lens is as sharp as they say, though personally I find it noisy in use after Canon's USM lenses and the lack of an image stabiliser mode in a lens this costly is a shame - it seems the programme mode is overly biased towards wide open apertures to cope, too. However, the minute (though not that light) GF-1 passes its first key test, because it has easily travelled everywhere with me. Response is everything you cannot expect from a compact. Image quality is right up there, at least with the kit lenses, with impressive resolution. The new software update should fix some slight auto white balance issues, but otherwise my images have been excellent. Not so good is the accessory electronic viewfinder, which lacks resolution and is only really useful for general aiming on a bright day. Judging by the large apparent size of the Olympus Pen 2 optional EVF, Panasonic wanted to keep the size of theirs down, and took the quality penalty as a trade off. The screen on the camera, though, is up to most lighting conditions and is easy to see at an angle, so should be enough for most people. General handling is very good, especially if you're used to Pansonic or Leica compacts, but even if you migrate from other makes the menu system won't take long to pick up. I really like the choice of image sizes - there's a 1:1 mode which I'm using, and also 16:9 which works beautifully with Apple TV/widescreen HDTV combinations to enable you to look at images full screen. HD movies with the 20mm lens haven't been a success so far but there's a new update for the lens and I haven't tested that yet. Overall, expensive, good, best in class at the moment and surely, the start of something big (or should that be, small?) in camera design.

A word of warning for all potential purchasers. I ordered this camera on 2nd December 2009 and paid for next day delivery. I received the camera on the 3rd, but there was no seal on the box. I phoned Amazon and they arranged for a replacement item to be delivered, and for a courier to pick up the original item.

The next day the replacement arrived and I found that once again the Panasonic box had been opened and seal removed.

Whether or not Amazon are sending out refurbs or returns instead of new items is debatable. What isn't debatable is that new items should arrive boxed with their seals intact.