The Pana­sonic G1 — Is this the begin­ning of a new direc­tion in com­pact cameras?

Back when I was rab­bit­ing on about what cam­era to buy, I men­tioned that “The best cam­era is the one you have with you…” and that “any com­pact dig­i­tal cam­era with more mega pix­els than [8] is nearly always going to result in a poorer qual­ity pic­ture”. These two assump­tions were key to my choices for a pow­er­ful carry around cam­era, which is cur­rently a Canon G7. Today’s announce­ment of the Pana­sonic G1, the first cam­era based on the Micro Four Thirds stan­dard may be about to fun­da­men­tally alter these assump­tions..

The main issue with com­pact cam­eras is that their imag­ing chip is tiny, and the cor­re­spond­ing indi­vid­ual pix­els are nano sized. This adversely affects it’s abil­ity to col­lect the light falling on it, and hence the final qual­ity of the image. For a details dis­cus­sion of pix­els, and imag­ing chip sizes, you could do worse than read this excel­lent overview on www.cambridgeincolour.com, or this web­site devoted to advo­cat­ing 6mp com­pact cam­eras. For a visual com­par­i­son, check out this diagram:

Dig­i­tal Cam­era Imag­ing Sen­sor Sizes

As you can see, an 8mp com­pact cam­era and an 8mp full frame SLR are not cre­ated equal.

So where does the G1 come in?

• Well its chip size is approx 50% of that of a Full Frame SLR, and at 12mp, it’s not excessive.
• Pixel size should be roughly 9 times greater than an equiv­a­lent 12mp com­pact cam­era, mean­ing that image qual­ity and noise should be vastly superior.
• By remov­ing the mir­ror / opti­cal viewfinder, and using a dig­i­tal viewfinder, size has been kept to a minimum.

By com­par­i­son to the Canon G9, body only, it is not sub­stan­tially big­ger, nor sub­stan­tially heav­ier (about 100 grams). With the stan­dard kit lens, the rel­a­tive sizes are as follows:

Size mat­ters: Pana­sonic G1 ver­sus the Canon G9

How would I have done the G1 dif­fer­ently? I think a fixed fast(ish) lens, some­where in the 28mm to 50mm equiv­a­lent would have been ideal. IT is early days yet for the Micro Four Thirds stan­dard, so we will have to wait and see what slot in the mar­ket place this fits into.

Off course, the price will still prob­a­bly be a rip off here in Ire­land

Some other links to Pana­sonic G1 coverage:

• DPre­view
• Engad­get