Lumix GH2

As a birthday present this year I upgraded my old and proven G1 to the new and powerful GH2.

I've got the G1 3 years ago (also as a birthday present from my wife) and it was the first µ4/3 camera on the market. Though it was a promising system most of its potential wasn't realized at that time. It had only two basic lenses and the performance in low light was lousy. But since then the system has come a long way.

Testing low light performance

The main reason why I wanted the GH2 was a new 16 megapixel Panasonic sensor that should have fixed low light performance. While the old sensor was barely able to produce a good picture at ISO 800 the new one promised a perfectly acceptable image at ISO 1600 and a somewhat bearable — at ISO 3200.

Let's see (click for full images):

These two images have been shot in a fairly dark room with a tele 45-200 lens at the maximum zoom at the widest possible aperture of 1/5.6 and the slowest shutter speed of 1/13 sec at which I'm still able not to blur the picture while shooting from hands.

All in all I'm pretty impressed with the level of detail that GH2 can manage in these extreme conditions.

Real-world difference

Granted, the previous example, while good for demonstration, is not very real: I could "fix" the problem by just turning on the light in the room :-). However I can remember a couple of recent situations where I really could use a more sensitive sensor.

Look at this shot from the latest DjangoCon. It's blurry because it's hard to shoot moving people from a long distance using 1/6 sec shutter speed. If I could shoot at ISO 3200 back then I could afford a much more forgiving 1/30 sec.

Another example is this whole Christmas lights set. I was shooting from a moving car and anything slower than 1/50 sec was guaranteed to be blurry. And at this speed and ISO 800 all pictures were hopelessly underexposed and required a huge amount of post-processing. And even after that they're still full of noise.

Other improvements

I've only played with GH2 for half a day and didn't do any serious shooting but I already love some new things about it:

• both the viewfinder and the LCD screen are more responsive and have bigger resolution
• choosing the focus point by touching the LCD screen is super convenient
• focusing speed is much faster
• it can shoot HD video with either the built-in or an external microphone

Why not Nikon/Canon/Sony… whatever DSLR

Judging by the review at dpreview.com GH2 is pretty similar in quality to, say, Nikon D7000. The price is similar too. But for me the decision was simple: I already have three µ4/3 lenses and changing just a camera body was way cheaper than buying similar lenses for the new system.