Tong Family

Well, it is $800, but the initial reports are good. It is so exciting that the small compact, but professional segment of cameras is opening up. It used to be just the Ricoh GR Digital II and the Sigma DP2 which has a 41mm equivalent lense at F/2.9. The lense is sharp but autofocus is slow. I has decent resolution through ISO1600 and noise is OK through ISO 400. It doesn’t have a stabiilzer but has the Foveon sensor.

Now Olympus has the EP-1 which is nice but slow to focus. And the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1 looks particularly good. Ships with a very fast F/1.7 lense 20mm (40mm equivalent) and has low noise up to ISO 400 and is decent at ISO 800 so great for available light.

There is also the super expensive Leica X1 that also uses an APS-C sensor but it is more like $2K! With Luminous Landscape preview, it looks pretty good.

DPReviews had a good preview on this. It looks pretty good and they say the screen is nice. Cameralabs also had a good review. The initial tests show that focus is fast and the noise is very well controlled even to ISO 400 and usable to 800. Digitalcamerareview.com did a review. The 14-45mm F/3.5-F/5.6 is slow but the 20mm F/1.7 is fast. The 14-45mm is also image stabilized. The 20mm seems like a nice choice. Photographyblog.com say the images are little soft with the default sharpening in camera.

The camera with a 20mm lense is $900. There is also a wide range of lenses that Panasonic has including alot of micro 4/3 lenses including (these are 2x factor

• Panasonic Lumix G Vario 7-14mm f4.0 ASPH. A nice wide angle lense for landscape. It is a little slow, so mainly for brighter light. 14-28 equivalent. This would be the next lense I’d get. No reviews yet on image quality. SLRGear says the images are very sharp. It does have strong chromatic aberration at the edges. Very little distortion as well. It is 300 grams which is very light.
• 14-45mm f3.5-5.6. A pretty slow lenses, but a good intermediate, personally I’d get the 20mm instead since it is faster. This is the other kit lense.
• 14-140mm f4.0-5.8. This is a zoom lense that is 28-280mm equivalent. A good travel lense for zoom. Probably the second lense.
• 45mm f2.8. Very fast for macro photography. A specialty lense.
• 45-200mm f4.0-5.6. A super long lense 90-400mm equivalent.