Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 at a glance:

  • 12.1 million pixel Four Thirds Live MOS Sensor
  • 1280×720 pixel video resolution
  • 3in articulated touchscreen
  • Street Price £549 (body only)

According to Plato, ‘necessity is the mother of invention’, a notion that is as true today as it was more than 2,000 years ago. However, some ideas and inventions do little to improve our experience on this planet, and instead merely offer an alternative solution to a problem.

Since the emergence of electrical products we have been quite content pushing buttons, moving dials and pressing switches, but the last few years have seen a change as we move to more tactile ways of operating electronic devices.

Whilst touchscreens have been around for years, until now they were largely preserved for vending tickets at train stations. As with all things electronic, improvements in technology mean that touchscreens are now small enough to put into devices like MP3 players, mobile phones and even cameras. Of course, Apple’s immensely successful iPhone has really popularised touchscreen technology.

Although a few compact cameras feature touchscreens, the 12.1-million-pixel Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 is the first interchangeable-lens camera to include such technology. Alongside this, the G2 also features video capture capability, a function that was not present in its predecessor, the G1. So, with the body of the G2 being largely the same as that of the G1, I was interested to see how a touchscreen control could alter the handling of the camera.

Features

Like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, the G2 features a 12.1-million-effective pixel Live MOS Four Thirds-size sensor. The sensor is capable of producing images measuring up to 4000×3000 pixels, as well as 1280×720 HD video. Video isn’t a feature of the original G1; it is instead included in the more expensive GH1, which also has Full HD (1920×1080-pixel) video capture from a specially designed 12.1-million-pixel sensor.

As before, Panasonic has fitted the G2 with a Supersonic Wave Filter, which uses supersonic sound waves to vibrate and shift dust particles away from the sensor.

Also inherited from the G1 is the Free-angle, articulated, 3in, 460,000-dot screen. However, as already mentioned, the screen is now touch sensitive, and allows the current shooting settings to be changed on-screen. It also allows the user to use the touchscreen to scroll through and zoom into images when reviewing them in playback mode.

As a Micro Four Thirds interchangeable-lens hybrid camera, there is no optical viewfinder in the G2, so images must be composed either using the screen or the electronic viewfinder, but more on these two features later.

Unlike the Olympus Pen range of Micro Four Thirds cameras, none of the Panasonic G-series cameras include in-camera sensor stabilisation; instead, some lenses feature Mega OIS (Optical Image Stabilisation). One such lens is the new 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6, which can be purchased in a kit with the camera. This lens is slightly larger than the 14-45mm optic that served as the
kit lens for the G1. Instead of having the Mega OIS switch on the new lens, switching it on and off is now done in the camera’s menu settings.

Like Panasonic’s range of compact cameras, the G2 has an Intelligent Auto (iA) mode, which recognises particular scenes and adjusts the camera settings accordingly. For example, if it sees a very bright blue area at the top of an image it can predict that you are taking a landscape. However, if a face was to appear in this scene, then the camera’s face detection mode would be activated, ensuring that the camera switches to portrait mode and that the focusing prioritises the face. Handily, iA works in both still and moving-image modes and should help amateur photographers more used to compact cameras take a lot of the guesswork out of taking photographs.

With your pictures taken, the G2 makes it easy to present them to a captive audience via the inclusion of a mini HDMI socket. This allows the camera to be connected to a high-definition television, and if you are fortunate enough to own a Panasonic Viera television the TV’s remote control can be used to control the play back of images from the camera.

It was initially thought that the Micro Four Thirds format would appeal to those photographers wanting to advance from a compact camera, but who don’t want the specification of a DSLR. However, it quickly became obvious that the smaller, lighter Micro Four Thirds cameras could also appeal to those who already own DSLRs but want a lighter camera for day-to-day use or when travelling. With this in mind, the reasonably high specification of the Lumix DMC-G2 should appeal to a large number of different photographers, and even videographers.

Touch shutter

The Touch Shutter feature is an extremely simple idea that is made possible by the camera’s touchscreen. It makes focusing easier by allowing you to simply touch the part of the on-screen image that you wish to focus on. The camera then focuses the lens on the area and takes a photograph. The whole process takes place so quickly that at first I questioned whether the camera had actually focused, or whether it had just taken the picture. The fact that the G2 had done both so quickly is a credit to the AF system.

Although Touch Shutter doesn’t go so far as to revolutionise the way that images are taken, it does offer an alternative that I found particularly useful in a few situations. For example, if you wish to focus on a point in the scene that is off-centre, it is far easier to use the Touch Shutter than to adjust the size and position of the focus point using the camera’s buttons.

It also has a physical advantage. When using the articulated screen to shoot from a low, high or otherwise awkward angle, the feature means that you don’t have to hold the camera conventionally, as you no longer have to press the shutter release button. I found this to be particularly useful when shooting at very low angles, with the camera just a few inches above the ground.

However, all that said the Touch Shutter does have it faults. A couple of times I forgot to turn the feature off, resulting in me taking numerous shots due to the screen being knocked whilst I was walking along.

Build and handling

There are only a few minor changes in the build and layout of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 over its predecessor. The most notable of these differences is that the control dial has now been moved from the front handgrip to the rear of the camera. Although I generally prefer using a dial on the front grip of the camera, in practice it really only makes a modest difference moving this to the rear.

The dial on the top left of the camera now also allows you to select the AF mode, as well as quickly switch from AF-C to AF-S or manual focus modes. Besides this, there have been minor changes to the placement of buttons, such as the addition of a record button for instant video capture.

In terms of its size, the G2 is almost identical to the G1, and its compact polycarbonate body is well constructed and weighs just 371g. As well as being available in black, the more fashion conscious photographer has a choice of purchasing the G2 in red or blue.

Of course, the major new addition to the G2 is the touchscreen, and the G2 is the first interchangeable-lens camera to use this technology. I have to be honest and say that I have previously been unimpressed with most touchscreen compact cameras. On the whole, I have found them to be not very sensitive, requiring a very firm press, or having on-screen buttons that are too small to change with the tip of your finger. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the touchscreen of the G2. It is very responsive, but perhaps the best thing about it is that the camera’s operation isn’t completely reliant on it. The G2 has the full complement of regular controls, so you may actually never use the touchscreen at all.

The one real benefit of the touchscreen, though, is when it comes to selecting a focus area. With the touch AF turned on, all you have to do is touch the part of the image you want the lens to focus on and the G2 will do so before taking a picture. This is an extremely tactile way of working, though it does take a while to get used to. For more on this feature see the Autofocus section of this test.

Pressing the on-screen Quick menu button displays all of the current shooting settings. The touchscreen allows each one of these settings to be pressed and changed on-screen. I found this system makes it easy to alter settings, with the exception of the exposure compensation. The compensation is adjusted by moving a point left or right along a scale, but I found that when moving my finger it obscured the precise location of the point and therefore the current setting.

As previously mentioned, the G2 is thankfully not reliant on using the touchscreen, which means that there are other ways of changing the exposure compensation. The first of these is to use the physical Q.Menu button rather than the on-screen button. This presents the same on-screen controls, but allows the standard up, down, left and right buttons to be used to change each setting, including the EV compensation.

An even quicker method of changing the exposure value is to press the rear thumb control dial. Keeping your thumb on the dial then allows you to turn it to the left or the right to increase or decrease the exposure compensation.

As much as I enjoyed using the touchscreen, it takes a while to become completely comfortable using it to operate the camera. For this reason I am grateful that a full complement of regular buttons, switches and controls allows the camera to operate as normal.

White balance and colour

Image: Even in its standard setting the G2 produces bright, bold colours in JPEG images

One of the most appealing features of the G2 is that the colours of JPEG images are bright and well rendered straight out of the camera. Blue skies look natural, with no hint of cyan, although red hues can be a little vivid in bright light.

For the most part, the AWB setting does a just as good a job, if not better than the daylight white balance setting on a bright sunny day and images look neutral.

Results are also similar under tungsten lighting, with orange/yellow hues reduced, but they are not completely neutral and don’t look as clinical as results we have seen from other cameras.

There are a number of different standard colour settings available, or Film Modes as they are called in the G2. These include Nostalgic, Nature and Smooth. There are also two different black & white settings: Smooth, and the higher-contrast Dynamic.

All of these Film Modes can be tweaked by adjusting the saturation, contrast, sharpness and noise reduction, and there are also two user-defined custom Film Modes.However, although the Film Modes are useful, with just four adjustment options they don’t offer the refinement found on other cameras.

If you aren’t keen on spending time editing JPEG images, the G2 does offer a solution in the form of Multi Film mode. This allows up to three Film Modes to be chosen and have the camera take three images in succession, applying one of the image styles to each photo in turn as it is saved as a JPEG file. This is a useful feature, but could be improved by simply taking a single image and applying each effect to it before saving it each time, rather than taking three separate images.

Metering

Image: Although evaluative metering performed well in this scene, by switching to centreweighted metering the area of blown-out highlight detail has been reduced.

I was very impressed with the 144-zone multi-pattern metering system. In particular, the Intelligent Multiple evaluative metering, which in nearly every situation calculates the correct exposure for producing print-ready images. Of course, it is not 100% flawless, but does perform as expected. This makes it simple to identify when to add a touch of exposure compensation, or when to switch to centreweighted or spot metering mode.

When I photographed some ducklings on a shaded stretch of water, predictably, the evaluative metering did get the exposure wrong. It saw the water as being too dark and adjusted the exposure to lighten it, causing the ducklings to become very bright and burnt out. However, knowing that a camera is going to behave in such a way when photographing a high-contrast scene, makes it easy to adjust the exposure compensation, prior to taking the shot.

Obviously, spot and centreweighted metering are on hand for more accurate metering in difficult lighting conditions. It may sound rather surreal, but centreweighed metering proved useful when photographing a life-size plastic fisherman. Compared to the Intelligent Multiple metering mode, the centreweighted mode compensated for the highlights in the centre of the image and created an exposure around 0.6EV darker, which produced less blown-out highlights.

Noise, resolution and sensitivity

These images show 72ppi (100% on a computer screen) sections of images of a resolution chart, captured using matching 105mm macro lenses. We show the section of the resolution chart where the camera starts to fail to reproduce the lines separately. The higher the number visible in these images, the better the camera’s detail resolution is at the specified sensitivity setting.

As you would imagine, by packing 12.3 million photosites onto a Four Thirds-size sensor, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 is capable of resolving as much, if not more detail than it’s APS-C-format counterparts.

At a sensitivity of ISO 100 and 200, JPEG images are capable of resolving detail just past 24 on our resolution chart.

Raw files shot at ISO 3200 on the G2 are capable of resolving just beyond 18 on our test chart, albeit with a slight degradation in quality due to the default level of noise reduction. At the maximum ISO 6400 setting, the camera only really reaches 16, but it still gives the impression of detail at 24.

Noise is well controlled and is only really obvious at ISO 6400. In well-exposed areas, it isn’t a problem and is well disguised with a slight smudging of detail. Underexposed areas do suffer from cyan and magenta patches of noise, as well as an impressionistic smudging effect caused by noise reduction.

UNDERSTANDING THE GRAPH: This graph shows the brightness values recorded by the test camera when it is used to photograph a stepped graduation wedge. The wedge has transmission values in 1⁄2EV steps ranging from 0 to 12EV. The camera’s exposure is set so the 12EV section in the wedge has a brightness value of 255. Software analysis of the image then determines the recorded brightness values of all the other steps and calculates the camera’s dynamic range.

Autofocus

Given that the Lumix DMC-G2 is a mirrorless Micro Four Thirds camera, it is reliant on contrast rather than phase-detection autofocus. Contrast-detection AF is most commonly used in compact cameras, where the lens moves back and forth until the camera detects the highest point of contrast and therefore the point of focus. Compared to phase-detection focus, contrast-detection is generally slower. But despite the apparently slower AF system, I was very impressed with the speed of the contrast-detection in the G2, and I didn’t feel that it hindered my photography at all.

Image: The G2 is capable of resolving a great deal of fine detail, as shown in the pull of these fishing nets  

There are numerous methods of focusing the lenses used with the G2, including AF tracking, face detection and manual focusing. One of the more interesting aspects of the G2’s AF system is the size of the AF area can be changed. Obviously, the smaller the AF area the more precise you can be when focusing, which is most useful when shooting still-life and landscape images. Interestingly, I didn’t notice any difference in the time taken to focus with any of the four different AF area sizes. The swiftness of the AF was particularly noticeable when using the Touch Shutter focus system.

For those who require very precise control, manual focusing is available. Like most Micro Four Thirds cameras, the manual focus mode offers either a 5x or 10x magnified view of a selected area. One of the benefits of using a Live View system, be it via an LCD screen or an EVF, is that you can move the magnified point around to check the focus in a specific area, without having to move the camera and lens around the scene.

I do have one slight issue with the G2 that is indirectly linked to the manual focus feature. The playback image preview on the rear screen appears to be a fairly low-resolution preview image, even when a magnified view is used. Although this wasn’t too much of a concern in general use, it can be frustrating when you require very precise focusing. On a number of occasions, I spent a good while manually adjusting the focus only to find that the preview on the rear screen appeared to be slightly out of focus. This caused much frustration until I eventually loaded the images onto a computer and found that the focusing was correct after all.

Overall, I was very impressed with the focusing of the G2. Whilst its AF speed will not be fast enough to match the demands of sports photographers and the like, for the average enthusiast photographer it will be more than good enough.

LCD, viewfinder, live view and video

With no optical viewfinder, it is important that the screen and EVF of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 are good enough for both framing and focusing. With the 3in rear screen having a 460,000-dot resolution, it falls a little short of some of the better screens we have seen on DSLR cameras, with many current models featuring 921,000-dot screens. That said, the screen is detailed enough to make manual focusing simple when the screen is set to its magnified mode. The on-screen menus, text and symbols are also clear and easy to read.

One concern I had before using the camera was that the touchscreen would quickly become covered in marks and grease from my fingers. Thankfully, the screen doesn’t have a high gloss finish, and it is bright enough that any finger marks aren’t visible when an image is displayed. Finger marks are noticeable when the screen is turned off, but these can be easily wiped off using a suitable cloth.

Being electronic, the viewfinder offers a complete 100% field of view. It is also of a good size and is bright, clear and responsive, making it easy to compose an image. Its 1.44-million-dot (equivalent) screen provides enough detail to aid manual focus when the 5x or 10x magnification is used.

As the display is the same regardless of whether the screen or viewfinder is in use, it also offers the ability to see settings and features not available on a traditional optical viewfinder, such as a live histogram view.

Video is a feature that was lacking in the G1, but which has been introduced in the G2. With a maximum resolution of 1280×720 pixels at 30 or 25fps, it doesn’t offer the 1920×1080-pixel Full HD resolution of the GH1, but with an external microphone input, its quality should meet the requirements of most amateur photographers.

Dynamic range

Image: Taken at a sensitivity of ISO 100, the above JPEG image illustrates the amount of detail that can be resolved from shadow areas. The brighter section was adjusted to +4EV using Adobe Camera Raw 

With a dynamic range of around 11.5EV, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 is just about on a par with most current DSLR cameras. However, our tests show that the contrast curve is actually linear compared to the reverse S shaped curves that we are used to seeing from other cameras. This means that in its default settings, little dynamic range correction is taking place.

That said, I found that the slight straight curve meant that blown-out highlights and shadows were kept to a minimum. In fact, I found that detail can be recovered from shadow areas by lightening JPEG images by up to +4EV in Adobe Camera Raw. Obviously, luminance noise does start to become an issue, but the images still manage to reveal otherwise hidden detail.

The competition

Image: Panasonic Lumix DMC-G10

At the same time as Panasonic announced its Lumix DMC-G2, the company also announced the 12.1-million-pixel Lumix DMC-G10. Of the two cameras, the G10 is the more affordable option, lacking as it does the articulated touchscreen and featuring a lower-resolution EVF. Priced at £499.99, including 14-42mm kit lens, the G10 is around £120 cheaper than the G2 and kit lens, making it better for those on a tighter budget. However, I would spend the extra money on the better EVF.

Image: Samsung NX10

The other alternative is the Samsung NX10. This received a very good score of 86% when it was reviewed. Featuring a larger 14.6-million-pixel, APS-C-sized sensor, the NX10 is capable of resolving a large amount of detail, but it seems to have a slower AF system than the G2.

Verdict

It is hard not to be impressed with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2. It takes the best features of its predecessor, the G1, and adds video capture, a touchscreen and a few tweaks to the button placement.

Of all the features available in the G2, it is the combination of the AF and touchscreen that I was most impressed with. Although I found that the touchscreen menu was easy enough to use, I have to say I preferred the good, old-fashioned method of using buttons and dials.

However, when the touchscreen is combined with the fast AF in the Touch Shutter feature, it adds a more tactile experience to the process of taking images. I’m sure that it will only be a matter of time before we see a DSLR that includes a touchscreen, and no doubt that, as the technology evolves, new ways of using these screens will come to light.

With the metering and image quality being equally good, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 is a great option for those more used to a conventional DSLR, but who are looking for something smaller and lighter.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 – Key features

Accessory shoe
As well as being able to fit external flashguns to the shoe, external microphones can also be fitted and connected via the mic input on the side of the camera.

Touchscreen
The articulated 3in, 460,000-dot screen is touch sensitive.

Software
Silypix Developer Studio 3.1SE software is included with the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2. This enables raw files to be viewed and adjusted. Although it can produce good results, it is a little slow and not especially tailored to the camera.

Flash
The in-camera flash has a guide number of 11m @ ISO 100 and a synchronisation speed of 1/160sec. External flashguns, such as the Panasonic DMW-FL220, can also be fitted, as can the the DMW-FL500E, which was originally designed for the Panasonic L1 DSLR.

SDXC
As well as being compatible with SD and high-capacity SDHC memory cards, the G2 can also take the latest SDXC memory cards. This new format is the same size as existing SD cards, but allows for far larger memory capacities of up to 2TB in size.

Video Codec
Video can saved using either the Motion JPEG or the AVCHD Lite codecs. The former is an older codec compatible with most video software. The newer AVCHD Lite is claimed to provide better image quality and smaller file sizes, but may not be compatible with older software.

Quick menu
Pressing this activates the on-screen Quick menu. The different options can then be changed either using the screen or the arrow buttons underneath.

Eye sensor
This sensor detects when the camera is held up to the eye and it turns the rear screen off and activates the electronic viewfinder.