The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is a glimpse of a different and better world

Politics trundles on and the more you pay attention to it the more depressed you are going to get, so what I like to do instead is look at gadgets. Gadgets aren’t everything. An affordable mobile phone is scant consolation if your ludicrously unaffordable house has just been repossessed. Flat screen televisions are only as good as the stuff that’s on them. Cool cars only provide escape from the cares of city life in car commercials, not in cities.

Nevertheless, gadgets are still being done well, and every now and again I like to pick out a new one and praise it on Samizdata, both for its own beautiful sake, and because doing this makes the point that life would be so much better if everything (not just gadgets) was done like that, by grasping capitalists in competition with one another instead of by tyrannically pompous bunglers who are clever only at winning elections or at sucking up to such people. The last such gadget that I got excited about here was the Asus Eee-PC, which I now happily possess, and am gradually finding more uses for. And now, I offer you the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, which is a digital camera, which looks like this:

It doesn’t look anything very special, or very different, does it? And for many people it won’t be. For all those Real Photographers squinting into their optical viewfinders to get the perfect shot with their brick-like Canon or Nikon DSLRs, the G1 would be a severe come-down, because the G1 doesn’t have an optical viewfinder. But for that vast tribe of cheaper and more cheerful digital snappers who prefer cameras that don’t weigh so much, the fact that the G1 has no optical viewfinder is exactly the point. We Billion Monkeys, as I like to call us, look at all those Real Photographers with their clunky black contraptions and we say to ourselves, yes, I’d love my pictures to be as good as theirs are, and it would certainly be nice to be able to use lots of different lenses the way they do, but really, does a camera have to be that big to be that good?

The thing is – from where we Billion Monkeys stand, sit or crouch – DSLRs look like a relic of the analog age, like those weird early steam ships that also had sails on them. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex, and this refers to the fact – commenters will doubtless correct me to the degree to which I am, I am sure, somewhat-to-completely wrong – that in order for the optical viewfinder to be an accurate foretaste of the picture being attempted, the light that enters a DSLR has to be divided up and sent off to two different places, one of them being the optical viewfinder and the other being the magical electronic surface that turns the light into a digital picture. This process involves … well, it involves a lot of space and a lot of complication.

So, the G1 does away with the the optical viewfinder. You can still squint through an eyepiece if you really want to, but what you see is a digital picture, not a merely optical one. More conveniently, you can see the digital picture beforehand on a small screen, which, as with the best little digital cameras, twiddles, and hence lets you take pictures that you can still see even when you are holding the camera way above your head or way down in front of your private parts. Most DSLRs still only show you the picture on their screens afterwards, but the latest ones also have these see-the-picture-beforehand screens, but this combining of optical and digital previewing all adds to the size and the expense. What the G1 does is put all its pre-viewing and post-viewing eggs in the one digital basket.

If the G1’s screen were only as good as the kind of screen you already get on most small digital cameras now, such as the one on my current camera, that would not be a good decision. These small screens are now notorious for telling you that that is a fine picture while you are taking it and just after you took it, only for you later to discover, when you get home and see it on a real screen, that the picture is a blurry failure. Much effort has gone into making the image on the G1’s screen, and the image you see through the G1’s digital viewfinder, a lot better than such images have ever looked before. And the even better news is that the improvements already achieved in this department, being electronic rather than merely optical, are bound to be surpassed in the near future and surpassed again and again in the years to come.

Meanwhile, the G1 offers us digital amateurs all the things we really do want that only the SLR fraternity can do now. The picture quality will be far better, both because it just will be, involving as it does the exact same kind of picture making technology as happens in DSLRs now (only rather smaller), and because we will be able to use a growing choice of lenses instead of the one lens we are stuck with now. But, we won’t have to lug a thing like a brick around with us to get all these delights.

All this is hearsay and conjecture, based on the reports of the lucky few who have already been allowed to actually see and play with this new camera. But the buzz that it has already stirred up around itself definitely reminds me of the buzz that buzzed around the first of those micro-laptops, of the Asus Eee-PC variety, a market that is now galloping ahead exuberantly. What this buzz already tells us is not that the G1 is definitely the wonder that its paid puffers and earliest reviewers are now claiming it to be. No, it tells us something more important than that. It tells us that this is what the market really really wants. I am most emphatically not the only cheap snapper who wants to trade up to something definitely better, without trading up to a big black brick that leaves little space in my life or bag for anything besides photography. If the G1 is what it promises to be, it will be a runaway hit. If its reach turns out to exceed its grasp, never mind. Rival capitalists will soon be delivering for real on the same clutch of promises that the G1 has merely advertised.

So I’m going to wait to see if the G1 really is this good, and I will also be waiting for the price of the G1, or of satisfactory rival facsimiles, to fall from the currently announced level of about £550. That’s too rich for me. I’ll also be waiting – although I don’t think I’ll have to wait long – to see if the G1, and the new market that it points towards, is the huge market that I think it will be, because only then will the lens-makers respond, in the way that they already have responded to the recent explosion of the DSLR market, which happened as it did because of already existing cameras that were merely SLR, without the D for digital bit. Not the least significant of the responses will be in the form of adapters, to make the small new G1 able to make use of the big old SLR lenses that lots have already invested in. Panasonic have already made such an adapter to allow the G1 to use their big old lenses.

You think that postings like this are frivolous, in these scary and portentous times? If so, I see what you mean, but I think you are wrong. Thank goodness that there are these frivolous things like little laptop computers and like small digital cameras, so frivolous that most politicians feel that it is beneath their dignity to take charge of them. That way we all get a chance to see how much better the world, all of it, would be, if the politicians could be persuaded to regard everything as too insignificant for them worry about. Think what a great world that would be, and think how rapidly it would, even now, be improving.