transiently permanent
Panasonic G2 vs Olympus E-PL2/VF2
I think both cameras have a lot to offer, and I like them both. However, I do find them both problematic and feel a bit frustrated that their strengths and flaws seem to be complimentary. If Panasonic do buy Olympus's camera division (as opposed to just the medical imaging part), I'd love to think that they could synthesize the best of these two cameras, or their newest equivalents.
Basically it seems that Panasonic have created a camera (and system) which is lovely to hold and nice to use but whose JPEG engine clearly loses more of the quality of its RAW output than we have the right to expect these days from a reasonably serious camera.
Olympus, on the other hand, have a camera (and system) which as everyone knows has a rather sweet JPEG engine, an EVF which is simply excellent (and clearly superior to the very good one built into the Panny) and an extremely tweakable interface where it is possible to set the camera up to get just the desired results. The downsides? Their cameras are seriously fiddly to use, even after you've spent months familiarising yourself with their intricacies, and come set up with a hideously strong tonal optimiser (auto gradation) defaulted to ON, which is guaranteed to have anyone experienced in shooting in low light believing they have a dud in this machine which wants black to be a noisy, speckled grey. Then after a period of reading and fiddling, it becomes apparent that not only can you turn this hideous feature off (OK, to be fair it doesn't ruin most outdoor daylight shots), but you can actually tweak the tone curve used manually and that there are 45 different possible settings for it. That's LOW, NORMAL and HIGH...and each has 15 different settings, accessed through a rather well-hidden trick of pressing the +/- button followed by the INFO button.
Anyway, that's all for now...
P4242526
Panasonic G2 vs Olympus E-PL2/VF2
I think both cameras have a lot to offer, and I like them both. However, I do find them both problematic and feel a bit frustrated that their strengths and flaws seem to be complimentary. If Panasonic do buy Olympus's camera division (as opposed to just the medical imaging part), I'd love to think that they could synthesize the best of these two cameras, or their newest equivalents.
Basically it seems that Panasonic have created a camera (and system) which is lovely to hold and nice to use but whose JPEG engine clearly loses more of the quality of its RAW output than we have the right to expect these days from a reasonably serious camera.
Olympus, on the other hand, have a camera (and system) which as everyone knows has a rather sweet JPEG engine, an EVF which is simply excellent (and clearly superior to the very good one built into the Panny) and an extremely tweakable interface where it is possible to set the camera up to get just the desired results. The downsides? Their cameras are seriously fiddly to use, even after you've spent months familiarising yourself with their intricacies, and come set up with a hideously strong tonal optimiser (auto gradation) defaulted to ON, which is guaranteed to have anyone experienced in shooting in low light believing they have a dud in this machine which wants black to be a noisy, speckled grey. Then after a period of reading and fiddling, it becomes apparent that not only can you turn this hideous feature off (OK, to be fair it doesn't ruin most outdoor daylight shots), but you can actually tweak the tone curve used manually and that there are 45 different possible settings for it. That's LOW, NORMAL and HIGH...and each has 15 different settings, accessed through a rather well-hidden trick of pressing the +/- button followed by the INFO button.
Anyway, that's all for now...
P4242526