Panasonic G9 and the Break is Over

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. The reason for this is that I’ve been on one of those rare things called a holiday. I feel extremely fortunate to have been away in St Ives, Cornwall having booked this a long time ago.

What I didn’t know when I booked this holiday is that the G7 Conference was going on in Carbis Bay at the same time. And when I say I was on holiday in St Ives, where I was staying was in Carbis Bay. To reach my apartment I had to navigate through 4 roadblocks manned with armed police and the road where I was staying was completely sealed off. On arrival the police had to remove fencing and a barrier to allow me drive in.

It was also very strange walking around because there were armed police every 20m. I would step out of the back garden to see a group of heavily armed policy sat on the path next to the gate. But this wasn’t a problem because the police were amazing helpful and friendly. I have nothing but admiration for how well they did they job and how friendly they were. And to top it off, on my walk back from Tesco’s on the Sunday, I saw the US President going to the local church.

But on more serious matters, the holiday presented me with an opportunity to use the Panasonic G9 a little more. This was good as I started to get a real feel for how the camera performs.

Here are a few of my likes and dislikes:

• The camera feels well balanced and easy to handle. This is especially true when using either the Leica 12-60 or 8-18 lenses. I should also mention I found both lenses to be excellent in terms of handling.
• I’m impressed with the image quality in terms of how sharp the images are when processed. The detail that the camera and these lenses can resolve is very impressive and possibly even a little too sharp. I sometimes find myself adding a faint blur to soften the image as it can appear almost unreal.
• I don’t like the lens distortion from the extreme wide angle focal lengths. Whilst this seems to be handled well in the likes of DxO PhotoLab and Capture One, the corners of the frame can become too stretched. As for Lightroom, it doesn’t seem to handle the lens correction very well and I still end up with noticeable distortion.
• The shutter speeds are amazingly fast in most conditions. I shoot using Aperture Priority and when I checked my shutter speeds, I would often find I was shooting at 1/800” or faster even though I had the aperture at f/7.1.
• I found I could handhold the camera whilst shooting sunsets and didn’t need to use a tripod (even though I sometimes did). This also seemed to remove the enjoyment of shooting the sunset because it became almost too easy.
• When shooting with a fast shutter speed I noticed noise creeping in, especially in areas like the sky. This was noticeable even at ISO200 which is base ISO for this camera. It was easily dealt with in software, but I wonder if this is where some of the criticism of micro 43 cameras being noisy comes from. Bizarrely, when the shutter speeds slowed the noise seemed to vanish from my shots.
• I’m still finding it fiddly to achieve colours that I like. This is the same problem that I’ve mentioned in a couple of earlier posts.
• I do enjoy using the camera as a carry around camera when trekking. I find it excellent for that purpose, but I didn’t enjoy using for sunsets with a tripod. And even though it’s excellent, I also didn’t find it the best camera for walking with. That honour goes to my old Olympus EM5. I’m now wondering would I have been better buying the new EM5 rather than the G9.
• I didn’t enjoy trying to use my 75mm filters with the G9. Whilst they are small and light, I found them somehow difficult to handle. I’ve now broken 3 glass filters by dropping them. I’ve also had quite a few other problems including my filter holder falling off the lens several times. All of this is user error, but I just seem to find myself struggling with the kit.

I’m sure I will have more to say in the future, but after a month, I now find myself missing the Fuji XT3. Here’s a final image from the G9 (but I’ll probably post more as well as on my Instagram account).

I hope you like the shots and have a great weekend.