I've owned the GF1 for just under a month now, and have had the chance to use it enough to form some opinions on where it excels and where it could improve. In no particular order, here they are:

Auto ISO

The Auto ISO feature leaves a lot to be desired. It allows you to set a minimum shutter speed and it will adjust ISO up to keep the shutter speed above that value, up to a user-definable maximum ISO. Sadly, it doesn't work in manual mode. I'd really like to be able to dial both shutter and aperture to a value and have the camera try and compensate with ISO to get the exposure right. Also, in Aperture-Priority mode, I'd like to be able to prioritize ISO ahead of shutter speed; right now the camera will push the shutter speed to barely hand-holdable levels while there are plenty of decent quality ISOs that could bring my shutter speed up and hold my dialed-in aperture.

P Mode

The P (Program) mode will stick at f/1.7 even when there's plenty of shutter speed and ISO headroom to go for a smaller aperture. f/1.7 is really wide-open, with very shallow depth-of-field to be the go-to default. Yes, I can use program-shift to get an equivalent exposure with a smaller aperture, but I'd like it to start a bit smaller when appropriate. Likewise, the full auto mode also likes to shoot wide open even with plenty of available light, which is often not what someone like my wife would want in a point-and-shoot mode.

My Menu

I hate that "My Menu" isn't customizable, but simply has my last used menu items. It sticks "format" as the top item when it's the last thing you do, making it too easy to reformat your card accidentally.

Menus/Interface

I find the interface to be generally intuitive. A lot better than the mess Olympus made with the E-P1 menu system. The most common controls are pretty easy to get to.

Rear LCD/Optional Viewfinder

I generally want reviews and menus on the rear LCD and the current view and shooting info in the finder--it's all EVF or all LCD right now. The LCD is beautiful. Upon review, it's not quite as good as the D700's but it's close enough. It sure would be nice if the resolution and color rendition of the EVF were better. The refresh rate of the LCD is excellent. It's not easy to make critical decisions with it in bright light/outdoors, but that's to be expected. I wish there were better post-shot review options with the histograms.

Image Quality

Image quality is overall quite a bit better than the G9 it replaces in my stable. The noise gets pretty bad at ISO 1600, but it's usable for most of my purposes. 3200 is only for use if it's the only way to get some sort of shot, and there'll be some real noise reduction post processing work necessary.

The Lens

Ooh, la, la. This is a sweet little lens! It's fast, fast, fast, and has nice bokeh. On the down side, the manual focus ring gives no real feedback, and isn't a pleasure to use, although it works better than most manual focusing on small cameras I've used. The lens cap sucks--it's deep and pops off too easily.

Handling

The GF1 has proven to be a decent mountain biking camera, although it's clearly not built for fast action. It works well when pre-focusing and shooting action; fast moving subjects coming at the camera are not handled super well by the AF. Shutter lag is minimal and power on time is good enough for me.

Conclusions and Comparisons

To date, this is by far the best compact camera I've used. Despite its drawbacks and high price, it has the best build, handling and image quality I've seen. The G9 was good in the build regard, not as close in image quality (although it was no slouch), but far off from a handling point-of-view. The menu system is much better than the E-P1 based on the brief time I handled one of those, and the EVF is a differentiator. I do wish the GF1 had the E-P1's in-camera image stabilization--that would be killer for low-light pics like those I've been shooting on the bike. Overall, though, this camera wins.

The Canon G11 and S90 are now out and gaining a lot of buzz. It would take a very impressive camera to make me sell the GF1 at this point, and I can't imagine that either of them will compel me to do so. Still, I'm interested to play with them and see what the state of the art from Canon is. The G9 has been a great camera, and I'm sure Canon isn't out of this race.

I've processed a few images now, and I have to say that I'm super impressed with the new beta already. The videos talked about how the core has been re-written for quality and responsiveness, and boy have they delivered. It's more impressive given that they've described this as a rough beta.

I was recently turned on to the DNG profiles and earlier today had switched to using the Camera Standard profile for most images, which I'm finding I prefer. That, combined with the new responsiveness of the slider adjustments in Develop mode, is really making for some real fun when processing images.

The new sharpening is a wonder to behold. I'm finding that it's able to sharpen more to bring out detail without introducing artifacts and noise. I'm not sure how they did it, but it's working.

As I said, I've only played with a few images (and only ones from the D700) but I can't rave enough about what I'm seeing so far quality-wise.

Also, I imported a few DNG files that I'd already started processing in Lightroom 2 into a new LR catalog to play with. The new import process is much nicer than the old one, although I'm not sure I'd call it intuitive. I need to play with it more and noodle on what's not quite right there. Still, it's an improvement for sure.

Adobe’s released a beta of its upcoming Lightroom 3 been downloading it and have watched the videos (about 45 minutes worth). The beta seems pretty focused on getting feedback on specific new things, most of which are enhancements or re-implementations of existing features, rather than new features. I hope that means that there are still new features in the works, because soft-proofing isn’t mentioned anywhere and I think I’m going cry if LR3 doesn’t have it.

Highlights from what I’ve seen:

• Completely rebuilt rendering engine.
• Redone sharpening and noise reduction. I hope these are really improved, because they were a bit weak in LR2, IMO.
• Publish services allow for managing multiple export types, like to Flickr or to a local folder for iTunes. LR will sync changes made in those sources back to the LR catalog, and also make it easy to re-publish to those sources when changes are made in LR.

It’s just finished downloading, so I’m off to play a bit. I’ll post more later. I’m about half-way through editing my pics from last weekend’s mountain biking trip to Downieville, so I’ll import that project into LR3 and give it a whirl.

My wife can’t understand why I love the idea of this stuff. I think I’d paint nearly every available surface with it, given the chance. OK, that’s not quite true, but it’s close!

David Coursey at PC World gives five reasons he thinks the recently-introduced Nook is a Kindle killer.

Numbers 2 and 3 are the only two that are "killers", in my opinion.

The color display is elegant looking (we'll see if it works as well as it looks), and could be a huge differentiator. The "more books" is nice, but I think the PDF functionality is the real win here. Trying one out in a physical store is a nice bonus, but probably not a killer feature.

I'll be honest: I really want a book reader like Kindle or Nook. I have a ton of technical books, and I'd love to have them, plus the non-photography magazines I subscribe to, on something like them that's easy to carry to and from work.

I like the Nook, but I really like Amazon as a company, and I'd prefer to reward them for not only being a good company, but having stuck their neck out and making this into a real market. That said, I'm not going to buy inferior hardware, especially at the premium price these are going for. I guess I'm still on the fence.

The possibility of Apple's tablet being good in an e-reading role adds to the reason to stay on that fence, although I'm having a hard time thinking of a reason I'd want a tablet other than as an e-reader. And so far I think e-ink is the right way to go for that purpose, and no rumors have e-ink on the Apple device. The last thing I'd want is a glossy, backlit screen for a device that I'm supposed to read anywhere. Still, Apple does have a way of designing things I love, so I'd never knock them out of the race completely. And if the tablet has other uses I find compelling, like mobile video watching or something, that could allow for some compromise in the reading experience.

I guess I'll stay on the fence awhile longer.

(Via Mike.)

Flickr has added tagging of people in photos as well as a new profile page for members. Looks pretty spiffy.

He was 91.

I've been catching up on some Lightroom tips, since I've been processing a few images recently, causing me to spend some time in that app. I really liked a recent episode of "The Complete Picture with Julieanne Kost" called "Timesaving Features in Lightroom 2". There are some great tips in there. The first couple (changing the hiding behavior of side panels and solo mode) are particularly ones that I've found useful.

I think that show in general is good, and would also highly recommend the episode on DNG profiles.

Jason Snell on the new iMacs. Gruber wonders about why there's no new 30" Cinema Display; I'm wondering the same about an update/refresh/whatever for the Apple TV.

(via Daring Fireball.)

I’ve been a long-time reader of American Photo magazine; I’ve read every issue since its inception. It’s in for a long-overdue makeover. I can’t tell from the cover if I love it yet, but change is welcome and I’m looking forward to the first new issue.

These folks did months traveling in an Airstream, and their blog is great. Six weeks is the longest we’ve spent in ours, and it was a great trip (I need to write about that sometime). I haven’t had the chance to read every entry, but the ones I have read have been good. Some of those destinations are amazing, and I’ll definitely check the site out for ideas the next time we’re looking to make a trip in the trailer.

Christopher Lane is in a similar situation, equipment-wise, that I am. I love, love, love my D700, but it's just not practical to carry around. As anyone who reads this knows, I supplemented my Nikon with a Panasonic Lumix GF-1.

I completely understand Lane's worry about the EVF; there's no doubt that it is indeed "soulless". However, in my opinion, it's the best camera of its kind out there, and it's one that I'm having fun carrying and shooting with. The lens really does make wonderful pics, and soulless or not, the EVF makes it feel like I'm shooting with a "real" camera instead of a P&S toy.

I'm a long-time Amazon.com customer, and order almost everything I buy there, largely because of Amazon Prime, where one can pay $79 per year and get free 2-day shipping or next-day shipping for $3.99 per item. Now they're introducing same-day delivery in certain cities--not mine right now, unfortunately--for $6 per item. I think that's awesome. I don't know how many times I'd use it, but it's certainly nice to know it'll be available sometime.

Great news! IDEA has always been my favorite IDE for Java development, and I’ve always been willing to pay to have it in my toolbox. Now hopefully this open source edition will get it in front of folks for whom the price was too high. I’ll still continue to purchase my licenses, since I want the full monty, but this is a nice development.

Good article from TOP. From his conclusion:

Even though I have owned it for only a few weeks, I am serious when I say that as an all-around picture taker, this Panasonic GF1 may be my favorite digital camera ever.

That’s high praise from TOP. Johnston coined the DMD term (Decisive Moment Digital), and says that this is pretty much it, which is what I was hoping when I ordered it. His list of wishes are nice, but my main wish is less noise at high-ISO. If we could improve the quality of the GF1 by one stop, up to the 1600 point, I’d be super happy.

As an aside, I shot a bit with the viewfinder yesterday, and while it has its drawbacks, I like it a lot. It was way too expensive for what it is, but it really enhances the feel of the camera for me, so it’s a keeper. I had Ainsley asleep on my chest last night while I was watching some TV and she had a sweet look on her face, and the GF1 was on the end table near me. I got it, but she was so close to my face that I couldn’t compose and see the LCD. I used the pivot of the EVF to get a 90 degree angle from it and could get it to my eye and shoot sideways and get her face. Hard to describe, but the pivot is already proving useful.

As another somewhat random observation about the GF1, the battery needed recharging last night, which means that it lasted a week of moderate use. That’s pretty good, although nothing compared the G9’s incredible constitution. The G9 often went so long between charges that I’d often lost track of its small battery charger in the meantime. A second battery might be wise for vacations and extended use, but at just over $50, I’ll wait and find a 3rd party battery that’s certified for use on the GF1 (I’ve read reports of some 3rd party batteries that work in other Panasonic cameras not working on the GF1).