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Panasonic GF1 Lens Mega-Review.

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I just received this video from one of our readers. He made an amazing job by testing some very interesting lens! He also wrote me following text:

Here is a video review of “most” of the lenses I currently own with the Panasonic DMC-GF1. I included all of the lenses that are reasonable to shoot with inside of a house. It has stills and videos of each lens and with each lens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7q9nP0fKB4

I also included MJPEG and AVCHD-lite samples and some samples using a video light on the GF1’s hot shoe.

Here is a synopsis of the review.

1. The legacy MF lenses are awesome for capturing low light videos. However, they are all very soft at full wide open aperture with the exception of the Nikon 50mm pancake. They tend to sharpen up between F2.0 and F2.8.

2. The m4/3s 14-45mm and 20mm produce very sharp pictures and videos. However, the 14-45mm videos get very dark at anything but F3.5. Therefore, it is only barely usable for video at full telephoto 14mm and wide open.

3. The video light really helps all of the lenses in low light. However, you can not use it to video a subject that can see. It will blind the subject even on the low setting.

4. The 50mm Nikon Pancake is by far and away the best bang for your buck. At $21 for the lens and less than $40 for the adapter it is an amazing deal. The 20mm + 50mm pancakes my an awesome combination.

5. AVC-HD lite is excellent for well lit scenes. However, the quality of the AVC-HD lite videos decreases drastically as ISO is increased. It struggles with compressing the noise because the noisy pixels are constantly changing. In these situations MJPEG might be a better choice if you are willing to tolerate a little more visible noise.

6. The S3-IS(Last Clip) produced surprisingly sharp video results considering it was only SD video. However, it had a tremendous amount of noise that detracts from the video quality greatly. It still was an excellent video camera when you consider how old it is.

Thanks!

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