Panasonic Talks GH1

Digital Photography Review has an epic interview with Mr. Ichiro Kitao, General Manager of Panasonic's DSC Product Planning Group. DPReview asks some good (if gramatically malformed) questions, including "What's the reception been in the camcorder division been to the GH1?" (sic). In general I love DPReview and admire how they ask tough questions when they get these interviews, but there's one point on which I disagree with them:

We're not big fans of the dedicated movie button. Would it be possible to allow the main shutter release to optionally be used to stop and start movies?
No, but we will consider this option for the future.

What happens if you press the shutter button when recording a movie?
It activates a one shot AF operation.

Panasonic's design sounds spot-on to me. Of course, I haven't used it, but the GH1's dedicated video start/stop button strikes me as preferable to having some kind of mode switch, and using the shutter button as push-to-focus seems ergonomically perfect to me.

Stills folks might be predisposed to place too much importance on the ergonomics of the video start/stop button. I guess if you're not planning on editing your video, you might want hairtrigger control over video recording—but I would much rather have my index finger hoving over something that is of use while I'm recording, like focus.

In stills, capturing "the decisive moment" is all that matters. In motion, precisely when you began recording is meaningless—but managing your dynamic composition during a take is everything.

The Eagle Has Landed

Welcome to the new ProLost.

I'm sure some things are broken, or lame, or brolameken.

I'll be expermineting with layout and features and whatnot, so let me know what you like and don't like.

I'm most curious about your comment-posting experience. On Blogger I did not allow annonymous comments, and I'd like to keep things the same here, which means (I think) that you need to create an account and log in to post. Let me know how that treats you.

Soon this blog will break

And soon after that it will be fixed.

I've been messing around with Squarespace, and I think I like it. When I move this blog over to it, a few things will happen:

  • The blog will get a little prettier
  • Some things will become slightly more awesome
  • Some things will become slightly less awesome
  • External links to specific posts will break (but will be redirected to a site directory with a search field)

ProLost.com has always redirected here to prolost.blogspot.com, but soon ProLost.com will be the one and only address for this site, as FSM has always intended.