Like many other folks, I received a unit with a defective lens mount. The lens twists back and forth by a substantial amount. I am returning my camera.
Did a little testing while I had it. My background is as a cinematographer and coder of digital imaging software. First and foremost, the four thirds format with interchangeable lenses blows away all current video cameras, including those costing $5000. Not only does the larger sensor give better control over depth of field, it changes the geometry of what you shoot, giving you a much wider field of view without the signature "video" look. I will never buy another video camera with a 1/3 or even 2/3 inch sensor again. Of course this is not unique to the GH1. There are several large sensor DSLRs on the market now.
The flip out, fully articulated monitor is super handy. Ever camera should be this way. Why would anyone want to squat down and twist their neck to take a simple low angle shot with a regular fixed monitor camera? It seems obvious. The monitor is incredibly bright and sharp.
The zoom on the GH1 kit lens is bizarrely stiff, which makes you twist the whole camera to zoom when filming.
In the category of dumb things from the past that should have died long ago, the full HD 24p mode is encoded as 60i with pulldown. Your footage will look terrible if played back directly, or you must use software to remove the pulldown. Even with pulldown "removed" you end up with visible interlace ghosting due to the fields being encoded separately. Furthermore, pulldown wastes bitrate, since it basically splits each image in two and compresses them separately, even though they are almost identical images. Result is lower quality images with more compression artifacts for the same bitrate. As it is, the image quality at 1080 is barely sufficient, has trails lasting 1-2 frames at times.
The 720 mode can only be 60p, and has no option for 24p or 30p. Weird, since most people would generally want to shoot at 24p, unless they were filming sports or slow motion. Including 24p and 30p modes would allow for less compression and higher image quality for the same bitrate.
I noticed in photo mode, the monitor has some auto-gain feature, so you don't actually see the photo you are about to take. Very annoying. I couldn't figure out if it could be disabled.
In automatic modes, like auto-iso, or aperture priority, the camera does not display the choices it is making. It just displays blank. So you have no idea what you are getting.
The digital zoom feature is backwards, for filming at least. The image is already being reduced from the sensor's 4K resolution to 1080 or 720. You would think digital zoom would crop out the center of the 4K image, which has tons of extra resolution. Instead digital zoom crops out the center of the 1080 or 720 image, giving you an ugly, super low res, soft, blocky, useless image.
The default sharpening level of "zero" gives you a heavily sharpened image with strong halos and artifacts around edges. Setting sharpening to the minimum (-2) appears to still force you to take some sharpening. Sharpening is an anathema to good post production image processing.
The noise reduction smears the chroma channels, introducing significant artifacts along edges. For example, if you film text on the page of a book in good light, it will appear to be covered with colored smudges. Turning it all the way down improved my images significantly.
The aperture adjusts in discrete steps when filming in shutter priority mode. The resulting sudden "steps" in brightness make it useless for any serious work. A shame, since this is normally the best automatic mode for filming if you are not going full manual. Also, I could hear the lens changing aperture, a sound will be audible to a mic on a boom in especially quiet environments.
The autofocus snaps very quickly when filming. It would be nice if this could be slowed down so as not to be so abrupt and to feel more natural.
I witnessed some pretty serious aliasing, suggesting their downsampling algorithm is not so good. For example, if you film tiny christmas lights from a bit of a distance, and pan slowly, you will see individual lights literally appear and then completely disappear, and then appear again.
Having a choice between mjpeg and avchd is awesome. If they would add mjpeg2000, you could get much, much better images for the same bitrate than mjpeg.
Finally, it would be super cool if camera makers would start offering wider aspect ratios, like 2:1. 16:9 is great, but with all those extra pixels in the 4K sensor, why not give filmmakers some of the typical movie aspect ratios to play with? Forcing them to crop in post waste the incredible resolution of modern cameras.
Overall, I must say that if Panasonic addressed the issues above, this would be an amazing camera. An incredible step forward in the video market, which is astonishingly lame generally.
Hope this is helpful! Sorry about any typos :)
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