How many of you remember the Panasonic GM1? I’ll admit that during that stage of the camera world, it probably wasn’t appreciated anywhere as much as it should’ve been. We wanted more serious cameras that autofocused better. Once that was figured out, I’m sure that camera makers could’ve done whatever they wanted and people would’ve bought them. But the Panasonic GM1 represents a part of what the future of Micro Four Thirds should be for photographers.
Here’s the truth: photographers don’t want to bring around big cameras for fun. The smaller the camera, the more fun it is because we can’t simply take it all that seriously. And more than any other camera system out there, Micro Four Thirds is the best option for this. You can take tiny pancake lenses and tiny cameras to take big photos. More importantly, you can set the camera to some intriguing JPEG output with Panasonic’s Real Time LUT feature and enjoy it to the max.
Micro Four Thirds indeed also has an audience with the wildlife and landscape photography crowd. But it really doesn’t need to be the only camera system that you own. Lots of your work can be done with a full-frame camera, and then when it’s time for fun, a Micro Four Thirds camera could come out.
However, both Panasonic and OM SYSTEM have more or less strayed away from these types of cameras. And the longer they do it, the more I think that photographers will lose faith in them to make a pocketable Micro Four Thirds camera that can take great photos when you want.
So what kind of features would we want?
- Weather resistance
- A useable touchscreen menu
- Retro ergonomics
- Fun color options
- A good sensor with a processor that can focus really quickly
- Decent video
That’s truly it. It’s a big reason why so many photographers go for cameras like the Leica Q2 and the Fujifilm X100V. There isn’t a demand for point-and-shoots per se. But there is surely a demand for the serious compact camera. A compact camera can be within a size category. These serious compacts can’t target the consumer. And as it is, the consumer has evolved quite a bit.
This is a big part of Micro Four Thirds fighting with their own identity. They’re smaller than everyone else, and they’re often hyperfocusing on fixing their weaknesses instead of embracing their strengths. Grainy images and bad high ISO output can be fixed with AI processing or some sort of in-camera filter like the Real Time LUT feature or something like that. The extra depth of field at a given aperture can also be addressed with a lot of the extra software depth-of-field effects that companies like Google and Apple have.
Seriously if stuff like this were available, then every serious photographer would have these kinds of cameras in their pockets. All the other features have become good enough to where we can pack them into a small camera body and make tons of photographers happy. And as we’re currently in an economic recession, I hope some brands start to take slight risks with design to add spice to an otherwise stale and monotonous camera market.
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Camera manufacturers: stop focusing so hard on bigger, better cameras that make video and just give photographers what they want. They’ll come back to you.