Hah! Scored another Friday afternoon camera to borrow for the weekend. A Pana GH1 arrived yesterday but won’t be picked up by a reviewer until next week, so home with me it goes. You snooze, you lose and no one ever accused me of being asleep when there was loot to be had.

The GH1 is the current state of the art in DIGITAL single lens reflex cameras, not from a performance or functionality point of view but rather in terms of adopting digital camera technologies and forcing them into the SLR form factor.

It’s got full time live view on a 3 inch articulating LCD, an electronic viewfinder i.e. no mirror (which equals a tiny body), can accept an external microphone for the full-HD 1920 x 1080 video at 24 fps or 1280 x 720 video at 60 fps that it can record and it even has continuous autofocus in video mode. There’s Panasonic’s iA or Intelligent Auto mode to make transitioning to a DSLR easy while still offering full manual control and just like any self respecting digital compact, it’s available in multiple colours as well.

The supplied kit lens is a 14-140mm zoom, which translates into a 28-280 super zoom in 35mm terms according to my maths. One lens to rule them all?

So will all this digital functionality I love so much be a blessing or a curse in an SLR? We’ll soon see – updates to follow.

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