Just did a test of the Panasonic lumix GF3 with one thing in mind. "If this is a camera designed for and marketed towards people like my dad then how would he really cope?" My dad isn't very good at technology, he would like a better camera than his compact but he is scared of New Things, he does not want a dslr as they are too big but has the disposable income of a retired person. He rather proudly told me last week that he had worked out how to resize pictures in paint. Quite.
Taking photos was easy, the iA mode is spiffy but I used A and as wide open as I could (for some reason panasonic has some options calling it A and some calling it F. /sigh) as the light was shit.
Editing was a different story. Firstly I tried to use the programs supplied with the camera. The "PHOTOfunSTUDIO" (indeed) just imports and acts as a viewer. Dad would be fine. SILKYPIX, the raw editor opens up to a confusing black mess with no instructions or guide mode at all. My dad would have shut it down and not bothered to use raw ever again. Plus point, you can change the colour profiles and the film ones are quite nice, downside is that current adobie camera raw can't read them and I couldn't find the
fucking convert to jpg option ( I looked but was so pissed off at this point I gave up without much of a fight). When you shoot in raw+jpg the 6 special colour modes can only capture them in jpg, but a really twisted raw file is created, the program only shows the raw. If my dad had got far enough in to view the files he would just delete them, however, when you delete from SILKYPIX
both raw and jpg files are deleted. I cannot describe how much Hatred I have for this program.
Needed to update LR and camera raw to get the raw files in a proper editing program. The raw files look horrendous (not a LR problem, they look god awful in Panasonic's devil program), and only have the adobie profile. A lot of my quick fix presets won't work. To make the test fair I used the same settings but had to fix the exposer on the raw versions after because the LR auto tone is borked, which left the skies blown. I left them like that because that's all my dad would do.
Full set of tests on an average subject on a dull day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/learnin_cu ... 716023825/