Coming from the LX3, which is a camera I really love, I have a bit of Panasonic bias. I like the way it performs and handles, and that has at least up until recently made me convinced that I should get a GF1, especially since it has (had) a much better AF performance than the Olympus PENs.

So hard to choose!

However, I’m starting to slowly change my mind. I was recently playing with an E-P1 in a shop and was first very annoyed with the Auto mode which consistently chose slower shutter speeds than was possible to manage without a tripod. Then after about 20 shots, I realized that the in-body image stabilization (IBIS) was turned off. After enabling it, I suddenly got almost 100% sharp photos instead. (Btw, I guess this tendency to select too slow shutter speeds is a firmware bug or something? Shouldn’t it take into consideration whether IBIS is enabled or not?)

Unfortunately, Panasonic chose the route to put image stabilization in their lenses, but not in all of them (and obviously not in rivaling Olympus lenses). Olympys, on the other hand, chose the in-camera body stabilization instead, which means that any lens attached enjoys the benefit of stabilization. 3 stops of IS is pretty huge. In the Panasonic LX3, I can sometimes take sharp photos at 1/8 shutter speeds without a tripod I if set it to burst mode and take 3-4 photos at the same time.

This leads me to think that buying a camera without IBIS is a pretty bad idea, given that many lenses (20mm/1.7, 7-14mm, 9-18mm) don’t have IS in the lens either. Also, with the new firmware update, it appears that Olympus isn’t that far behind in terms of AF performance anymore, although the kit lens isn’t very fast of course (though I didn’t find it slower than my LX3).

So, I’m now a bit torn. I’m starting to lean towards an E-PL1 because it also has a built-in flash, and the out-of-the-box colors of the JPEG images are simply stunning. In general, it feels like it has many advantages over its bigger brothers E-P1 and E-P2 while at the same time being cheaper.

At the same time, I really want the Panasonic 20mm/1.7 lens and think I’d use that more than any kit zoom, and I realize that buying that lens separately ends up getting pretty expensive compared to buying it as a kit lens with the GF1.

Am I overrating the importance of IS here? It feels to me like buying any Panasonic m4/3 is a bad idea if you care about low light performance and want to also use the camera as a casual social setting camera.

It’s such a shame that Panasonic chose the in-lens IS route here, since it really makes me less interested in their cameras even though they seem to perform better in many aspects. At this point, I would even go as far as saying that I am hardly interested in what a future GF2 will look like, because I already know that it will force me to use 3-4 stops higher shutter speeds compared to any Olympus camera with the same pancake lens.

Pros

• The screen is pretty good, and I rarely have a problem clicking on links and buttons using my thumbs. The fact that it’s resistive feels like an advantage in this incredibly cold Swedish winter. Next to a Nexus One, however, it’s obvious that the color reproduction could be better.
• The Mozilla-based MicroB browser really is awesome. Scrolling and zooming is so smooth and quick that it feels like surfing on the iPhone, only this time you’re using the real web. By far the best web browsing experience I’ve had on a mobile device.
• The fact that I can use it to call VoIP, Skype, Gtalk, and regular cellular networks is amazing.
• The Conversations application seamlessly integrates IM and SMS in an intuitive manner.
• The media player handles almost anything you throw at it after installing a few extra software packages.
• Great synchronization with Exchange-based mail services (e.g. Zimbra, which Mozilla uses).
• Nice multiple desktop solution (though lacks useful widgets).
• Battery life is impressive in active use such as in a phone call. Though see the standby time below…
• The “one-click” (actually a few clicks) publishing of both photos and videos to services like Facebook and Flickr is really neat. Though see below about the camera quality…
• It really is fun to use it. And it’s open source! And it can run Firefox!

Cons

• This thing is heavy! I thought my N95 was heavy, but this is significantly heavier. It definitely feels like a solid device, for better or worse.
• The camera is actually worse than the 3-year-old N95 camera in a number of ways: terrible colors in low light, terrible metering, light leaks making the subject in focus appear washed out, and the field of view is narrower than the N95 camera. In comparison, here’s a photo taken by the N95. Both are 5-megapixel cameras.
• The standby time is a joke. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but sometimes I can just keep the phone in my pocket during the whole day and it will discharge in less than 8 hours. I first kept all accounts logged in (Skype, VoIP, Jabber), but have since then compromised a bit and only keep Jabber online. Still, the battery isn’t impressive.
• The horizontal layout is annoying most of the time. When I’m out and about, it feels awkward that I can’t use the phone with one hand. I understand the “handheld computer” legacy (I even owned an N810), but feel that my typical use is much more like a regular smartphone than a portable computer. Ideally, all applications should support both layouts.
• The keyboard, while certainly better than the N810, is still not really good. It’s too easy to click on the wrong keys, and there’s no auto complete feature that can detect (and correct) common spelling mistakes.
• The auto suggest feature only shows one suggestion, so 90% of the time it’s not suggesting the word you want and as a result you end up ignoring the suggestions altogether.
• The physical unlock switch is only comfortable to use when in horizontal layout. It’s nearly impossible to reach with one hand if you just want to make a quick call.

As Commodus once said: “Are we so different, you and I?”

With my photo collection on my personal server (djst.org/gallery), I was constantly micro-managing the photo uploads by renaming image titles from e.g. IMG_1350.JPG to 01.jpg because I thought it looked cleaner with URLs like djst.org/gallery/v/tokyo2008/015.jpg.html compared to something like djst.org/gallery/v/tokyo2008/IMG_1350.JPG.html. If I had a complete set uploaded and later on realized I had forgotten one picture, I found myself struggling to insert that picture in the set and renumber all pictures.

Because of all this work associated with uploading images, I started to hold off on uploading photos until I found some free time for the micro-management, and the result is that I haven’t uploaded any photos for quite a while now.

Flickr has changed all that for me now. The URL prettiness is no longer an issue because direct image URLs are ugly no matter how you look at it, and the title of the image is separate from the URL. Bandwidth and storage space are not issues either, and albums (sets) can be created on the fly with photos belonging to more than one set, making organizing photos simple and fun.

Have a look at my new and growing photo collection at fickr.com/photos/djst. I plan to move all my existing photo albums over there too, but one step at a time here! The most important thing was to get all the new photos up.

Some previously unpublished Mozilla albums:

• FOSDEM 2009
• Mozilla Work Week 2008
• MozCamp 2008 Barcelona
• MAOW 2008 in Paris
• Mozilla Summit 2008

Isn’t Eskilstuna a beautiful place?

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Let me translate that into human readable English (although it is pretty readable as it is):

By uploading photos to your Facebook account, you automatically grant Facebook the right to copy, publicly display, and distribute your photos for any purpose, wherever they want. You may remove your photos from your account if you want, but Facebook still owns the copies you uploaded and can still do whatever they want with those copies.

I’ll think twice before I upload any photos or videos ever again.

The pictures from our wonderful vacation in Phuket, Thailand are now uploaded to the photo gallery. Instead of writing about the vacation here in the blog, I’ll add text descriptions to the photos like I did with our vacation in Sousse 2005. I’ll do that when I get more time. For now, just enjoy the pictures.

Sofie and I celebrated Christmas with my mom and her husband at their new house outside Köping, which was great. I have a few photos from there too that I’ll upload shortly (I think). I didn’t get a Wii, but hardly anyone else did either, did they? Seems impossible to get in Sweden even today.

Editing photos in F-Spot is a breeze. Easily rotate, crop, resize, and adjust red eye and other color settings with a few simple clicks. Versioning ensures your originals are never altered.

There seems to be quite a difference in the mission statement between Picasa and F-Spot. The latter has taken the “photo management” part more seriously, and the “photo editing” thrown in as an afterthought. F-Spot’s mission statement is not finalized, though, so hopefully this will change. This is also why I’m blogging about it.

Using F-Spot as a photo editor is very limiting. I would like to see lots of changes, most of them inspired by Picasa, but taken a bit further. The tools I usually need to improve a promising but not perfect photo are:

• Auto contrast. Ideally, it should be a button in the already existing color dialog in F-Spot, which should adjust the slides accordingly, so you have a chance of fine-tuning it before comitting.
• Straightening a photo. Picasa has a really good tool that not only straightens the image, but auto-crops the image so you don’t need to do that manually afterwards. Much easier than starting GIMP and rotating freehand (without any reference lines) and then cropping to remove the transparent areas.
• Cropping. My camera sensor produces 4:3 images, and most of the time I prefer to crop them to 3:2. F-Spot has this feature but the implementation is very non-intuitive. You need to select between portrait/landscape aspect ratio with a drop-down list. It would be much easier if F-Spot could just detect which direction you’re dragging the mouse the most to.
• Rotating. Even though the EXIF tag says the image should be rotated, basically every other application ignores this, making F-Spot’s rotation useless. Please, just do a lossless jpeg rotation like every other software! Also, rotation–unlike every other operation in F-Spot–is not treated as an actual modification. In other words, a (Modified) copy of the image is not created.
• Filtered B/W. Sometimes you can achieve a much better B/W effect by using this method. Try Picasa to see what I mean. The difference can be stunning.
• Levels/Curves. Maybe this is a bit advanced, but at the same time it can really make a huge difference on an image. Being able to, for example, increase the light of shadow areas, while preserving the light on the midtones and highlights is invaluable in a high contrast image.

Moreover, I like the idea of F-Spot creating a (Modified) copy of the image you are manipulating, preserving the original. However, there are things I don’t like about it:

• The modified copy is usually a lot smaller (in file size) compared to the original. There seem to be no preserving of the jpeg compression quality. I’ve seen examples of the original jpeg being over 2MB and the modified version under 700KB. That’s not normal, is it?
• There is no way of specifying where the modified versions should go. Currently, they’re dropped in the same folder as the original, with an added ” (Modified)” suffix. To me, it would make much more sense to put them in a /Modified/ subfolder. I like to separate originals from my “mastered” versions.