Panasonic GF2 Exposure

Saturation & Hue Accuracy
Good color and hue accuracy over most of the spectrum, with minor to moderate oversaturation and shifts in some colors. Some issues with orange through yellows and color balance, though.

Saturation. The Panasonic GF2 pushes blues, reds and dark greens a fair amount, while slightly undersaturating lighter greens, some cyans and oranges. Bright yellows are undersaturated a little more. Default saturation is 110.2% (10.2% oversaturated). That's a bit higher than the GF1 (106.9%), but a fairly typical result for average saturation. Most consumer digital cameras produce color that's more highly saturated (more intense) than found in the original subjects. This is simply because most people like their color a bit brighter than life.

Skin tones. Here, the Panasonic GF2 did well, producing natural-looking lighter skin tones, though just slightly on the pinkish side. Darker skin tones had a small nudge toward orange. Where oversaturation is most problematic is on Caucasian skin tones, as it's very easy for these "memory colors" to be seen as too bright, too pink, too yellow, etc.

Hue. The Panasonic GF2 pushed cyan toward blue, red toward orange, and orange toward yellow. These shifts were especially apparent in the yellow through orange yarn of our Still Life test image. The camera's average "delta-C" color error of 7.12 is one of the highest for an SLR-class of camera in recent memory. The good news is the orange-yellow shifts are significantly mitigated by shooting in RAW format and using a good-quality third-party RAW converter, as can be seen in this Adobe Camera Raw conversion. Delta-C color error improved significantly using Adobe Camera Raw defaults, to only 4.7, a much better score than the in-camera JPEG. Hue is "what color" the color is.

My Color Modes
The Panasonic GF2 offers nine preset "My Color" modes. You can adjust color, brightness, saturation, and contrast, and then save the settings as a custom option.

Mouse over the links above to see the effect of the presets on our Still Life target. You can click on a link to load the full resolution image.

Saturation Adjustment
The Panasonic GF2 lets you adjust the image saturation, contrast, and sharpness in five steps each. As can be seen below, the saturation adjustment was very subtle, and worked mainly on reds. We usually argue in favor of more subtle adjustments for saturation on the cameras we test, but the Panasonic GF2 goes a bit too far in that direction; we'd like to see a wider range here (more steps), but still with the fine steps the GF2 currently offers.

The table above shows results with the default as well as the two "extreme" saturation settings. Click on any thumbnail above, then click again to see the full-sized image.

Exposure and White Balance

Indoors, incandescent lighting
Slight yellow cast with Auto, pink with Incandescent, but good color with the Manual and 2,600 Kelvin white balance settings. Slightly higher than average positive exposure compensation required.

Indoors, under normal incandescent lighting, color balance was just slightly warm and yellow with the Auto white balance setting, though the Panasonic GF2 did much better than most digital SLRs in this regard. (While slightly warm, results with the Auto setting were quite acceptable, and many users in fact prefer a slightly warm look in situations like this, to better represent the mood of the original lighting.) Results with the Incandescent setting erred on the pink-red side. The Manual setting produced the most accurate results, though the 2,600 Kelvin setting wasn't far off the mark either, being just slightly cooler. The Panasonic GF2 required +0.7 EV exposure compensation here, which is slightly higher than the average of +0.3 EV normally required for this shot. (Our test lighting for this shot is a mixture of 60 and 100 watt household incandescent bulbs, a pretty yellow light source, but a very common one in typical home settings here in the U.S.)

Outdoors, daylight
Slightly cool colors overall, with a tendency toward high contrast under harsh lighting. Average exposure accuracy.

Outdoors, the Panasonic GF2 performed pretty well, with good though slightly cool color in the Far-field house shot, though skin-tones were fairly realistic in our Outdoor Portrait shot. Exposure accuracy was about average, as the camera required +0.7 EV compensation for our Outdoor Portrait shot to keep facial tones reasonably bright, which led to some blown highlights. The default exposure was quite good for the Far-field House shot, with very few blown highlights along edges of the white trim. Default contrast is on the high side, but that's how most consumers prefer their photos.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Resolution
Very high resolution, 1,800 ~ 1,900 lines of strong detail.

In camera JPEGs, our laboratory resolution chart revealed sharp, distinct line patterns down to about 1,900 lines per picture height horizontally, and about 1,800 lines in the vertical direction. Complete extinction of the pattern didn't occur until about 2,900 lines horizontally and vertically. We weren't able to extract much more resolution by processing the Panasonic GF2's RW2 files using Adobe Camera Raw 6.3, but ACR did hold definition in the target lines a bit better than the camera's own JPEG conversion did, making the target lines more distinct at higher spacial frequencies. ACR also showed a lot more color moiré than the camera JPEG.

Use these numbers to compare with other cameras of similar resolution, or use them to see just what higher resolution can mean in terms of potential detail.

See full set of test images with explanations
See thumbnails of all test and gallery images

Sharpness & Detail
Very good sharpness overall, though some minor edge-enhancement artifacts on high-contrast subjects are visible. Moderate noise suppression visible in the shadows.

Sharpness. The Panasonic GF2 captures sharp, fairly detailed images overall, though a few edge enhancement artifacts are visible on high-contrast subjects such as the branches in the crop above left. On some high-contrast subjects (like our resolution test target), the GF2's sharpening leaves more noticeable halo artifacts, but on natural subjects such as those shown above, the sharpening isn't nearly as evident. Edge enhancement creates the illusion of sharpness by enhancing colors and tones right at the edge of a rapid transition in color or tone.

Detail. The crop above right shows the effect of moderate noise suppression in the form of smudging of individual strands together in the darker areas of the model's hair, as well as in areas with low local contrast. There are also some blue-ish color blotches (particularly visible on the left edge of the crop above), that we believe may be the result of insufficient anti-aliasing filtering, and the demosaicing problems that produces. (We also saw these with previous G series cameras, but only in the very fine, reddish detail of the mannequin's hair. This is something that we've seen with a number of other cameras in the past, including several SLRs. Processing RAW files in a good RAW converter usually minimizes or eliminates the issue. ) Noise-suppression systems in digital cameras tend to flatten-out detail in areas of subtle contrast. The effects can often be seen in shots of human hair, where the individual strands are lost and an almost "watercolor" look appears.

Intelligent Resolution
The Panasonic GF2 offers three levels of "Intelligent Resolution", which essentially sharpens fine detail while leaving areas with little or no detail (such as a cloudless sky) untouched to keep visible noise to a minimum. To see how well it works, compare the crops below at each setting.

In the table above, mousing over a link at the bottom will load the corresponding crop in the area above, and clicking on the link will load the full resolution image.

As you can see, fine detail has progressively stronger sharpening applied as the setting is increased, while visible noise in the sky is not increased (in fact, noise is reduced). The increased sharpening does tend to coarsen fine detail at higher settings, though. The bark and leaves in the trees behind the house are a good illustration of this effect. Very fine detail such as the pine needles tends to be blurred a bit, probably due to the increased noise reduction.

RAW vs In-Camera JPEGs
As noted above, the Panasonic GF2 produces sharp in-camera JPEGs. As is almost always the case, though, quite a bit more detail can be obtained from carefully processing RAW files than can be seen in the in-camera JPEGs. The Panasonic GF2's JPEGs are pretty good straight from the camera, but it's surprising how much more detail is visible after processing in a good RAW converter. Take a look below, to see what we mean:

In the table above, mousing over a link at the bottom will load the corresponding crop in the area above, and clicking on the link will load the full resolution image.

SilkyPix 3.1 SE (the RAW converter Panasonic bundles with their RAW-capable cameras) is pretty sophisticated in the controls it provides for tweaking your photos. In the second crop above, we used the default "Natural" setting, but noticed fine detail in the pine needles was being smeared away, so we turned sharpening and noise reduction down all the way in SilkyPix, and used its output unsharp masking feature set to 250%, a radius of 0.3 pixels, and a threshold of 0. File output is actually a logical place to apply unsharp masking, as you'll want to use different sharpening settings for printing at different sizes, but we found it awkward not being able to preview the effect of the unsharp masking on-screen.

Adobe Camera Raw 6.3 was used for the ACR conversion version. Default settings were used, though no sharpening was applied during conversion. The image was then sharpened in Photoshop using unsharp masking at 250% with a radius of 0.3 pixel.

As you can see, the Adobe Camera Raw conversions contains more fine detail than the camera JPEG or the SilkyPix conversions. SilkyPix seems to have trouble with the pine needles, even with NR turned all the way down, so it is likely doing some NR under the hood which can't be disabled. The ACR conversion extracted the most detail, but shows quite bit more noise especially in the areas of with little detail such as sky. You can always turn up the luminance noise reduction (default of zero was used here), or process the files in your favorite noise reduction program or plugin. The results we got using SilkyPix were a bit disappointing, but we must confess we didn't experiment with different settings for very long, so you may be able to do better. Bottom line: the Panasonic DMC-GF2 rewards RAW shooters with very good detail (and better color) when used with a good RAW converter.

ISO & Noise Performance
Low noise up to ISO 400, moderate to high at higher ISOs. The effects of noise reduction can already be seen at ISO 100.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2's images are pretty clean at ISO 100, with only minor luminance and chrominance noise visible in the shadows, but there is already some smudging visible from slightly over-zealous default noise reduction. The effects of noise reduction become stronger as ISO increases, and a moderate amount of detail is already lost at ISO 400, and there is more visible chroma noise as well. The effects of noise reduction are more evident at ISO 800 where there's additional blurring, though stronger chroma noise reduction has removed most color noise including the blue botches we attribute to demosaicing errors. See the crops at right to see how the GF2 compares to its predecessor, the GF1 at ISO 800. At ISO 1,600 we see additional detail loss and stronger luminance noise, as expected. At ISO 3,200 very little fine detail is left, and some yellow and purple blotching is visible, along with sharpening artifacts around noisier pixels. Noise gets very ugly at ISO 6,400. There's no fine detail left, and the camera's noise reduction coupled with sharpening artifacts produce a very prominent peppering effect. Overall color balance has shifted toward yellow at the highest ISO, and saturation is also reduced.

As mentioned above, the Panasonic GF2 performs much stronger chrominance noise reduction than the GF1 at higher ISOs.  While this results in fewer color blotches in shadow areas, it does come at a cost, even at the lowest noise reduction setting. Compare the crops to the right, which are both at ISO 800 at the lowest available NR setting. Mouse over the links to load the corresponding crop. Note how the crop on from the GF2 blurs the subtle tone-on-tone detail in the red-leaf fabric of our Still Life shot, while the GF1 leaves much more detail intact.

We're of course pixel-peeping to an extraordinary extent here, since 1:1 images on an LCD screen have little to do with how those same images will appear when printed. See the Print Quality section below for our evaluation of maximum print sizes at each ISO setting.

A note about focus for this shot: We shoot this image at f/4, usually using one of three very sharp reference lenses (70mm Sigma f/2.8 macro for most cameras, 60mm f/2.8 Nikkor macro for Nikon bodies without a drive motor, and Olympus Zuiko 50mm f/2.0 for Four Thirds and Micro Four Thirds bodies). To insure that the hair detail we use for making critical judgements about camera noise processing and detail rendering is in sharp focus at the relatively wide aperture we're shooting at, the focus target at the center of the scene is on a movable stand. This lets us compensate for front- or back-focus by different camera bodies, even those that lack micro-focus adjustments. This does mean, though, that the focus target itself may appear soft or slightly out of focus for bodies that front- or back-focused with the reference lens. We know this; if you click to view the full-size image for one of these shots and notice that the focus target is fuzzy, you don't need to email and tell us. :-) The focus target position will have been adjusted to insure that the rest of the scene is focused properly.

Extremes: Sunlit and low light tests
High resolution with good overall detail, but somewhat high default contrast and limited dynamic range. Very good low-light performance.

Sunlight. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2 struggled a bit with the deliberately harsh lighting of this test, as contrast was a little high at its default setting, and the dynamic range somewhat limited. Although skin tones in the face are a bit dark at +0.7 EV with the default contrast, we preferred it to +1.0 EV exposure overall, because there were fewer clipped highlights. It's really the photographer's choice here as to which direction to go in. For those Panasonic GF2 owners that are going to want to just print an image with little or no tweaking, the +1.0 image would probably produce a better-looking print uncorrected. The bottom line though, is that the Panasonic GF2 had difficulty with the wide dynamic range of this shot, at least with its default settings.

Because digital cameras are more like slide film than negative film (in that they tend to have a more limited tonal range), we test them in the harshest situations to see how they handle scenes with bright highlights and dark shadows, as well as what kind of sensitivity they have in low light. The shot above is designed to mimic the very harsh, contrasty effect of direct noonday sunlight, a very tough challenge for most digital cameras. (You can read details of this test here.)

Contrast Adjustment
As mentioned previously, the camera's limited contrast adjustment was at least some help in handling the harsh lighting.

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2's lowest contrast setting did a good job bringing out detail in the shadows and darker midtones, but it did little did little to preserve clipped highlight detail. Overall, the camera's limited dynamic range makes it perform a bit below average in this situation.

The table above shows results with the default as well as the two "extreme" contrast settings. Click on any thumbnail above, then click again to see the full-sized image. The control for contrast was not quite as subtle as saturation was in its effect, though it appeared to leave the strongest highlights at about the same values, then applied a proportional boost to tones as it moved down the tone curve. To make the most of it in a shot like this, you'll want to expose for the highlights and apply a good amount of contrast reduction (probably the maximum).

The Panasonic GF2's contrast adjustment doesn't help with strong highlights here, and we'd really like to see more steps, covering a slightly greater range. Even with the lowest contrast setting, the dynamic range isn't terribly impressive. Lowering the contrast helps the visual appearance of images such as these, but doesn't result in any significant extension of the tonal scale.

Panasonic's Intelligent Dynamic Range
The above shots are examples of Panasonic's Intelligent Dynamic Range (or iDynamic) at work, with no exposure compensation. iDynamic appears to be a more advanced version of iExposure, capable of reducing both blocked shadows and clipped highlights, and is currently only found on the GF2 and GH2 system cameras thus far. iExposure, which worked by raising sensitivity in dark areas to bring out more detail is no longer offered.

There are three levels of iDynamic available on the Panasonic GF2: Low, Standard and High, plus Off. It's automatically invoked in iAuto mode and manually selectable in PASM mods. For our Outdoor Portrait shot, all three settings were an improvement over the Off setting, pulling detail out of the shadows and delivering a better exposure overall, while doing a very good job at holding on to highlight detail. Pretty good results here.

Face Detection
Like most Point & Shoot cameras these days (and most DSLRs in Live View mode), the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2 has the ability to detect faces, and adjust exposure and focus accordingly. The GF2 does it automatically in Intelligent Auto (iAuto) mode, when a Portrait scene mode is selected, or when Face Detection AF mode is selected. As you can see from the examples above, it worked fairly well, as the images with face detection enabled are better exposed for the face. iAuto also adjusted the tone curve, which helped retain highlights and bring out shadows under this very difficult lighting.

Low Light. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2 performed well in our low light test, capturing bright images down to the lowest light level we test at, at all ISO settings. This darkest level equates to about 1/16 the brightness of average city street lighting at night, so the Panasonic GF2 should be able to take well-exposed photos in almost any environment in which you can see well enough to walk around in. Automatic color balance was pretty good (just slightly cool), something that's not a given at such low light levels. Using the default noise reduction setting, noise was low to moderate up to ISO 800. At ISOs 1,600 and above, noise was a little high compared to most digital SLRs these days. We did not detect any issues with banding or hot pixels.

The camera's autofocus system was able to focus on the subject down to just a shade above the 1/8 foot-candle light level unassisted, which is pretty good for contrast-detect autofocus, but not as good as some SLRs. The Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF2 does have a focus-assist light option which allows it to autofocus in total darkness, as long as the subject is within range and has sufficient contrast.

How bright is this? The one foot-candle light level that this test begins at roughly corresponds to the brightness of typical city street-lighting at night. Cameras performing well at that level should be able to snap good-looking photos of street-lit scenes.

NOTE: This low light test is conducted with a stationary subject, and the camera mounted on a sturdy tripod. Most digital cameras will fail miserably when faced with a moving subject in dim lighting. (For example, a child's ballet recital or a holiday pageant in a gymnasium.) Thanks to their phase-detect AF systems, digital SLRs tend to do much better than point & shoots, but you still shouldn't expect a quick autofocus lock with moving subjects. The GF2 uses contrast-detect autofocus, as is found in most point & shoot cameras, so its low-light focusing ability is less than that of some SLRs with phase-detect systems. That said, though, the larger, more sensitive pixels of the GF2's sensor do better under dim lighting than do the tiny pixels of most point & shoots, (A useful trick is to just prop the camera on a convenient surface, and use its self-timer to release the shutter. This avoids any jiggling from your finger pressing the shutter button, and can work quite well when you don't have a tripod handy.)

Print Quality

Great 16x20-inch prints at ISO 100, good 13x19-inch prints at ISO 800, and even ISO 6,400 makes a decent 4x6.

ISO 100 shots are a little soft at 20x30 inches, which is not a surprise for a 12-megapixel camera. Prints look much better at 16x20 inches, with good detail and color.

ISO 200 images look almost the same at 16x20 inches.

ISO 400 images have about the same level of detail as ISO 200, but colors and shadows are a little darker.

ISO 800 images are softer at 16x20, thanks to a noticeable jump in noise and noise suppression efforts. Reducing image size to 13x19 brings quality back up sufficiently for a good print.

ISO 1,600 files are where quality drops off more dramatically, with lower saturation, darker shadows, and considerably softer detail, especially in reds. 13x19-inch prints are not acceptable, but 11x14-inch prints bring detail back in terms of sharpness, while reds still suffer a lack of detail.

ISO 3,200 shots are a bit rough at 11x14 inches, with mottled shadows, and darker reds. Printing at 8x10 brings back detail, but those reds are still troublesome and darker than we're used to seeing (blur is not uncommon, but a darkening of the red is unusual).

ISO 6,400 images are usable at 5x7, but really look better at 4x6. Reds are still darker, but we think that prints from low-light photos at these sizes will look just fine.

Overall, the Panasonic GF2 performs admirably. Its image quality tracks pretty similarly to the GF1, producing a good 13x19-inch print at ISO 800, but does a little better at 3,200 and 6,400 (the GF1 did not offer ISO 6,400).

Testing hundreds of digital cameras, we've found that you can only tell just so much about a camera's image quality by viewing its images on-screen. Ultimately, there's no substitute for printing a lot of images and examining them closely. For this reason, we now routinely print sample images from the cameras we test on our Canon Pro9000 Mark II studio printer, and on the Canon Pixma MP610 here in the office. (See the Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II review for details on that model.)