Panasonic G7 Field Test

One of the perks of my job is that I get to shoot some very cool cameras, and so I like to seek out equally cool shooting opportunities with which to put them to the test, whether it's hiking in the Colorado mountains, flying in an 85-year old Ford Trimotor, or searching for shipwrecks on the rocky coast of Hong Kong. For the Panasonic G7, though, I had the most awesome subject I've had in years, shooting at the world-famous Indianapolis 500!

For those of you who aren't well-versed on your motorsports, the Indy 500 is a motor race that's famed worldwide as the fastest venue in the Triple Crown of Motorsport! Alongside my fellow members of the photo press, I attended the Indy 500 as a guest of Panasonic. That got me much closer to the action than I'd have been on a standard ticket, including behind-the-scenes access to both the pit lane and garages, and a spectacular view from top of the recently-renamed Panasonic Pagoda.

My first field test for the Panasonic G7 was a rather unusual one, thanks to a really great shooting opportunity: A chance to shoot trackside at the Indy 500. That event told me quite a bit about this interesting camera, but it also resulted in a very long writeup, and so I left some things for the second field test that I'd ordinarily touch upon right off the bat.

A quick recap
As I said in that first test, I really loved the Panasonic G7's compact size, as well as the trim proportions of its lenses. This camera really plays to the strengths of mirrorless, and because of that it's more likely to be with you when you need it. (In my experience, even if the image quality can be spectacular it's just too easy to leave a larger camera and its various accessories sitting on the shelf at home. The result, when an unexpected photo opportunity arrives, is an unsatisfying photo from a smartphone, and a whole lot of regret that the proper camera wasn't to hand.)

I also found myself really liking the Panasonic G7's 4K video-related features. For one thing, the videos themselves are clean and crisp, and even in a non-4K workflow like mine they allow generous cropping, post-capture stabilization and (with a suitably good video editor) a noticeable improvement in video quality even after downsampling to Full HD resolution.