In 16 short years, mirrorless cameras have gone from being the new kid on the block to the new normal, now accounting for about 90% of all sales of interchangeable-lens digital cameras. The compact Panasonic Lumix G1 was the very first mirrorless camera, and it changed the photography world forever.
A lot of exciting and innovative events happened in 2008. It was the year we all flocked to movie theaters to bask in the gloomy, noir ambiance of “The Dark Knight,” and listened for the very first time to the likes of Lady Gaga and Coldplay on the newly launched Spotify music streaming service. It was also the year that saw the introduction of a genuine innovation in digital cameras—one that would completely reshape the camera market in the decades that followed.
2008 was the year I purchased my Panasonic Lumix G1, the very first commercially available mirrorless camera. I still have it to this day, and I doubt I would ever sell it because it is such a landmark camera for me. You can see my little G1 in the lead picture for this article, complete with its original strap. All the photographs in this article are my own, taken with that very same G1 you see in the picture. If you think you might want a G1 of your own, there are still plenty of them around, and you can pick up a used one for next to nothing on sites like eBay.
The slightly textured, rubberized coating on the G1 body came in a few different colors (I chose the blue), which gave the camera a novel and unique look that reflected the mechanical and optical innovation happening inside. Unfortunately, on my G1, this coating has developed a slight stickiness over the years, making it a magnet for dust. This stickiness also makes it rather difficult to remove the dust, as you can probably tell from the picture. Despite its dusty exterior, however, my Lumix G1 is still in perfect working order, and the batteries still hold their charge pretty well, even after all these years.
Before we go on, I should mention that this is in no way, shape, or form intended to be a review of the Lumix G1. There would be little sense in writing yet another review of a camera that came out 16 years ago, and if you were hoping for one, you’ll probably need to jump into your internet time machine and scroll back to 2008. The release of the G1 was pretty big news at the time, so I’m sure you can find plenty of reviews out there if that’s what you’re looking for.
Now, in this age where hyperbole often gets weaponized to be heard above the noise of social media, the phrase “game changer” tends to get thrown around rather liberally. If ever an innovation deserved this title, however, it was the Lumix G1. Here was a fully featured camera in an incredibly compact and lightweight form factor, able to accept a range of interchangeable lenses that were every bit as compact and lightweight as the camera itself. Migrating, as I was at that time, from my hefty Canon 20D SLR that could double as a tank obstacle, along with a selection of equally hefty Canon glass that made you want to trade in your camera bag for a wheelbarrow—the Lumix G1 seemed nothing short of miraculous.
Here was a fully featured system of camera bodies and lenses you could carry all day without needing a team of sherpas!
A little slice of camera history is probably necessary at this point to understand how the evolution of digital cameras brought us to the tiny marvel that is the Lumix G1, and how this eventually spawned a subsequent generation of mirrorless cameras that became the dominant form factor in the digital photography market.
35mm is the standard.
It’s important to realize that the very first interchangeable-lens digital cameras produced between the 1990s and the early 2000s were just digital camera bodies designed to take advantage of all the legacy glass film photographers had accumulated over the years. This made perfect practical and commercial sense—offering photographers the digital technology to transition from film while retaining and leveraging their investment in existing film lenses.
In this sense, the first DSLRs could not be considered digital camera systems of the kind we are used to today, where the digital image capture path is fully integrated between the camera body and the lens. The form factors and optical paths of these early DSLRs were dictated by the demands of existing lenses designed for use with 35mm film cameras (even though, ironically, the first DSLRs did not have full-frame sensors to reproduce the 24 x 36mm frame size of 35mm film).
For commercial and practical purposes, these pioneering DSLR manufacturers were essentially locked into building their new digital imaging technology around the demands of a century-old analog imaging format.
Two major steps were needed to move away from this legacy of maintaining backward compatibility between digital cameras and the analog film world to arrive at the mirrorless Lumix G1. These steps were the advent of the Four Thirds standard for digital cameras and its subsequent evolution into the even more compact and mirrorless Micro Four Thirds system.
What if we did not have to constrain the design of our digital camera systems to the demands of using a 35mm format?
The Four Thirds System, developed jointly by Olympus and Kodak, was the first attempt to address this question. The requirement to capture a digital image in a 35mm format essentially predetermined the form factors and optical paths of the first DSLRs. But if you could abandon the 35mm format and its legacy lenses entirely—starting from scratch with a digital sensor of any size you wanted, along with a new range of lenses designed specifically for it—you could build a system with much smaller and lighter bodies and lenses. This system would be far more compact and lightweight than any traditional 35mm SLR system.
In 2008, the semiconductor sensors used in digital cameras were following the kind of exponential performance/value trajectory that Moore’s Law had correctly predicted for computers. With the availability of smaller, cheaper sensors that could match or even exceed the performance of the previous generation of larger sensors, a smaller sensor format became a viable option for creating high-performance systems with more compact camera bodies and lenses. The Four Thirds engineers eventually settled on a sensor with a 4:3 aspect ratio and an area about nine times larger than the tiny 1/2.5” sensors typically used in compact point-and-shoot cameras. This compromise between sensor size and performance gave the Four Thirds System much better image quality than was possible with compact point-and-shoot cameras, while using a sensor that was still 30% smaller than APS-C and had about half the linear dimensions (roughly one-quarter the area) of a 35mm full-frame sensor. The 4:3 aspect ratio also made better use of the imaging circle produced by a lens than the 3:2 aspect ratio of 35mm, further facilitating the design of more compact, high-performance lenses.
But there was still a problem.
The camera bodies and lenses for the Four Thirds System achieved some reduction in size and weight compared to traditional 35mm systems. However, the major obstacle to achieving the significant size and weight reductions that the Four Thirds sensor could theoretically deliver was the SLR’s complex optical path between the lens and the image capture surface.
In a traditional SLR, a diagonal mirror is positioned in front of the film to redirect light from the lens into the viewfinder for composing the image. When the photographer trips the shutter, this mirror moves out of the way before the shutter opens to expose the film, then immediately moves back into place to redirect the light into the viewfinder again. Because the mirror corrects the vertically inverted image projected by the lens while also creating a laterally inverted image, it was necessary to reflect this laterally inverted image through a pentaprism in the roof of the camera, correcting the lateral inversion and allowing the photographer to see the original, upright, left-right-corrected view of the scene in the viewfinder.
In the diagram below, you can clearly see how the need for a mirror and pentaprism in the optical path between the lens and the image plane required a much bulkier camera body. It also placed the rear element of the lens much further away from the image plane than would be necessary without this extended optical path. The shaded orange area gives you a good sense of how much space could be saved if the mirror and pentaprism system were eliminated from the SLR design.
The solution?
The solution involved replacing the optical viewfinder with the live view from the actual sensor itself. In this way, the photographer could compose the shot through the same lens that would capture the image, but there was no need for the complex moving mirror system or the pentaprism to correct the mirror image in the viewfinder. The optical viewfinder was replaced by an electronic viewfinder (EVF) that displayed, in real time, exactly what the sensor saw through the lens. The other great benefit of simplifying the optical path in this way was that it brought the rear element of the lens much closer to the plane of image capture. This resulted in several performance advantages for both lens and sensor design.
And thus the Micro Four Thirds System was born.
Although Micro Four Thirds inherited the same sensor format as Four Thirds, the elimination of the mirror and pentaprism allowed for much smaller and lighter camera bodies. The corresponding reduction in distance between the rear lens element and the imaging plane also allowed for much smaller lenses. In fact, the flange focal distance—a measure of the gap between the lens and the imaging surface—was reduced by about 50% in the Micro Four Thirds System, enabling far more compact lenses.
The initial response to mirrorless cameras was overwhelmingly positive, but this new format was not without its issues. Many pointed out (rightly) that the EVFs in these new cameras tended to be sluggish in terms of refresh rate and couldn’t match the performance of equivalent optical viewfinders, particularly in low light. However, even in 2008, it was clear that since this was an electronics issue, the rapid evolution of semiconductor technology would likely overcome many of these limitations in the near future.
At the time I purchased my Lumix G1, I was seldom really bothered by the performance of its EVF, which I felt was more than adequate in most circumstances. With its equivalent of about 1.4 million pixels and 100% coverage of the frame, it felt pretty much like the state of the art at that time. Comparing the EVF of the G1 to any modern mirrorless camera, however, it definitely feels rather clunky and primitive by today’s standards. But I liken this sentiment to the kind of experience we went through with the introduction of high-definition TV (HDTV). Before we got used to HDTV, we were perfectly happy with our grainy 525 vertical lines of analog picture resolution, and it was only after we got used to watching HD that the old analog format started to look rather shabby and outdated.
I’m a firm believer in the old adage that the absolute best camera in the world is the one that you actually have with you when the shot presents itself. From this perspective, it is difficult to overstate what a huge benefit it can be to have smaller, lighter photo gear. My Lumix G1, with its tiny 14-45mm kit lens (equivalent to a 28-90mm zoom in 35mm full frame format), weighs in at a meager one and a half pounds, so there was never any question of being reluctant to tote it around when you were out and about.
Given the passage of 16 years since its release, it would be pretty futile to spend too much time comparing the specifications of the G1 with any modern mirrorless camera. Innovation in the camera world has continued apace since 2008, and of course, the G1 lacks many of the features we now take for granted in mirrorless cameras—in-body image stabilization, high resolution coupled with incredible low-light performance, face recognition, etc. And while it’s certain that the Lumix G1’s EVF and 12 MP sensor would not offer any real competition to the current generation of mirrorless cameras, the fact remains that it was (and in many ways still is) a great little camera. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is that you can still take great pictures with it.
Looking back, I loved using my Lumix G1, and it really was a camera that went everywhere with me. I was very happy with its performance, and I took a lot of great pictures with it. But I think there was also an additional sense of excitement around the potential this transformative evolution in digital cameras might hold for the future.
The Lumix G1 just turned sixteen this year, and it was the seed of a mirrorless camera revolution that is still ongoing today—an evolution in digital photography that started with small-sensor cameras and has now grown to include full frame and even medium format systems as well. So happy sixteenth, G1—the photography world would not be the same without you!
