These new very small, very light zooms from Panasonic certainly make sense as far as recent cameras such as the GF3 and the small Olympus Pens go. The 45-175mm is only 210g and that strikes me as a great lens to take out for a days landscape shooting.
Dpreview have a video here - http://vimeo.com/28155955 - of the power zoom function on the 14-42mm lens and it does seem very fiddly. This lens is probably far too "gadgety" for me, but I guess if you want a camera and zoom to put in your pocket that delivers great image quality then it will be available soon.
43Rumors have also shown an image of two "pro-spec" zooms.
Nice to know that Panasonic are still interested in what might be described as the "serious" m4/3 market. Personally I'm hoping that the NEX-7 might persuade them to come out with a "serious" body as well as these lenses.
Despite my misgivings about its "halfway-house" handgrip, I must admit to being seriously impressed with the G3. I'm going to do a short review of it fairly soon. It is a seriously good camera and has a couple of brilliant featres in its pinpoint focus option and the fact that when manually focusing lenses you can have a small magnified section in the centre of the screen while keeping the normal view. Very useful.
I hope Panasonic do think again about this policy of constantly reducing the size of their cameras. I blew up a shot taken with the G3 plus the 25mm f/1.4 lens to the size of one of the Sony A77 images I converted and in terms of sharpness they looked pretty much the same. Certainly the images I'm getting off the G3 compare very favourably (and I certainly prefer them) with those I get from my NEX-C3 at low ISO's.
Update - there are now more details on the forthcoming "pro-spec" zooms.
http://www.43rumors.com/real-images-of-the-12-35mm-and-35-10mm-fast-x-zooms/
Update - there are now more details on the forthcoming "pro-spec" zooms.
http://www.43rumors.com/real-images-of-the-12-35mm-and-35-10mm-fast-x-zooms/
