I started looking into small digital cameras a couple of months ago. I need a camera that I can carry around with a modest physical investment, that focuses fast and has no shutter delay, that can capture good quality images in low light conditions, and that gives me full control.

And, from what I've been able to gather so far, many others are looking for it. The Olympus E-P1 PEN and the Sigma DP2 get close, but according to the reviews the focussing is slow and unreliable. The Panasonic LX-3 and its twin the Leica D-LUX 4 get close, but the chances that their tiny 1/1.63" sensor can actually capture low-light images with good quality are very low.

And then Panasonic introduced the DMC-GF1: a Micro Four-Thirds camera (which means that it has a pretty nice sensor, about a fourth of the area of a full-frame sensor), with inter-changeable lenses, at a very reasonable price. And I thought this would be it. Until I saw the image samples.

This is the rendition of a sky at ISO-100 according to the GF1. It is much more noisy than what I had expected. I want my blue skies to be flat, and I was hoping that the 18x13.5 mm of the 4/3" sensor would do the trick.

It doesn't. Look at the contrast-enhanced version, in which the shape of the noise is more visible. Interestingly, the problem seems to be mostly variations in hue towards magenta: if you contrast-enhance a lightness-only version of the image the result is much less objectionable.

It is a pity. There was a real chance it would work. And I don't expect it to be any better when it appears in a Leica costume on 09-09-09. It could of course be that there's something wrong with the sample images I've found, but I doubt it: the EXIF data is correct. I suspect I'll be going back to analog.