The boost in sensitivity to 200 ISO hasn’t had a detrimental effect on noise levels, with the crops remaining clean and detailed. Once again, there’s an almost eerie absence of coloured fringing thanks to in-camera reduction, but while the image isn’t soft, it’s also lacking the bite of many consumer rivals.

At an equivalent of 156mm with the maximum aperture, we’ve managed to blur the background, and if desired, a smaller depth-of-field can be achieved by standing back and zooming-further.

This first image in the sequence is almost 100% sharp, with only slight softening due to motion, but later images in the sequence became softer due to the AF not quite keeping up.

A bigger issue is a lack of live view between frames, making it tricky to update your angle.

As you’d expect at this focal length and distance, there’s no geometric distortion to worry about, although you’d need to close the aperture to get more in focus than we have here.

The crops are a little soft, but otherwise detailed, and there’s little evidence of noise at 400 ISO here.

There’s fractionally higher noise than at 200 ISO, but really nothing to worry about here.

The GH1 is very usable at 400 ISO with respectably clean results.

The GH1 has again under-exposed this shot, which would normally make noise levels more visible, but to its credit, the crops remain fairly clean and detailed.

A great result here for the GH1 which remains very usable at 800 ISO.

Noise levels are now much higher than before, although the GH1 manages to avoid many of the undesirable chroma artefacts of some rival DSLRs at the same sensitivity.