This first shot was taken with the Lumix GH1 and its 14-140mm kit lens under bright light at its lowest 100 ISO sensitivity and therefore represents ideal conditions. The crops contain plenty of detail and as you’d hope, are bereft of noise. The metering has underexposed a little here though, perhaps fooled by the white hull dominating the frame, although you’ll see more under-exposures later. While coloured fringing is absent in the image – we believe due to in-camera processing – it does become softer towards the edges.

Landscape: 7.02MB, Program, 1/400, f7.1, 100 ISO, 14-140mm at 14mm (equivalent to 28mm)

						Another shot under bright light with the lens zoomed-out and a sensitivity of 100 ISO. This was taken virtually at ground level, where the GH1’s articulated screen made composition much easier. Once again though, the GH1 has arguably under-exposed a little, and the image becomes soft towards the edges.<

Landscape: 5.53MB, Program, 1/1000, f11, 200 ISO, 14-140mm at 41mm (equivalent to 82mm)

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.

Face Detection easily locked-onto the subject here, and again the increase to 200 ISO hasn’t had any detrimental impact on the quality.

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.

The AF mode was switched to Face Detection and the camera had no problem locking onto the subject.

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.

The GH1 then goes on to offer a 3200 ISO maximum, and you can see samples at every sensitivity in our High ISO Noise results page.