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better GH1 manual or tutorial?

Lisa

New member
Me again...

I'm going through the manual that came with my new Panasonic GH1, and am finding it to be poorly organized, poorly indexed, and lacking sufficiently detailed descriptions of what some of the options do and when you would want to use them (for example, "auto ISO" versus "intelligent ISO"?).

Can anyone here recommend a supplemental manual or tutorial for the GH1? Or did you all just learn it by trial and error with much cursing at the manual?

Thanks,
Lisa
 

Terry

New member
I don't know of any supplementals but here is the answer to your ISO question

Intelligent ISO the camera senses movement in the scene and will bump up the ISO to get you a better shutter speed to stop the action. I don't use it so I can't comment on the nuances.

Auto ISO will adjust upward when the shutter speed would have to go lower than either 1/focal or 1/30th of a second (whichever is faster). Does not work in manual exposure mode. Min shutter speed can not be manually set like your Nikons. I use this pretty often. If you don't go in and change the limit in the menus the camera will only go to a max of 400. I have mine set at 1600 max and when I want it low I simply change the ISO using the quick menu.
 

Lisa

New member
Thanks Terry, that explains that one, and it now makes sense. The movement sensor is something I hadn't heard about before (I presume the onboard processor analyzes how the scene changes from frame to frame). The way you use Auto ISO makes sense, too, and it's good to know about the default max of 400 - I'll probably set mine to 800.

Unfortunately, however, I had a number of questions of a similar nature while going through the manual for the first time, and was hoping for a source of answers for all of them. How did you learn all this stuff, just experience and trial-and-error, or something else?

Coming from a DSLR, I understand the more manual features, I mostly just want to better understand some of the auto and semi-auto things it can do in order to decide whether they are useful to me.

Thanks much,
Lisa

P.S. When I got my first digital camera, a Nikon D70, someone produced a series of tutorials on CD for various digital cameras that explained more than the OM manual about how to use them well. I found it to be a very useful thing at the time. I don't remember who produced it, but was hoping that someone still produced something similar...
 
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