Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsSimply an excellent stills camera, and a great upgrade from a smartphone
Reviewed in the United States on October 13, 2017
I’ve been using a cellphone camera as my primary camera for a few years now and decided it was time to move up to a “real” camera. After successive purchases of two other models that both had defects out of the box and simply weren’t compelling enough to get a replacement of the model, I ended up with this camera. After having it for a few months I can definitely say I’m glad I got the Panasonic LUMIX GX85.
The first thing I really liked was the size of the camera. I have rather small hands for a male and the size of the camera is just right for me, being just large enough to have a solid grip on the camera while being small enough to carry around easily. The size of the camera and layout of the controls means it’s easy for me to access all the controls.
What impressed me after just a few days of use is the interface and menu system of the camera. I’m already very used to touchscreen camera controls from using smartphones and Panasonic did a really good job with the interface on the touchscreen display. It can be as simple or as busy as you wish it to be and works intuitively. I use the touchscreen display as my primary viewfinder, just like on a smartphone, and I simply find myself really enjoying using it.
As for image quality, I currently have a iPhone 7 Plus and the GX85 is leagues better, at least in RAW. The iPhone is a great snapshot camera to always have with you but trying to use it more “seriously” (if vacation photos count as serious) leads to disappointment. The GX85 can take photos with far superior detail and vastly superior dynamic range compared to the iPhone. That means being able to capture things a bit more like you see them and having more headroom to play around with in your photos in applications like Adobe Lightroom. I’ve been very happy with the photos I’ve been able to get from this camera.
I tend to mostly capture photos of still scenes and the focusing system in AF-S mode works very well for that. I have attempted a few times to get shots of birds using AF-C mode and have actually gotten a few good shots despite my inexperience with this (or any) camera’s focusing system. The mechanical shutter has a surprisingly soft sound, being loud enough to where you can be sure the shutter really did fire but not so loud, or sharp, that it gets annoying. The image stabilization is excellent and even my shaky hands can reliably get shots at 1/8 of a second and with a bit more effort in steadying myself, 1/4 of a second.
Battery life is pretty good on this camera and I can generally get a few hundred shots from it before needing to charge it. It charges through micro USB which is extremely handy, though it cannot charge the battery while the camera is powered on nor can it be powered by micro USB alone. Still, being able to use a portable battery pack to recharge camera is very useful. The included lense is very compact and has good image quality which helps make this a good travel camera. The build quality of this all-plastic camera is excellent and it has a hefty, reassuring weight.
The JPEG engine on it is good enough but doesn’t quite match up to smartphones like the iPhone 7 Plus. The biggest issue is that it has a tendency to randomly pepper solid-yellow surfaces with noticeable green dots, a rather bizarre effect. Again, it’s not a bad JPEG engine and most people will be quite happy JPEGs straight out of the camera, but I’ve been spoiled by how well smartphones with their extra processing power can do and I also intended to use RAW and process them in Lightroom later anyway.
There are some other downsides I’ve noticed. The electronic viewfinder is not very great to me, with it being rather blurry in parts no matter how I adjust the diopter, the image being a little small, and the field sequential image simply being a little unpleasant to look at. I should emphasize that this is quite personal and you may be absolutely fine with it, and also that I almost never use the viewfinder anyway so having it at all is more of a bonus feature to me. The included lense has a rather limited zoom range of 12-32mm and there is noticable barrel distortion at the widest end (12mm) that disappears at 14mm. The relatively narrow maximum aperture of the lense means low-light image quality may not be as dramatic of an upgrade from a recent high-end smartphone as might be hoped. The smartphone app’s location tracking is unreliable and I’d recommend using something like the GPS Tracks app (on iOS) to log your location and then use Lightroom to add the locations to your photos later.
I’m not much on taking video and I can’t comment much on that part of the GX85.
There’s really lots more I can say about this camera but this review is probably too long already. This has been an excellent upgrade from my smartphone camera that carries over the intuitiveness of smartphone camera apps and combines that with something with far better image quality and control. It’s just the right size and is so enjoyable to use that I actually do take it with me when I can. Simply put, I’m very glad I got the Panasonic LUMIX GX85 and enthusiastically recommend it.
