A marked difference compared to the GF1, the touch screen functionality is supposedly the biggest draw of the GF2. Does this do any good to the handling and shooting in reality? Without boring you with the details of the on-screen menus which you can surely find elsewhere or in the operating instructions, let's explore the answers.
The i-Phone and the lookalike gadgets have swept the world with the increasingly popular touch-screen activation. This function works every fine on cell phones and computing pads. But the story is a bit different in the case of a camera.
The Bad
With, say, a cell phone, the user can unlock the screen which is important to prevent accidental touching of the screen. However, there is no way to lock and unlock the screen of the GF2. After it is turned on and before it goes into sleep mode, the screen can be touched with or without intent. Users who have the habit of keeping the camera on will find themselves touching the screen to activate a function by chance. This happened for 90% of the time when we used the camera. This does inconvenience the user.
In our case, it was the focus area selection which we mostly activated accidentally. Although the selected focus didn't require lots of tabbing to be remedied, the touch-activation function of the focus area selection – unlike the touch-screen shutter, guide, scroll, de-focus and quick menu – cannot be turned off. That is to day, there is no way to avoid the possibility of activating it accidentally.
The Good
(Apart from tracking the subject and releasing the shutter, touching the screen can also set the position of the AF area – great for doing portraits)
Call it every cloud has a silver lining or the other side of the coin, the touch screen operation certainly has its merits. It is very when it comes to doing portraits. A touch on the selected area will lock the focus and, if the touch-screen shutter is on, take the picture. You will never need to mess around the button to select the desired focus area as in other cameras.
(Viewing photos, especially playing back videos, has never been easier like with the GF2's touch screen functionality)
The touch screen is put to the best use when viewing photos. It works like any smart phones' in viewing photos. A swap of the figure across the screen brings you to another photo or back to the previous one. Pointing the figure on the screen at a specific area of the image will enlarge it. Deleting multiple images has never been easier – simply touch to select the shots to be deleted and then the on-screen OK button.
The screen responses quickly to every touch even though not as smoothly as the remarkable iPhone4' s retina screen. We have no complaint about the responsiveness of the screen.
As a side note, the screen at 460,000 dots, which is not stunning at today's standards, has a good viewing angle of, according to our observation, nearly 270 degree. The brightness can be set to automatically enhance under bright environmental light. Just as any other new cameras in this class, GF2's screen has comparable visibility (i.e. barely visible) when shooting under bright sunlight. Surely, for that matter, Samsung's AMOLED screen is still unrivalled.
A Blessing to Photographers?
The touch-screen is as good as it gets. To old-hand photographers, the touch screen thingy is a gimmick which is not indispensable, much less than the forfeited dial and lever (situated under the dial) on the GF1. To the newer i-generation, maybe it works more intuitively. Our verdict is that if the touch-screen operation doesn't prevent the diving into menus, which it doesn't in the case of GF2, the implementation is not desirable. The tiny GF2 body makes accidental touching of the screen an issue.
There is one more vexation about the touch screen. While the cluster of the on-screen photographic information can be turned off, the Disp(lay) icon doesn't go off (and also the touch-screen shutter activation and Q.Menu icons if the physical Q.Menu button is set to function as a Fn button) unless the shutter release is half passed. The relatively sizeable icons effectively prevent the photographer to check out the elements on the screen at where these icons are situated. This can be forgiven on a point-and-shoot camera. But the GF-2 is no point-and-shooter. And even on a point-and-shooter, the on-screen information can usually be completely turned off .
In short, the touch-screen functionality is a mixed blessing to users of the GF2. At best, it is more useful for doing tweaking and viewing photos but can be done without for shooting. As for us, the conventional dials and lever on the GF1 are preferable.
(to be continued)
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