This isn't actually a review*. It's a brief account of my recent experience shooting with a Panasonic GX9 for 19 days. The GX9 I used was brand new when it arrived as a loaner from B&H Photo.
First, the bad news.
My first impression taking the camera out of the box, I have to admit, was a wave of negativity. I'm a fan of the GX8, which I owned for a year, and I was not a big fan of the GX7, a very different camera which I also owned for a year. Don't get me wrong—the GX7 is a good camera, and has been used to good effect by good photographers I know. (That's three "goods" to drive the point home. You see what I did there.) However, I did not like it. It seemed too small and fiddly, sort of unsorted, and my intuitive sense was that it never worked quite right. I wanted to like it but couldn't. I never trusted it. Didn't bond with it, you might say.
So my first thought was, oh no, not this again. It seemed all too familiar. Like that gnarly little GX7 had returned to haunt me.
...And taunt me, too. Taunt me about the GX8, I mean. I really am genuinely a little angry about the orphaning of the GX8. And no kidding about that, I'm sincerely unhappy about it. The GX8 was of my favorite cameras of recent years, yet it was one which could have used the kind of "refining" Mark II revision that so many cameras routinely get. Not to skip ahead, but, the exact same sort of revision the similarly not-quite-there GX7 has received with this GX9. Why not the GX8? I'm perturbed. As well as, let us admit, petulant.
So my first reaction was twofold: the GX9 wasn't a GX8 II, which was a bad thing; and it really was a GX7 II...also a bad thing. That's why unboxing the GX9 triggered a gut response of dismay, even something close to disgust.
Finally, ordering a GX9, in the US at least, force-feeds you a kit lens, and I also resent that on principle. I'm a grownup. Not a beginner. I'll pick my own lenses, thanks. Minimum I expect from a camera company: give me the option of buying the kit lens or the body-only. What, you want to discourage as customers people who already own your lenses?!?
Overall, I was pretty grumpy.
At that juncture—in that state—I blatted out a reactive screed of a post and splashed it out onto the blog. Probably a bad idea. Various readers complained, and they were right. I decided not to fix it, but simply to remove it**. So away it went.
Get a grip
Knowing the awkward grip/bulge on the side of the GX7 was one of the many things I disliked about it, and wanting to pre-emptively defend against being annoyed anew, I ordered this for the GX9 from eBay:
It's a very reasonably priced, impressively lightweight handgrip designed for the GX9. I thought it would improve my personal experience of the little GX9. And it did.
After a few days of feeling grumpy and cross and knee-jerk negative—and of ignoring the camera still cradled on top of its disordered shipping materials—the grip arrived. As I fitted it to the camera, I felt a pang of self-recrimination and thought, oh, Mike, grow up. Get over yourself. It's a camera. After all these years, you can use any cam damera under the sun and adapt to it, can't you? Didn't you use an ancient dented Spotmatic with no light meter and a broken lens for a whole year once (c.1998), and make perfectly nice pictures with it? When did you get so picktidious? (That's picky and fastidious mashed together.) At least this thing has a flip-up viewing screen, which you like, and which your precious GX8 didn't have. It's small and tossable, which you say you like. It's got a longer lens than your 12–35mm zoom (the GX9 comes with the 12–60mm ƒ/3.5–5.6 ASPH POWER O.I.S. standard), and you've wanted to experiment with a longer lens. And the kit lens makes the camera a bargain, because the lens alone retails for $498, meaning that they're throwing in the camera for only an extra $300. So just go do your job and adjust to this and shoot with it for a while. Stop being a baby.
So I did. I did a little mental flipperoo, like turning off one switch and turned on another, and started taking the little bugger out for exercise. And that's when the fun started...
[...To be continued...]
Mike
Ed. note: Please hold on to your comments until the conclusion. Thanks!
*I put "review" in the title for the search engines.
**That's happened remarkably few times over the years, actually, although I've done it before. You'd think I'd have hundreds of false starts and rough drafts that never made it to publication, but no, not so; and you'd think there would have been dozens if not hundreds of times that I had put up a bad post, thought better of it, and then deep-sixed it hours, days, or weeks later. But that's not the case either. It has happened, but not very often. It was the same way at the magazines—I wrote between two and three hundred articles that were published in various newspapers and magazines, and only two were ever rejected. (I took note of it when it happened because it was a rare occurrence.) At this point I've written roughly nine thousand(!) posts on TOP, starting at Blogger and now on Typepad, and, with relatively few exceptions, everything I write goes up, and everything that goes up stays up. I have an indulgent editor, though (me).
