GX8 adventure: Customer friendliness

Photo & Video Sharing by SmugMugSunrise on the Matterhorn, Zermatt, Switzerland.

This blog post is the first of a series on our recent holiday and on my Lumix GX8 adventure, which has just ended yesterday by posting the camera at our local post office. For 18 days I have been photographing with this exciting new camera in the Swiss mountains and valleys, in the rain (rarely) and sun (most of the time), in the cold as well as in hot weather.

As I have accidentally destroyed my most preferred digital camera so far, my beloved Lumix GH1, just before our summer holiday, I needed a replacement quickly, within a week. In my despair, I filled out the contact form on Panasonic's website, explained the problem and asked if they could sell me a GX8 prematurely. It seemed a hopeless trial balloon. I was so devoid of expectation that I actually bought a used GX7 already; after all it was the last weekend before our holiday and one was on offer close by. It was thus a surprise, when a few days later a friendly person from Panasonic replied that they cannot directly sell to customers, but that they were of course willing to help me. They offered to loan a GX8 to me - two weeks were fine. Woow! No conditions, signatures or anything; just a few friendly emails and the next day the GX8 had already arrived.

Photo & Video Sharing by SmugMugReflections at the entrance of ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

To clear out any potential misunderstanding: I am not turning my blog into a review site and neither have I become an employe of Panasonic, nor received any form of payment for these posts. However, this overwhelming example of customer friendliness motivated me to photograph and encouraged me to write about my experiences and equipment choices. In upcoming posts I will thus write much more about equipment than I usually do, but I will also use these post to share photographs from our recent trip in the Swiss mountains (that were mostly taken with the GX8, but also with the GX7).

Overall, both cameras, the Lumix GX7 and GX8 are a pleasure to use (the children clearly preferred the GX7, myself rather the GX8). Having worked with a Lumix camera for many years, it was intuitive getting used to the new models, setting up the menu and buttons to my liking, and starting to photograph immediately. To summarise my GX8 adventure: the Lumix GX8 is clearly my most preferred digital camera yet (and the GX7 is very nice too) and I am still amazed by Panasonic's friendliness and accessibility!

Photo & Video Sharing by SmugMugAstrantia major (Great Masterwort, Grosse Sterndolde)

2015/08/09 by Unknown
Categories: , | 4 comments

Comments (4)

  1. Interesting Post .. I liked the GX7 (nice dynamic range), butin the end switched to Sony ... wouldn't want to juggle 2 camera systems. It was a pain to ditch all the MFT stuff, but in the end now I have asystem (APS C and Fullframe) to use one lens with 2 crop factors ...
    Nevertheless, great capture of the Matterhorn!

  2. Hello Henrik and thank you for your comment.
    For me, it is exactly the same, did not want to deal with 2 camera systems, but I went the other way. In my case, the decision was simplified by my abysmal experience with the Sony customer service (and the A7r).

  3. Hello,
    Yes, micro 4/3 cameras are really interesting. Even the 4/3 were great. I have used an Olympus E-30 on a fantastic trip to Bhutan in 2011 with the 7-14 f/4, the 12-60 and the 50-200. (I made a book, pictures will be online in the near future...). The great thing about the E-30 is that I could go on for almost a week of trek -without access to electricity- with one or two batteries. And take about 1000 pictures. What about battery life with the GX8??? Would it even last a day of shooting with one battery? How do you go on a trek of 8 or 10 days without electricity with this camera??? THank you for your attention.

  4. Hello and thank you for your visit and comment!

    I have not made an exact analysis of the battery life, but for my type of shooting the battery lasted at least 2-3 days and several hundred photographs. I photographed every day, usually carried the camera all day long, used the electronic viewfinder almost exclusively, and the screen was folded away (this is how I like it best). Usually, I do not take thousands of photographs per day, but it can be a few hundred. I also do not much look at the photographs that I have taken, only occasionally and shortly. Finally, during our trip I had the camera record a jpg and a raw file, while usually I only take the latter (but I do not know if/how this affects battery life). I had the impression that battery life was good.

    If I knew that I will have no access to electricity for 8-10 days I would probably take 2 or 3 spare batteries with me. If I intended to do a lot of long exposure shots definitely at least 3; this type of photography always drains the batteries (with all the cameras that I used so far).

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