New Panasonic pancake

One of my mostest favorite lenses ever is the ultra-compact and yet fast and very sharp Panasonic 20mm F:1.7 lens for the Micro Four Thirds system. This is an equivalent of a 40mm normal lens. And now they are coming out with a 28mm-equivalent lens, a 14mm F:2.5 pancake lens (because it's so flat). If this one is even close to the quality of the 20mm one, I shall definitely have it. The Panasonic GF1 with a pancake lens fits in a jeans pocket, and yet is a fast and full quality camera in most respects. (The one limitation being that if light gets really low, you'll need a camera with a bigger sensor.)

It's harder to make good wideangle lenses, but this is a rather slower lens (one stop slower), so I think there's hope it can be about as good as the 20mm.

For sure the size is amazing: even smaller than the 20mm, and only 55 grams! That's ridiculous.

I think a good walk-around gear would be a Pentax K-x or K-r with the outstanding and very compact 70mm F:2.4, and the Panasonic GF1 with the 14mm lens, in a pocket. The Pentax won't fit in a pocket, but you can sling it onto your back when using the wide-angle camera.

Why not use a zoom? Hard to say. There's a bit of snobbery to it, perhaps, but you do get extra zing to the pictures with a good prime lens, and they are much more compact. And there's a peculiar pleasure in composing to a fixed focal length, even as there's also much convenience in the instant composing with a zoom.

(I can't believe they haven't updated the GF1 yet. I hope they'll do something great with it, unlike with the G2, which was a pretty trivial update.)