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Politics trundles on and the more you pay attention to it the more depressed you are going to get, so what I like to do instead is look at gadgets. Gadgets aren’t everything. An affordable mobile phone is scant consolation if your ludicrously unaffordable house has just been repossessed. Flat screen televisions are only as good as the stuff that’s on them. Cool cars only provide escape from the cares of city life in car commercials, not in cities.

Nevertheless, gadgets are still being done well, and every now and again I like to pick out a new one and praise it on Samizdata, both for its own beautiful sake, and because doing this makes the point that life would be so much better if everything (not just gadgets) was done like that, by grasping capitalists in competition with one another instead of by tyrannically pompous bunglers who are clever only at winning elections or at sucking up to such people. The last such gadget that I got excited about here was the Asus Eee-PC, which I now happily possess, and am gradually finding more uses for. And now, I offer you the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, which is a digital camera, which looks like this:

It doesn’t look anything very special, or very different, does it? And for many people it won’t be. For all those Real Photographers squinting into their optical viewfinders to get the perfect shot with their brick-like Canon or Nikon DSLRs, the G1 would be a severe come-down, because the G1 doesn’t have an optical viewfinder. But for that vast tribe of cheaper and more cheerful digital snappers who prefer cameras that don’t weigh so much, the fact that the G1 has no optical viewfinder is exactly the point. We Billion Monkeys, as I like to call us, look at all those Real Photographers with their clunky black contraptions and we say to ourselves, yes, I’d love my pictures to be as good as theirs are, and it would certainly be nice to be able to use lots of different lenses the way they do, but really, does a camera have to be that big to be that good?

The thing is – from where we Billion Monkeys stand, sit or crouch – DSLRs look like a relic of the analog age, like those weird early steam ships that also had sails on them. DSLR stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex, and this refers to the fact – commenters will doubtless correct me to the degree to which I am, I am sure, somewhat-to-completely wrong – that in order for the optical viewfinder to be an accurate foretaste of the picture being attempted, the light that enters a DSLR has to be divided up and sent off to two different places, one of them being the optical viewfinder and the other being the magical electronic surface that turns the light into a digital picture. This process involves … well, it involves a lot of space and a lot of complication.

So, the G1 does away with the the optical viewfinder. You can still squint through an eyepiece if you really want to, but what you see is a digital picture, not a merely optical one. More conveniently, you can see the digital picture beforehand on a small screen, which, as with the best little digital cameras, twiddles, and hence lets you take pictures that you can still see even when you are holding the camera way above your head or way down in front of your private parts. Most DSLRs still only show you the picture on their screens afterwards, but the latest ones also have these see-the-picture-beforehand screens, but this combining of optical and digital previewing all adds to the size and the expense. What the G1 does is put all its pre-viewing and post-viewing eggs in the one digital basket.

→ Continue reading: The Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1 is a glimpse of a different and better world