Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He’s a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn’t used, so I’ll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but in investment banking we’ve been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone.” When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. “I got a sense that he was pissed off,” Jim told me. A handful of Jim’s colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn’t a coincidence. “I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors,” Jim says. “Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways.”
It’s hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem—maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem—is like saying our shoes might be killing us.
Except our shoes don’t send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do—a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world. Consider, for instance, the following headlines that have appeared in highly reputable international newspapers and journals over the past few years. From summer 2006, in the Hamburg Morgenpost: are we telephoning ourselves to death? That fall, in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin: mobile phones affect the brain’s metabolism. December 2007, from Agence France-Presse: israeli study says regular mobile use increases tumour risk. January 2008, in London’s Independent: mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep. September 2008, in Australia’s The Age: scientists warn of mobile phone cancer risk.
Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe’s premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to “brain aging,” brain damage, early-onset Alzheimer’s, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union’s environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology “could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol.”
Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.
As more results of the Interphone study trickled out, I called Louis Slesin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT and in 1980 founded an investigative newsletter called Microwave News. “No one in this country cared!” Slesin said of the findings. “It wasn’t news!” He suggested that much of the comfort of our modern lives depends on not caring, on refusing to recognize the dangers of microwave radiation. “We love our cell phones. The paradigm that there’s no danger here is part of a worldview that had to be put into place,” he said. “Americans are not asking the questions, maybe because they don’t want the answers. So what will it take?”
To understand how radiation from cell phones and wireless transmitters affects the human brain, and to get some sense of why the concerns raised in so many studies outside the U.S. are not being seriously raised here, it’s necessary to go back fifty years, long before the advent of the cell phone, to the research of a young neuroscientist named Allan Frey.
The Lumix GF1 is Panasonic’s answer to the Olympus Pen, and is the second “rangefinder” style Micro Four Thirds camera on the market. It blows away both the EP-1 Pen and also the new EP-2 Pen, and is — amazingly — good enough to replace all but the best of entry-level DSLRs.
The camera has been reviewed across the internet, but oddly some of the most important points have not been written about. These questions are particularly pertinent when it comes to compact cameras, whose performance varies so much more than that of DSLRs. Here we answer those questions, and hopefully fill in the gaps. The GF1 is here paired with the Lumix 20mm ƒ1.7 “pancake” lens.
Shutter Lag
Shutter lag is the best reason to buy a DSLR. Compacts are notoriously slow to fire when you squeeze the shutter release. The GF1 is as fast as a sub-$1,000 DSLR, taking a picture as soon as you tell it to. You can capture a fleeting expression on your subject’s face, and generally trust the camera to take the photo you want. There’s even a satisfying clunk as the shutter closes and opens (unusually, the GF1 keeps the shutter open until you fire it). In short, it feels like using a film camera.
Screen vs. Viewfinder
I was planning on buying an external, optical viewfinder to go with this camera (yes, I bought the camera myself). The optional electronic finder is a fuzzy, distorted piece of junk, and I usually hate composing on-screen. But although the GF1’s LCD panel has only 460,000 pixels (many newer DSLRs have almost a million), the 60fps refresh rate makes a huge difference. You actually feel like you’re using the focusing screen on an old medium format TLR. Weirdly, I actually find it easier to frame shots than with my Nikon D700’s fantastic viewfinder.
Focus
Auto-focus on the GF1 is startlingly quick, and it has been noted by other reviewers that it is in the same class as an entry-level DSLR. This is a surprise, as the contrast-detection used by live-view cameras is a fundamentally slower technology than the phase detection of an SLR. It’s not in the class of a pro Nikon or Canon setup, but it is fast enough, and more importantly, it is not annoying.
Manual focus, too, is handled well. Either switch into MF, or just turn the lens’ wide, well-damped focus ring when you have the shutter half-pressed, and the screen displays a zoomed view. This makes focus quick and, for a camera of this kind, surprisingly intuitive.
Video
This has been pretty well-documented, so I’ll just say that with the ƒ1.7 lens, you get some sweet, shallow depth of field, and the manual focus is ideal for video. A dedicated button will start recording immediately whatever mode you are in, making it a snap to shoot a quick clip.
High ISO
One of selling points of a large-sensor camera is low noise, even at high ISOs. The GF1 runs all the way up to ISO 3200. How does it do?
Pretty well. It’s no Nikon D3S, but noise is perfectly acceptable up to ISO 1600, and even at ISO 3200 the noise is handled well. More importantly, the color saturation and tonal range manage not to fade at higher speeds.
There are two tricks that will take a night-time, ISO 3200 shot and make it look amazing. One is to convert to black and white. This nixes the the offensive colored speckles that are color noise and leaves the pleasantly grain-like luminance noise. It looks like B&W film.The other is to use Adobe’s Lightroom 3 Beta. Here’s a comparison after a conversion to black and white. On the left is the old noise-reduction algorithm, on the right is the new one. Even with this web-sized picture you can see the difference. It works this well in color, too.
The Bad
These are nitpicks on an otherwise amazing camera. First, it needs more dials. The Canon S90 has a useful dial around the lens collar, as well as a command dial at the back. The GF1 has a single, tiny dial which tends to slide under my normal-sized thumb. Also, there is no in-body image stabilization — it comes in the lens (an the 20mm doesn’t have it). Also found in the lens, inexplicably, is the accelerometer. Again, the 20mm lacks this feature and therefore the camera doesn’t auto-rotate images. And remember, this is a $1,000 device.
Last is the battery compartment. The plastic lid feels flimsy on the all-metal body, and the spring inside looks like it came from a $1 flashlight. Poor.
In all, though, this is a camera that feels most like my old Leica M6. If you think of it as a Leica lite, it is cheap. If you compare it to a Canon Rebel, it is expensive. It is also small, and a lot of fun to use. I can’t stop snapping.
And one more thing — I picked up a Micro Four Thirds-to-Nikon adapter. As soon as I get home, I’ll have my entire lens collection to try out, from Lens Baby to a 50mm ƒ1.8 (which will turn into a 100mm ƒ1.8) to an 85mm ƒ1.8, which will become a rather amazing 170mm ƒ1.8 on this camera. I am, it’s safe to say, quite excited.
Product photo: Jon Snyder
Photos: Charlie Sorrel
Top 1/30th sec, ƒ1.7, ISO 125
B&W noise comparison 1/1250th sec ƒ1.7 ISO 3200
Ahhhh the new hotness. I think I need one of these. Replace the SLR and the compact.
