path: root/wired/old/m1review.txt

The Chinese company YI has jumped into the mirrorless camera game with a new Micro Four Thirds camera dubbed the M1. It's not every day that a brand new camera maker comes out of the woodwork, and indeed this isn't YI's first camera -- the company makes an "action" camera which is, by most accounts, quite impressive -- but it is the first brand new entrant in the Micro Four Thirds game in some time.

If you've ever wondered what would happen if you took the camera interface of your average cellphone and bolted it onto a Leica-inspired compact Micro Four Thirds body, well, the M1 is here with the answer. The M1's design owes a debt to the Leica T. The compact body with flush dials, minimal buttons and even a distinctive red logo mark all recall the Leica T, along with some of Panasonic's Leica partnered efforts. With a sticker price of only $700 though, the M1 is definitely not a Leica T. 

The M1 sports an almost entirely touchscreen UI. There's a mode dial and a control dial for setting shutter and aperture (depending on which mode you're in) and just two buttons on the back, one for playback and one for AF selection. There's a hotshoe, but the package I was sent did not include a flash of any kind.

Holding the M1 is comfortable, it's a lightweight, mostly plastic camera that feels more like a point and shoot than anything. For comparison's sake it's about one half of an inch narrower and shorter than the Panasonic GX 85 I tested last month. The shutter button is well placed and easy enough to find by feel, not that you'll have the M1 held to your eye, but just picking up the camera puts your fingers where you want them, something a surprising number of compact cameras get wrong. There's a dedicated video button in the center of the mode dial that's somewhat less easy to find by feel.

The control dial is similarly well placed, just under where my thumb rested while holding the M1. I primarily shoot in aperture priority mode and had no trouble with the control dial. The mode dial also manages to find the sweet spot between "easy to turn" and "doesn't accidentally turn in your bag". Aside from the playback button and AF select button that's it for the physical interface of the M1.

The rest of what you'll want to control in the M1 will be done through the touch interface. The menu is simple enough and follows touch UI conventions with swipe gestures as well as tab buttons supported. The interface works quite well and is responsive enough, though it's nowhere near as fast as the UI of a phone. I bring this up mainly because the target market here seems to be cellphone users who want to move up to a "real" camera. The UI won't be a problem for anyone who's well versed in mobile device photography, but the experience is somewhat slower. 

The lack of physical buttons means that you'll need to dive into the menus quite a bit, which can make it tricky to get the settings you want quickly. This will depend somewhat on how you shoot, but for me the biggest annoyance was no quick access to ISO settings. On the other hand, if you were upgrading from a cellphone camera and just stuck with auto for most things you won't likely be hindered by any lag in the UI.

The UI itself is simple to use. There are three tap-target circles on the left edge of the screen in shooting mode. They are, from top to bottom, aperture, shutter speed, and EV compensation. To adjust them you can just select by tapping and use the control dial. Alternately you can tap on them and adjust via the touch screen though this takes much longer.

Changing the metering mode, adjusting white balance, ISO or other setting mean going deeper into the UI with a swipe the right. This will bring up three screens worth of settings and adjustments. Swiping the main screen to the left bring up some different output settings, like vivid, high contrast black and white among others. 

Overall I would put the M1's UI at about average for the field. It is an almost entirely touchscreen base, which while not completely original, but is not common in Micro Four Thirds either. As with any new camera spending some time learning the quirks of the UI will pay off down the road.

One place the M1 shines is that the $700 base price gets you not one, but two kit lenses. One is a macro-capable 42.5mm f1.8 prime lens (85mm equivalent for 35mm). The other is a 12-40 f3.5-f5.6 zoom (24-80mm 35mm equivalent). They are both lightweight, plastic lenses with about the build quality you'd expect at this price, which is to say they didn't fall apart, but they're a long way from solid. 

Optically the zoom is predictably soft at the edges until you get above F8. The prime is much sharper and makes a decent portrait lens. Unfortunately the manual focus wheel is just for looks. This makes the macro feature next to useless on what would otherwise be a pretty decent "macro capable" prime lens.

The other reason the lack of manual focus is disappointment is that autofocus is not the M1's strong suit. Focusing is slow, and not just in low light. The M1 takes a noticeable amount of time to lock onto static targets and if anything is moving, forget it. You might think that switching to continuous AF would help, but alas, it does not. Combine C-AF with burst mode and you'll get some hilariously bad results. I tried to shoot this way while my kids were flying a kite at the park and found that the M1 was never actually able to refocus after the first shot, to say nothing of tracking. Suffice to say that if shooting fast moving subjects, and possibly moving subjects at all, is a requirement, then this is not the camera for you. It would be possible to overcome this a bit by going old school with a manual focus lens and small aperture, but if that's how you shoot you probably aren't in the target market for the M1 in the first place.

The M1 uses a 20MP Sony sensor that produces either JPEG or DNG RAW files (but not both at the same time). The image quality of both the RAW and JPG files is quite good. I found the color rendition of the JPGs to be a bit washed out, but the RAW files had decent dynamic range and you can easily pull out an extra two stops of detail in the shadows before the noise gets too bad. Speaking of noise, the M1 will shoot up to ISO 25600, though in my testing anything over 6400 was largely unusable (very noise in RAW and a blurry mush in the camera-corrected JPGs).

The M1 is capable of quality video at 30fps, which is an impressive spec for a $700 camera with two lenses. Unfortunately to shoot in 4k it does some serious cropping, which means wide angle shots are largely impossible. There's also no external mic jack, and, as with stills, AF speed is an issue. 

Should you pick up the M1? Probably not. It's a decent first release, but there are other options in this price range that are considerably more capable. Both the Olympus PEN E-PL7 and Panasonic GX85 are only $100 more than the M1 and can run circles around in it nearly every category. If you really want to step up, the APS-C based Sony alpha 5000 is currently available with kit lens for roughly the same as the M1. It's not that the M1 is incapable, in fact I look forward to seeing what YI comes up with in future releases, just that in its current incarnation it's not a good value for the money.