daring

Nice summary Trunk, will be helpful for sure. I picked up a GX1 a few months ago to experiment with and have been pretty pleased with it and the Panasonic 14mm pancake lens. Very lightweight compared to the Canon 30D/10-22mm I was using on occasion. Not quite the same quality, but good enough. I really like the 4:3 aspect ratio, but that's personal preference. A few observations in the dozen or so dives I've done with it... 1. The remote shutter needs an adapter to work with standard switches, but not very difficult to make. I built one from a connector I bought at Radio Shack, a couple of resistors, and a 2.5mm right angle plug I ordered online. 2. The Custom modes on the dial is nice, it can be programmed with most camera settings you need for skydiving, such as manual mode settings, disable touch screen, JPG format, etc. Except for the manual focus point, that needs to be set every time you let the camera auto-focus. Pretty easy though, especially with the zoom feature, and it will remain in place after power off. All the lenses (that I have) are electronically focused, so moving the zoom ring with the power off doesn't affect it. There's no reason the manual focus point could not be part of the custom settings, but not something they figured people would use I guess. 3. FPS is a bit low, but perfectly fine for me. With my SD card (class 10 Sandisk Extreme) I get about 5 seconds at full rate, then about 2 fps after. I clears the buffer pretty fast though, so it's nearly always ready for full-burst shooting. I should note it does have a 20fps shutterless burst mode, but quality is poor. I would be tempted to try the Olympus PEN models if you need a faster fps. 4. It has an auto-ISO feature in all modes EXCEPT in manual mode. Which sucks, because it'd be nice to lock the shutter and aperture and have it auto-ISO the exposure. As it is now, I guess at a decent ISO depending on light conditions so that my aperture remains high enough for a decent DOF. I hear the Olympus PEN models have this feature though. Since it's just a firmware issue, I contacted Panasonic and actually got a reply saying they forwarded it to their R&D department, who knows... 5. Good ISO performance, at least as good as my 30D I'd wager, even though it's a smaller sensor (2x crop factor instead of 1.6x). I have no issues using 1600 or 3200 if need be. 6. Did I mention it's small and light? I don't even notice it on my head until I smack it on the ceiling or door of the plane. D'oh! 7. The SD card slot is on the bottom of the camera, so removing the card is a pain. Not really an issue for me, but a working stiff might be a bit frustrated. Overall I'm pretty pleased with the results. It's not quite in the same league as my 30D, but the more I've used it the more content I am with the new format. The smaller size is priceless, though it's not really much cheaper than a standard Canon Rebel setup. I was a bit bummed at there being no inexpensive options for super-wide angle, but you can pick up the excellent Panasonic 14mm from Ebay for a good price and slap a Panasonic DMW-GWC1 wide-angle converter on it to get to 12mm (24mm equivalent) without adding much extra weight. The attached pic was with the wide-angle attached. ISO160, 1/640s @ f5.6. -dg

That's just his jumpsuit design, the pattern is folded over and it looks funny from that angle. No tricks I swear!

After googling a bit I found this link: http://www.jesseshunting.com/index.php?request=brian-s100-digital-mod I might try this on my SD200. I had the case off once but was afraid to go much farther because I was scared I wouldn't be able to get it back together correctly, but this article has renewed my courage.

XVID is a very nice open source MPEG4 codec. It's become the defacto standard for ripping DVDs and recording TV shows for distribution on the net since it doesn't require a paid license to use. Even my standalone DVD player supports it, which is really nice for downloading and watching TV shows I missed. Being that it's open source and primarily developed on Linux, it's probably not as easy to use as some Windows and Mac users are used to. But do a search for a toolset called Gordian Knot, I think it includes everything necessary to encode video and audio in XVID and MP3 formats.

The 1D has always had a 1.3 multiplier. The extra speed and buffer are really nice, but it's probably going to be a big heavy camera, built like a tank. Not something I'd want to strap to my head anytime soon, but I'm sure there are those who will.

Newer Sabres have a larger slider which I think accounts for most of the hard openings. I jumped a newer 230 for a while and had very soft openings without rolling the nose, but then downsized to a 1991 170 which gave me inconsisently hard openings. Sometimes it would be ok, and sometimes pretty hard, but never as soft as the 230 was. I recently broke a line on a particularly hard opening and borrowed a friend's 1995 Sabre 170. All 8 of the jumps I've put on it have been very nice, snivelly openings (using my pilot chute, d-bag, and the same packing technique). I finally pulled out a tape measure and found out the 1995 slider was 2" wider than mine. For the curious, to measure the slider you need to fold it in half, pull it tight, and measure along the fold since it's dome shaped (do this both width and lengthwise). All I know is the 170 slider is supposed to be 23" x 31", but you can email PD for the other sizes. Packing is a huge factor for soft openings, but having the right sized slider helps a lot.