The Panasonic Lumix DMC-L1 brings to treasure the company's pledge power April 2005 that solid would get going a digital SLR beneath its secure branding, akin with Olympus' Four Thirds lens make active standard. The L1 looks to produce quite an interesting SLR at that, with a traditional - perhaps retro - styling aesthetic. It is based around the same 7.5 effective megapixel Live MOS image sensor that debuted in Olympus' EVOLT E-330 digital SLR, along with the mirror box unit from that camera (which combines a quick-return mirror, viewfinder, and AE sensor). Panasonic's proprietary Venus Engine III LSI handles the image processing, and Olympus' Supersonic Wave Filter makes its first debut in a non-Olympus branded camera.

The Lumix L1 has a shutter impact dial on the peak of the body, month a simultaneously announced Leica 14-50mm lens offers rings to govern aperture, locus besides lens zoom. As with the EVOLT E-330, the L1 offers a Live View vocation that allows images to serve framed using the LCD display, regardless of whether you're focusing automatically or manually. In addition, you encumbrance blessing the LCD display as a handy confirmation of focus via an enlarged view when focusing manually. The L1 offers a 2.5" LCD display with 207,000 pixels, at the high end of what's available on digital SLRs at the current time. One other feature worthy of note is that the Panasonic DMC-L1 offers a Secure Digital card slot, and is compatible with the FAT32 file system - meaning that Secure Digital cards larger than 2GB are supported.