Frank, I seriously doubt that the mechanical shutter is the source of your woes. I just took six shots with my G7, tripod mounted, stabilization off at speeds of 1/20, 1/125, 1/400. Each speed was with the mechanical shutter and the electronic shutter. If I had not written which shutter was used into the keywords, you would never be able to tell the images apart, even at 300% viewing.
It may be that Olympus has a real problem with shutter shock and it may be that you can see some shutter shock in Panasonic cameras using test gear more sophisticated than what I can create on a bench and tripod, but in actual photographs, there is no difference. Put your camera on a tripod and run a series of test to prove it to yourself.
As for the noise and image quality problems you are having. Use the attached image as a reference. This is a shot taken with the GH2 in 16:9 framing at ISO160, f6.3, 1/250, hand held, OIS on. This had already been converted to black and white but is still a .dng file. The attached image is a scan of a printed crop from a 20 x 10 print. This is my procedure for creating this:
- Import the file into Ps and resize to print size (20 x 10) at 360dpi.
- Apply an output sharpening action based on Jeff Schewe’s process described in his book, The Digital Print, page 123.
- Apply a custom color curve required to print UT-14, black only ink, on glossy paper. (This is not required for color prints or matte paper.)
- Printed on an Epson 1400 with the high speed box unchecked.
- The print is a 5.5” x 8.5” cut out of the full 20 x 10 image using the Ps settings to take a section of the full image and to not scale it.
- The scan of the print was created at 600dpi so it will be much larger than the print when viewed at 100%.
The scan attached has considerably higher contrast than the actual print and I think it has lost some sharpness, especially in the distant buildings, compared to the print. Since the scan is at 600dpi it should be viewed at 16% (on a 96dpi screen) to get the most realistic sense of what the print looks like.
I do not think there is any noise in the print, let alone too much. As for clarity, it is sharp even if you pixel peep it. If you can’t get your images to this level of IQ, I suspect there is something else wrong in your process. If you are getting images this good but are still unsatisfied, then I think you will need to trade in your GX7 for a full frame camera.