What is the 'iA' in the GX1 for?

There's this really cool 'iA' button - Intelligent Auto that automatically detects what kind of picture you wanna take and adjusts its settings.

Once you set the iA button, you'll see this interface on the touchscreen:

You see the line in the middle?  It's kinda cool cause it helps you to level your angle and will turn green when it's levelled.

The highlighted icon on the right is called the 'Defocus Control Function'.  When triggered, the bar at the bottom of the screen will appear for you to adjust the depth of field.  To the left - subject clear, background blur.  To the right - both subject and background clear.  But if you're shooting in a low light setting, then the entire photo will become dark as you will see later on.

To be really honest with you.  The picture quality is ah-may-zing.  Seriously.  If you're holding a compact point-and-shoot camera right now.  Burn it.  Sorry... I mean recycle it.  I'm not sure if the high-spec GX1 is really what you need but Lumix has other G-series variants.  But whichever model, seriously forget about compact cameras.  When the Babyboomer generation fades off, the entire category will become obsolete and taken over by camera phones.  So anyway, back to our photo-taking rendezvous.  So I've taken a variation of photos using the 'Defocus Control Function' with the 14mm F2.5 pancake lens (what it really means is, it's the flattest one, no zoom, good for portrait shots to create depth of field - yeaaaaap.  That's all you need to know).

Sample introductory no-brainer, point-and-shoot shot.  Nice depth ;) am liking it already!

So this is when I adjusted the different settings on the 'Defocus Control Function'.  So what you get under low light, is not cool.  Photo is underexposed and flat.  Yucks.

And I adjusted it to a mid-level, so what you get is 'half' cool.  Yup, we're getting there.

And once you set it all the way to the left, you get a really nice focal point and everything blurs out of your vision.  Your photo immediately becomes a composition :) Now we're cool.

See, again, Mao is dark and uninteresting.  Everything in the photo is flat and asking for non-attention.  This is not cool.

And then, Mao becomes the focal point and everything is blurred.  This pancake lense (without zoom) is really good for portrait shots.  You just have to zoom manually, which means using your own arms and legs to move forward and backward.  Don't look at me that way, I'm not joking.

This is cool.

This is not cool.

This is cool.

Then we change the focal point to a midway object.  Still works :) This is cool.

Paris is cool :)

What I found amazing about using a 'system/mirrorless' camera is, the photos above were taken simply with no particular thought about 'settings'.  They were not edited (whether in-camera or in photoshop).  What you see here is what you get.  I'm liking it already :)

If there're any tricks about the GX1, you wanna share, please feel free to comment.  I'm learning!