The Panasonic DMC-GF1 is surely targeting the highly popular Olympus E-P1. Both cameras are similar in terms of both size and weight. While they use slightly different Panasonic N-MOS image sensors, both have a 4:3 aspect ratio and offer effective resolutions of around 12 Megapixels. Both cameras comes with 3.0-inch LCD while the GF1 has double the resolution at 460,000 dots. One of the features of the GF1 is its external electronic viewfinder that can be mounted on the hot shoe with the ability to tilt upwards 90 degrees. The DMC-GF1 also supplements its aforementioned hot shoe with a built-in popup flash, something that's absent from Olympus E-P1 camera. Both cameras offer burst shooting at roughly three frames per second, but the GF1's contrast detection autofocus is both faster than that from the E-P1, and offers 23 focusing areas, instead of the E-P1's 11-area AF. The GF1 can support a maximum ISO sensitivity of ISO 3,200, uses 144-zone metering.

The rest of the standard featuers like storage, power source and connectivity, both cameras are quite similar between the two camera, featuring an SD / SDHC card slot, lithium ion rechargeable battery, and the support of HDMI high-def, NTSC/PAL standard-def and USB 2.0 High Speed connections. The Panasonic GF1 also offers the choice of both AVCHD Lite or MotionJPEG compression for its 720p high-def movies, where the Olympus E-P1's 720p movie mode offers only Motion JPEG compression.