Hands On: Panasonic Lumix G3 review

As with the G2, the G3 has an excellent 460k dot touchscreen display. We found that this was bright enough to use to compose shots on a brightly lit day, although there’s also a viewfinder if you’d rather use this.

The touchscreen lets you quickly access some controls and menu, plus you can use it to select the focus area and even release the shutter. Our one complaint here is that while it’s easy to use the screen to select a single focus point, there’s no way to return the focus point back to the centre of the image. It works quite well, but the more we used the camera the less we used the touchscreen, opting for the well-laid-out dedicated control buttons on the rear.

Panasonic has updated the video mode, so that the G3 will shoot 1080i video, where as the G2 could only shoot 720p. Continuous auto-focus makes sure that the image stays in focus and Dolby Stereo sound processing is designed to make most of the soundtrack. There’s built-in wind reduction for the microphone, too, but stuck in the middle of the Thames with a fast wind blowing towards us, the soundtrack was all wind noise.

Quality of the video is good, but the image starts to loose detail the further away from the camera you get. In our shot of the Houses of Parliament, the brick work loses quite a lot of detail and becomes a bit blurred. From our initial inspection, the video mode isn’t as good as on a high-end DSLR, such as the Nikon D7000. However, as this is pre-release firmware the final version is likely to differ.

We were unable to do any proper low-light shooting with our review model, but the quick tests we did inside showed that the Auto ISO mode was picking a wide range of sensitivities; the G2, we found, tended to stick to ISO settings of 400 or less. We’ll reserve judgement on the quality of shots at high ISO sensitivities until we’ve got a full review sample.

In our short testing, Panasonic seems to have addressed a lot of the issues that we had with the G2, while keeping the best points about that camera. The G3 should be on sale mid-June, with the body-only version costing £550 and the kit with the 14-42mm lens for £629. It will be available in Black, White and Red in the UK. We’ll bring you a full review once final samples are available.