Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH3 review

The Panasonic GH3 is the company’s latest flagship Micro Four Thirds camera, and it’s much more than a revamped Panasonic GH2. With its larger, weather-sealed magnesium alloy body, vast array of buttons and dials, optional battery grip, PC sync socket for triggering external flashes and four-figure body-only price, it’s aimed at a more demanding user than any compact system camera (CSC) that has gone before it.

Buy it with the new 12-35mm f/2.8 weather-sealed lens and it will set you back £1,995 including VAT. That’s more than the magnificent Nikon D600 costs with its kit lens. Is the GH3, with a sensor that’s just a quarter the size (by surface area), really able to compete?

HANDLING

The answer is an emphatic yes. The GH3 looks, feels and behaves like a professional camera. It doesn’t have the same low-light capabilities, but it has its own strengths that make it an extremely compelling alternative to the D600.

The taller body and more substantial handgrip compared to the GH2 are big boosts to ergonomics, and it includes many more physical controls. There are dedicated buttons for white balance, ISO speed, exposure compensation, AE Lock, five customisable Fn buttons, dual command dials and a rear wheel.

The dual dials are used in tandem to good effect. Direct access to shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation (depending on the exposure mode) is the most obvious example, but we also appreciated being able to adjust the manual ISO speed and the Auto ISO range via the dual dials. The sculpted shape on the rear of the camera makes it a little tricky to perform full revolutions on the rear wheel, though. We accidentally popped the card slot door a few times, but these are our only complaints regarding ergonomics.

The 1.7-million dot electronic viewfinder is only a little smaller than the D600’s full-frame optical viewfinder, and being electronic, it can overlay lots of useful information. Meanwhile, the 3in screen offers significant advantages over the D600’s, being both articulated and touch-sensitive. The menus benefit from touch operation, and it’s extremely useful for moving the autofocus point.

Autofocus is spectacularly quick for a contrast-detect system. It delivered 4fps shooting with continuous autofocus, increasing to 5.6fps with fixed focus. When saving JPEGs to a fast SDHC card, it kept these speeds going until the card was full. The only caveat is that noise reduction at ISO 3200 and higher sensitivities is more processor-intensive, so continuous shooting slowed to 2.2fps after 32 frames. Raw shooting slowed to 1.9fps after 23 frames, regardless of the ISO speed. With just 0.4 seconds between shots in normal use, performance is comfortably a match for the D600. It was faster in a few areas, such as when it let us carry on shooting while the camera merged HDR shots in the background.

WI-FI AND APPS

Wi-Fi is built in, and it’s the most sophisticated implementation we’ve seen to date. The camera creates an encrypted network for an iOS or Android device to join, whereupon the free Lumix Link app becomes a comprehensive remote control for the camera. The app’s Live Control tab receives a VGA live view feed, which can be touched to move the autofocus point. It’s suspended while the camera is recording video, though, dashing our hopes to use an iPad as a remote monitor. There’s control over everything from exposure and white balance settings to autofocus mode, aspect ratio and video codec, although they could be quicker to access.

Here’s the Android app on a smartphone …

… and the iOS app running on an iPad

The Playback tab shows thumbnails or full-screen previews, and photos can be transferred to the phone or tablet at various resolutions. A Location Log tab uses the phone or tablet’s GPS facilities to geotag photos, but we weren’t able to get this to work. Browsing photos on an HTC phone didn’t work either, but both the Android and iOS apps worked faultlessly in Live Control mode. We’re yet to see any camera’s Wi-Fi functions work exactly as advertised, but this one shows more promise than most.

VIDEO

The best thing about the GH2 was its video mode. It delivered sharper 1080p footage with less moiré interference than Canon and Nikon’s SLRs, along with low image noise, a choice of automatic, priority and manual exposure modes and silky smooth autofocus, amply assisted by the touchscreen autofocus control. An unofficial hack gave bit rates to up to 176Mbit/s for immaculate picture quality in fast-moving scenes where lower bit rates would lead to compression artefacts. With this rare combination of talents, the GH2 has gained a cult status among independent filmmakers.

The GH3 is even better, and without having to resort to hacks. 1080p shooting at 50fps has been added to the GH2’s 24p, 25p and 50i options. It can record in slow or fast motion – from 40% to 300% – with playback at 24fps. It can shoot in AVCHD format at 24Mbit/s, but it’s also possible to record 24p, 25p and 50p QuickTime AVC clips at 50Mbit/s.

Last but not least, 1080-24p, 1080-25p and 720-50p are available at 72Mbit/s using an all-intra codec. This means each frame is described from scratch rather than by updating the previous frame, as the other codecs do, so even the most frenetic scenes are captured with no perceptible compression artefacts, to our eyes at least. We also found that the QuickTime modes delivered even sharper details than the AVCHD modes. The resulting files are enormous, but the camera can span multiple 4GB files for uninterrupted recording for up to 30 minutes.

Audio artefacts can be just as big a problem, but the GH3 avoids this with lenses that autofocus silently and the ability to adjust exposure settings via the touchscreen. Changing the ISO or shutter speed caused visible jumps in the exposure, but aperture changes were smooth. There are 3.5in microphone and headphone sockets, plus audio metering and the ability to adjust the volume while recording. The lack of a mains power input is a concern for long video shoots, though. We’d have also liked something akin to Sony’s focus peaking mode, which highlights areas of sharp focus and is extremely useful for focusing manually while recording. Still, we were able to focus reasonably confidently using the viewfinder.

We’ve been using the first-generation Panasonic GH1 for the last three years, hacked for high bit rates, and we’ve yet to see a camera that surpasses it for video quality – until now. The GH1 held its own for details and noise, matching the GH3’s AVCHD mode but not quite keeping up with its QuickTime mode. However, the GH3 was in a different league in its ability to pick out subtle textures, particularly in darker areas of the frame. It also exhibited a more flattering colour palette, with stronger contrast without resulting in clipping and none of the banding that the GH1 and various other Lumix G cameras have exhibited in skin tones.

The Nikon D600’s videos matched the GH3 for shadow definition and flattering colours, but its details weren’t quite as crisp and moiré interference was a problem. It also lacks smooth autofocus, priority exposure modes and aperture control while recording – the GH3 is the clear victor here.

STILL IMAGES

Fine details are rendered with impressive precision

Photo quality has come on a long way since the GH1 and GH2, too. Noise levels are significantly lower, with ISO 3200 giving print-worthy results. It can’t match the noise levels of the full-frame D600, but it’s roughly on a par with the best APS-C SLRs and CSCs, such as the Nikon D7000 and Sony NEX-6. The same improvements to colours that we saw in videos were apparent for JPEGs too, with lifelike skin tones and superb handling of high-contrast scenes. Details were razor-sharp, and subtle textures were handled superbly.

The new 12-35mm lens is seriously expensive for a kit lens but it’s incredibly sharp right into the corners of frames

There’s very little evidence of noise at ISO 1250

There’s no question that the GH3 has the best video mode of any CSC or SLR we’ve seen, not just in terms of picture quality but also for features and operation. The GH2 was more limited as a stills camera, but the GH3 brings considerable improvements here. It can’t quite compete with the Nikon D600 but it comes surprisingly close, and it’s a match for the best cropped-sensor cameras such as the Nikon D7000.

…and JPEG quality is still excellent at ISO 2500

By ISO 6400, noise is taking a heavy toll

We loved using the 12-35mm kit lens, but if that’s a budget buster, the 14-140mm lens is an excellent alternative with a darker aperture but a bigger zoom range. Expect to pay around £1,500 for that kit. With a wide array of excellent Micro Four Thirds lenses available, the GH3 is ready and able to compete in the major league.