You've seen the test videos and the first short film made with the prototype models, but now the production models of the Panasonic GH3 have been around for almost a month. Those filmmakers who decided to take the early adoption plunge have been out there kicking the GH3's figurative tires and uploading their resulting videos. Here I've picked out those videos that should answer lingering questions about moire, ISO, the wireless app, overall image quality, and how the GH3 compares to the GH2 (and popular DSLR's). I'll also chime in occasionally with my thoughts on the brief hands-on experience I had with the camera:

First up, YouTube user Griffin Hammond gives a nice overview of some of the differences between the GH2 and the GH3, and also takes a look at the GH3's features (some of which have been touched upon previously).


One thing that Griffin didn't mention that I think is a great feature on the GH3, is that when you're adjusting the focus ring on an electronic lens, the GH3 will automatically magnify the image to help you focus.

Although general overview aside, I found the limitations of the Lumix Link app that Griffin made note of to be rather disappointing. For the most part I can accept not being able to change certain camera settings while recording, but the lack of live monitoring, focus control, zoom control, and ability to stop the camera without a timer seems a bit ridiculous to me. In addition to all this, there are apparently some live monitoring lag issues with the iPad version of the app:

Now granted, some of these issues might be due to hardware limitations, but hopefully we can expect some fixes in future software updates or perhaps a hacked app from Vitaliy Kiselev or one of the users over at Personal View.

Moving on, we have a comparison of moire on the GH2 and the GH3:

In all of the shot setups it seems that the amount of moire on each camera is roughly the same. However, I should also point out that when I was playing around with a demo model I noticed rainbow moire patterns on camera bags with fine canvas-like textures, although I'm not sure if this is still an issue on production models.

Here we have some comparisons of different ISO settings on the GH3, the 5D Mark III and the 7D, as well as a real world comparison of the GH3 and the 5D Mark III:

For the most part, the GH3 holds its own with the 5D Mark III and the 7D, but in the higher ISO's the GH3 was noticeably more noisy than the Mark III and was only slightly better than the 7D.

In the real world comparison, the GH3 and the 5D Mark III seem about even quality wise, although I did notice that the GH3 had a bit more dynamic range in the shadow areas than the Mark III. Speaking of dynamic range, the next couple videos explore how the GH3 fares when shooting at night:

All in all I found that both of these videos produced results on par with Genesis; with the right amount of light and fast lenses you can get some great images at night, but with darker clothing and shadows you're still going to get crushed blacks.

Lastly, we have a couple of videos shot during the day in both urban and rural settings. Altogether I think they're good examples of the camera's color rendition, and ability to resolve detail.

What do you think of these GH3 production model test videos? And for those of you who have GH3s, what has your experience been like thus far?

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