Now that I’ve had the Gh3 for a week I think that I have enough of a comparison with my Gh2 to give a basic Gh3 review.
I’m going to stick to comparing the Gh3 to the Gh2 to cover the reasons for upgrading from the Gh2 – also, the Gh2 has been (in my opinion at least) the best option in a hybrid SLR-styled camera in terms of features and image quality so it stands to be a pretty solid camera to compare against.
Build Quality: The biggest change is definitely in the build quality. The Gh3 is slightly larger (it’s noticeable, but not drastic) and considerably sturdier. My biggest issue with the Gh2 was always the feeling that you might break off the screen or destroy the camera if you dropped it. I never actually had an issue with damages on the Gh2, but the build quality added an element of paranoia when carrying it around. The Gh3, on the other hand, feels solid and doesn’t leave any of those worries.
Functionality: The menu system hasn’t changed much, though I do miss the menu of recently used settings on the Gh2 (the Gh3 menu just has a setting to open the menu to the last setting that it was on). This helped with speeding up formatting sd cards because the option would always be in my recently used menu – It isn’t a major problem on the Gh3, but it does add a few more button clicks to a fairly common activity when you have to offload footage and reuse sd cards throughout the day.
The camera body has added a few more custom f buttons which makes common settings (like the q-menu, histogram, wi-fi, electronic shutter, picture style, etc.) extremely easy to change. I liked having the three custom buttons on the Gh2, but having five now on the Gh3 (you can reprogram some buttons from factory settings to whatever you want) is fantastic. There is also another dial near the shutter button to go along with the dial on the back of the camera body to give you dedicated control of the aperture and shutter (you also get a setting to change which dial controls shutter/aperture to match your shooting style). I like having a dedicated dial for each because it makes changing settings faster, but it hasn’t made a huge difference to me (most likely because I’m not fully used to it yet – I think that once I get used to it, it will make setting the exposure extremely fast). Besides those new add-ons, some buttons and switches have been moved around, but everything makes sense and makes the controls more accessible and easy to use (the Gh2 was already easy enough to use, but the setup on the Gh3 shows the polish of a closer look at what settings people need access to).
Image Quality: Image quality hasn’t changed drastically. For now, I’ll just say that the Gh3 appears to handle higher iso noise better and the compression of the all-I .mov files appear to be comparable to the better hacks on the Gh2. It seems like the Gh3 gives you the quality of a hacked Gh2 with better noise in high iso and maybe a somewhat wider dynamic range. I’m still going to be using the camera more so I’ll save my final opinion on the major differences between the Gh2 and Gh3 image quality for another post.
To sum it all up, I don’t regret buying a Gh3 when I already had a Gh2. The improvements in build quality, control accessibility, codec handling and high iso noise make it worth the cost.
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