Eduardo Angel Visuals

Shooting with the new Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH3. My field report and impressions.

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Pana­sonic is one of the largest con­sumer elec­tron­ics com­pa­nies, and the GH3 is the third gen­er­a­tion of their very suc­cess­ful Micro Fourth Thirds DSLM (Dig­i­tal Sin­gle Lens Mir­ror­less) system. For a while I have been aware of the low-budget-filmmaking community’s devo­tion to the hacked DMC-GH2 and its ALL-I codec. I saw the DMC-GH3 at Pho­tok­ina last year, but I had never before shot a sin­gle frame with a Pana­sonic cam­era. The bod­ies that I was given were run­ning Firmware v0.5, and no instruc­tion man­u­als were pro­vided. Add to this a nine-hour time zone dif­fer­ence and jet lag, and you can begin to imag­ine my pain.

THIS ARTICLE While I’ll be using some geeky terms, this is not an in-depth tech­ni­cal review, nor a sci­en­tific analy­sis of the GH3. You can dig into tech specs and MTF charts some­where else. My goal is sim­ply to share my hon­est and inde­pen­dent impres­sions, go over the things I liked and didn’t like, and com­mu­ni­cate my wish list for future fea­tures. I want to empha­size that all the con­clu­sions in this arti­cle are sub­jec­tive and strictly based on my own per­sonal experience.

“I have to warn you, I’ve heard rela­tion­ships based on intense expe­ri­ences never work.” –Keanu Reeves in “Speed”

I have to respect­fully dis­agree with Keanu on this one. Much to my sur­prise, the cam­era was much more intu­itive than Sony’s NEX sys­tem, and sev­eral video fea­tures got my full atten­tion right away.

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FEATURES • Full HD 1920x1080 60p/50p (NTSC/PAL) with 30p/25p/24p options. • Ultra-high bit rate video recorded at 72 Mbps (ALL-I) or 50 Mbps (IPB). • Capa­ble of record­ing con­tin­u­ously for an unlim­ited time for NTSC and 29 min 59 sec for PAL. • Native sup­port for MOV (h.264), MP4, and AVCHD for­mats. • Time Code sup­port in the MOV and AVCHD for­mats. • Extremely fast and accu­rate contrast-detection Aut­o­fo­cus. • A 3.5mm mic input AND a head­phone jack AND the option to man­u­ally adjust the sound record­ing lev­els via touch­screen con­trols. • Full-time AF, AF Track­ing, and Face Recog­ni­tion AF are avail­able for VIDEO. The Touch AF mim­ics rack focusing.