Hey @Collinlandry, the 5dMk3 is not a 26 megapixel camera. Other than that, cool review...

This shootout is a good thing and is an early part of the process to get the maximum image quality out of the GH3. I love my GH2 and use Apocalypse Now Boom. The amount of work and collaboration, by many on personal-view, done on the GH2 to get to the point where Apoc Now Boom was introduced, is quite a lot, and occurred over much time. My point is...it will take some time until we see both 1) the best possible quality from the GH3, plus 2) the variety of looks possible on the GH3. So while it's always good to make assessments (for and against), it's also good to give all the testers, and all of us here on personal-view, the necessary time and patience for the mastery of the GH3 to come to fruition.

My guess is that the people who are testing the GH3 are doing so because they have a feeling that this camera has some serious potential once it's been fully understood, fully tested, when Vitaliy hacks it, and when Driftwood and the gang start adding settings. I'm real curious to see what happens six months down the road. Maybe we'll have a cam doing some kick-ass imaging and maybe the price will drop to $999, which could mean the GH3 could end up being a real powerful tool.

Thanks @shian and @collierlandry for doing this test, and thanks all for weighing in with opinions. Happy New Year - Rock on

i have a GH1 a GH2 and a GH3. so which one do i take out as my 'main axe?' so far it's the GH3. the quality of the footage does seem to vary quite a bit with the settings. like many, i have opted for lowering the sharpness, contrast, and saturation settings. however, i can't say i agree with the idea that noise reduction should be dialed-down. my latest tests are Natural -3, -4, -3, 0. i have had good results from tests outside in late afternoon when the sun is going down and everything is blue shooting ISO400 with the mov container both at 50mbits 30P and at 24P all-I. lowering noise reduction seems to quickly smash the all-i codec, but at 0 it looks good at 24P. i think the GH3 is an improvement over the GH2, in the build, design and features.

Oh yeah... Just hailed here really hard. I had NO worries about running around in it knowing the Gh3 is weather sealed. Forgot the weather sealing!!!!

We'll I was just playing around with the Gh2 and 3 doing the old spaghetti strainer test. I used the Flowmotion v2 on Gh2 and it failed on me twice before getting 20 secs of footage.

The ONLY thing the Gh2 has over the Gh3 is less moire. That's it. But like I said, it took me three times to record 20 secs of footage on the Gh2 even with the more reliable Flowmotion.

Were the Gh3 wins (too me) is the increased DR, the body build and monitors, more options to set up color profiles, 3 codecs, 1080/60p. How that is not an upgrade is beyond me.

Perhaps it's just me, but I can't understand some of the comments from the negative side about the image of the GH3. I can understand complaints about the EVF and LCD or some other physical issue, but from all the videos we've seen comparing the 2 cameras it's obvious that the 2 cameras are very close in terms of quality and so how can one be so bad that it's "no competition" for the other? Just seems strange to me.

One thing I do believe is a plus is the sheer amount of options we have now. You can record AVCHD, .MOV, ALL-I, IPB with different bit rates. You can make greater overall adjustments. We have 1080/60p. I mean the improvements seem to go on and on if you judge the entire camera. All of this is just the beginning of the GH3 life cycle. It seems the more users are learning the GH3 the images are getting better. It's still early in the game.

50M tests coming in part 4 which is redemption time for GH3 and 5D.

@shian Yeah buddy, redemption couldn't have come a moment too soon!

@Butt, I came to that thought based on the fact that all your gh3 post are in response to another users post or video, I have not seen one video, or post where you mention your own experience with the GH3, your only relevant post state your opinion that the GH2 is better than the GH3... never mentioning why you believe so, never providing any support for your opinion other than... GH2 better for video... 3 weeks and no test footage, that Ive seen.

I am amazed by all the people raving about the GH3. The current release isn't at all what I hoped for. The firmware is buggy, there are many issues (cadence, noise, artifacts, some crashes), the All-I is crappy and noisy, there is more visual unpleasant noise in the footage and quality issues with the OLED screen.

Not too say that it is a bad camera, but I think the GH2 has a more pleasant and cinematic image quality. The green cast of the GH2 has been replaced by a nice magenta cast of the Sony sensor. Still image quality wise, the JPEG quality is behind the OMD-5 and the RAW quality is about the same (but a big improvement over the GH2). That is pretty disappointing if you take into account that Panasonic had a year to improve upon Olympus' work. Look at Nikon to see what you can do with a Sony sensor if you know what you are doing. Nikon smokes Sony's with Nikon image processing on output from the same sensor.

Down the line, the GH3 will improve and with a hack there is huge potential but right now, I don't see many good reasons to upgrade a hacked GH2 to a GH3, especially with regards to the price of both camera's. I have a strong feeling that most people want to justify their camera purchase but judging from the sample footage I have seen and my own experiments, the GH3 doesn't live up to the hype that Panasonic created. It is amazing though to see what a 1.100 EURO camera can do nowadays.

I will wait for a 1.1. firmware or a hack and have returned my camera for now.

@jimagine: that was beautiful!

@Butt - you do not have the GH3 right? How can "you" measure, and compare the competition between the two camera's without owning/using the GH3. This camera is still very new and only a small amount of people actually have the camera, early firmware, and no hack... yet you keep spewing your obvious opinion that almost seems as to be some sorta masked jealousy or something.

@Conundrum @From_Paris at present can / should we hope for a hack by Vitaliy - the GH3 is at present no competition for the GH2 "Hack Vitaliy"