I wonder; is the level of price gh2 after gh3?

@danyyyel I agree, if that is their workflow they are mistaken. Poor sound and poor lighting is a recipe for disaster.

The GH3 will be a great camera. But as a colorist I was really bummed having worked with the BMD raw footage, to have to go back to the limitations of the GH2 footage. It just made me wish for a flatter image with more color depth out of my GH2 which I love. Or at least the option to have something similar in the GH3.

For me the threshold is 12 stop of DR. At this level, you can do a lot of things and you should question your ability as a photographer/cinematographer if you can't use it well. That is know where to place your actors pertaining to the sun/source of light, back lighting, contrast range from inside to outside like open windows a la zacuto test etc.

At 14 stop, you have excellence, I would call it human vision. Think about how you see the world, where you nearly don't care about exposure, where there is detail nearly everywhere, from the shadow to the highlight. There might be some clipping but it is with a very gentle roll-off and once you try to put everything inside it gets a bit the HDR fake look.

This is from my experience with the 12 stop rated Nikon D300/D700 and the 14.5 stop D800.

@danyyyel Even though it's rated at 11.4 stop, I don't find that it is 'usable' in those stops. Personally I find usable detail in the AVCHD GH2 to be around the 8 stop mark, and if I want a superior image I need that to be within a 6-7 stop window. RAW for stills is much better.

From what I've seen from BMC, it looks like it's able to compact a lot of it's usable DR into the ProRes codec, which is really great.

My first point was about the gh2 as being generally poor in DR. That is only in case of jpeg. What the dxomark result tells us that it is only half a stop lower than the Canon 5d mark3. The problem is that Panasonic profile crushes part of that DR before outputting it video. So it is not farfetched to think that after 2 years of research and development they could increase the DR by at least half a stop to reach 5dmark3 and 1 to 1.5 stop to be more in the Sony exmor type of camera. More so that they did not increase the megapixel. So should they decide to put some flat log profile that would preserve a lot of the DR and we would get a very good DR video camera.

In the case of DXOmark the usable DR applies to every camera. So if you think the gh2 usable DR is lower for the gh2, then it will be the same in the same measure for the other camera. If someone think that the usable DR of the gh2 is 1 or 2 stop lower, then it will be the same case for 5d3 or D800. They have a methodological system in place to calculate clipping point, noise level at a normalise size of 8 megapixel.

For me the concept of usable DR is a a bit absurd. The concept is that you should be able to boost the shadows or bring the highlight to unnatural level. When I shoot a scene, I don't expect the deepest shadows to come to middle gray. I mean if there is an actor there and I want to see him, either I light him or try decrease the highlight level so that I can with exposure put the shadows higher.

So we got another rumour confirming the same specs:

http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3292505/panasonic-gh3-micro-four-thirds-spec-sheet-leaked

given that here we all have a shirt written "prisoners of one faith" just look at comments of the average Joe out there...

@LongJohnSilver

It is not another rumor, it is plain C&P.

It says the GH3 screen is OLED tho not LCD, which is a large step up an is still 200line's more rez then GH2 screen.

@danyyyel

Some people are claiming that based on the DXO results the DR of the GH2 is not as bad as it sounds. However, looking at the Dpreview results you can clearly see that the GH2 is actually the worst camera they have ever tested for Dynamic Range.

Now it is only about a stop behind the best cameras in DR without any DR expansion applied. However, once those other cameras apply their DR tools then they really start to pull away by many stops. This is because Dpreview could not get the IDynamic feature of the GH2 to trigger with their setup.

It is very hard to get IDynamic to work. However, it might close that gap a little if you get it to engage.

All I hope for is that the GH3 can at least beat the likes of the fixed lens compact cameras like the Sony RX-100 and the Canon S100. If it can equal the OMD then I will be satisfied. I do hope they fix the I.Dynamic mode as well. You should be able to turn it on or off in different levels or have it on Auto instead of it turning itself on or off all the time.

Play with the comparison tool in the link below and you will see how bad the GH2 is for DR especially once you factor in the other cameras DR modes that actually work most of the time.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sony-cybershot-dsc-rx100/11

lol

@mpgxsvcd I was just going to tell you that. Dpreview by some strange coincidence stopped testing camera DR in Rawwwwwwwwwww, to only include Jpeg at the same time that Nikon/pentax/sony based exmor sensor started to trash Canon. Since then I have lost any respect for there testing.

I don't know about anyone else, but I can't really afford anything over a couple thousand dollars or so. That culls the field quite a bit for me. So I'm really happy when more cameras come out at lower price ranges. The extreme top of my affordability list would be the BMC. After that you have Canon's lower end offerings and Panasonic's GH series. Not such a large list (for me). Scarlets, Sony's FS series, and the like are great cams, but they might as well not exist since I'll never be able to afford one. But the great thing is, as that tech moves forward it trickles down into lower end cameras that I can afford. : )