is anyone from panasonic reading this?

@cinemasteve87

I was writing a long comment but forget about it.

In my opinion... you can't compare the price range of a FullFrame and a M43, it's not the same... i'm not talking about the quality, etc.. but a production of a FullFrame Sensor cost more than a M43.

Now the GH3 don't cost that much less than a FullFrame and if you compare the GH3 to the another FullFrame product with a lot interesting stuff for videographer... the only difference is 700$/700euros, also in my opinion the A99 is not the official price and i will not be surprised to see after the release a price range of the A99 less than 1900$/1900euros... remember the A77 announcement price and the official release huge price difference.

And if you check correctly the GH3 + 12-35 is announced at 1800$ when the d600 + 24-85 can be find at 2300$ Also the GH3 have almost the same size than the D600

@all

Considering @Neverhood, I absolutely do not belive that @Neverhood ever touched GH3.

One remark about the different quality of the GH3 clips you find. Not all GH3 at the Photokina were the same. The scenes I made on Monday, with the low light and the blue, were done with a 14-140 lens. The one from Wednesday with more yellow, had the new 12 - 35 2.8 lens on.

2 GH3 had WiFi, the others not. With most of them I could change the video quality, with one not. Markus Matthes said, they got the silent shutter to work in 2 models, not in the others. This clearly shows, that the GH3 at the Photokina were in an early stage of firmware, maybe even with different firmware (I did not check unfortunately) so that can be the reason for different results.

@bwhitz This is just a hunch but the GH3 is touted as having low noise high ISO performance do to its noise reduction. Could you be seeing some of the 'smoothing' effects of this in the GH3's video?

This all sounds a lot like the GH1 to GH2 kind of comments. Also sounds like the early BMC kind of comments. When will people learn to have a little patience and not be too overly judgmental about pre-production videos? Without a finished product out in the wild to really put it thru it's paces, we really can't be sure what the final GH3 is gonna look like.

The comments about the look of the footage seem a bit dubious to me in that we know these are not final products and based on the info we have, likely none of the guys doing videos really knew a darned thing about the new camera. I read countless reviews from testers who found out after their review that they made some mistakes in settings on the camera due to user error. Not being familiar enough with the camera to realize that they had some setting wrong or whatever.

I can understand some pessimism due to not being totally blown away by the promos, but I also think this community has enough experience to know that it doesn't make sense to be premature in evaluating new cameras. There have been some bad signs, but still it's hard to say that Pany simply won't be able to address the image issues. Also how much of those issues are user error and how much is a real technical limitation of the camera?

I was waiting all the same: D recess and just like the GH2, the GH series is nothing without vitaly! For my part the genies are not Panasonic lol, quite the contrary.

In France, there is a promotion in certain shop

GH2 + 14-140mm has nine 899euros: D, I may be tempted me was the price, considering how my first gh2 suffered shock lol ... In case.

@Astro

I wouldn't worry too much about how other people's video looks (particularly when it's uploaded to Vimeo). There is no real alternative to waiting for a GH3 (buy or borrow) and evaluating it yourself.

There are so many variables for settings, acquisition, editing and uploading that making a decision based on how someone else shot and edited their GH3 material is basically meaningless. For me anyway.

I'm getting one asap...and intend to test the crap out of it relative to my GH2's (different hack settings). Then I'll know if it's a worthwhile upgrade or not.

@Tron

Your posts seem to me me those of Barry Green when people complained about AF100...

To upgrade to GH3 or stay with GH2?

I see it this way: I bought my GH2 last year and like with other purchases (software, even cars).. I may well find I choose to skip one version and then leapfrog to the next; in this case, a hypothetical GH4.

I find myself thinking the way we did with Australian built Holden cars. There was a new model every year. The new body style came out one year; often with a few bugs. The following year, there was only a subtle body change but they got everything right under the bonnet.

Now, will the GH3 turn out to be like the new-body-style 1963 EJ? Or more of a rock-solid, different tail-lights, 1964 EH?

@GH2UW Yep there is a lot of truth in what you say about evaluating for yourself, but the Vimeo complaint (many say that) I dont really buy, this clip for example (I know its only 720P...I have 1080P clips that look as good as this) Anyway it looks far better than any of the GH3 clips I have seen so far.

Pause it around 15 sec on...thats a great look (to my eyes) this look is quite unique to the GH2, I guess its now gone...maybe not, probably that's why Coppala liked it, its not just clarity (although it has that in spades) or DR or 4x4 matrixes or any of the other technical details, its a look, and I see it over and over with the GH2. But I havent seen it yet...not once with the GH3 and its not Vimeos fault. No matter how clever the engineers are at Panasonic or Sony, they may not be artists, thats another talent, so they only can make something thats technically good, has better luminance and so on...all good stuff, but somehow uninspiring.

That said I hope I am wrong, and will be happy to eat my words.

@kholi

Yep I read your posts...agreed!! Definitely...100%

@Nino_Ilacqua

Barry Green is pragmatic and talks a lot of sense from his own perspective (which should be expected to differ from others here), but we're not talking about a $5000 camcorder vs. a $1000 consumer model. Rather some folks who are trying to judge a bunch of unlit footage shot with preproduction firmware as evidence of a conspiracy or epic failure. I just don't see it. My GH2 looks like shit when I shoot unlit scenes too, in fact the noise looks like crap compared to the grain-like noise I see in the GH3 at higher ISO's.

I'm also glad to see that banding appears to have been fixed on the new model, that was the biggest pebble in my shoe with the GH2. Adding grain in an effort to defeat it often erased any detail advantage the hack may have provided and also extended the length of my rendering times dramatically. It will also be nice to run a camera that doesn't require I change ISO in a predetermined sequence or else face completely botched footage. Personally I am not looking for a religious experience when I pick up a camera, I just want a quality image with the least amount of workflow challenges. The GH2 is really great when all the stars line up, but there are plenty of things about it that I am looking forward to forgetting about.

@GH2UW You do realize that most of the variables you mentioned do not apply to the footage Dieter and the rest of the PV team at Photokina put up already, right? It has not been edited, nor transcoded or re-compressed if you just download the original files from the Vimeo site (which they considerately made available).

Now the differing GH3s at the show presents more of a variable.

@Astrp @Kazuo You guys are making me think back to the 90s, and when I was dreaming of being able to afford a good radiosity renderer but made due with mid-level software to render things for months at a time. Then I had my mind blown by the first screens from Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within. Say what you will about the box office receipts, but they changed the "face" of computer animation with that movie.

Anyway, I am very much willing to wait and see how the GH3 handles when it launches - to systematicaly put it through its paces. But there are some areas I will be looking at very intently to see whether I want one or not - and thanks to the MAR issue, I honestly cannot see myself on a GH3 shoot without a GH2 as well for acces to the crop I have grown accustomed to, etc.