Incorporating a new megapixel sensor, Panasonic's Lumix G3 also has significantly improved image quality, now rivaling larger SLRs with larger sensors, an impressive achievement. Indeed, the Panasonic G3 feels more like an SLR than most any other compact system camera, only a very small one.
New features include Pinpoint AF, a touchscreen-enabled focus mode that automatically zooms in on a point to make focus point selection and confirmation easier and more precise. The company's 11 lenses include macro, wide-angle, telephoto zooms, and even a 3D lens.
Many other lenses are available from other manufacturers. The Panasonic G3 includes dust reduction technology, Intelligent Automatic exposure, the full complement of automatic, semi-auto, and manual exposure modes, and its kit lens includes optical image stabilization. The Panasonic G3's aluminum body comes in four colors: black, red, white, and brown. There's a lot more to the Panasonic G3 than its small body reveals at a glance.
Check out our hands-on preview and shooter's report below! Smaller, lighter, and faster: all three made the list of what we wanted from the next Panasonic G-series compact system camera, and the Panasonic G3 delivers. That's exciting news for mirrorless camera lovers. While the G2 was cubic centimeters, the G3 occupies only about cc.
For those of us still using US weights, the cc difference equals 6. Not bad at all. Measurements are 4. The front end shows how dramatically the grip has been reduced, as well as the overall width. It's more of a finger grip now, with a nice inward curve and soft rubber texture that caresses the fingers.
The Panasonic G3 is noticeably slimmer front to back as well, even with the articulating LCD, showing some impressive engineering here. Lens styling has changed a little for this model, to an all black design with a new chrome band around the middle, rather than the silver-gray rear bezel that shipped with the G2. Like the G2, the lens-side bayonet is plastic, though the camera's mount remains metal.
The kit lens also comes with a lens hood, something omitted on most SLR kit lenses. Most of the dials and switches are removed from the top deck, and the Mode dial is smaller with fewer settings, eight instead of The hot shoe on the Panasonic G3 is also moved back quite a bit, now overhanging the LCD to make room for the stereo mics, which are absent on the G2 it has a mono mic on the left top deck , and rather awkwardly mounted on the pop-up flash on the GH2.
While the shutter button was perched out on the grip on past models, it's retreated to the confines of the top deck, leaving little room for a Record button, so that migrates once again to the rear of the Panasonic G3 Panasonic recently moved the Record button to the top on most of its cameras, and now it's moving again. The Intelligent Auto button lights up blue when pressed, and unfortunately it's too often pressed by accident. The Power switch is well-positioned for easy activation.
The LCD moves degrees to the side and swivels degress up and down, allowing it to face forward for easy self portraits. The DISP. In Manual exposure mode, pressing the dial switches between shutter speed and aperture settings. The Record button on the back requires a good firm press to activate, which is somewhat annoying, since recording is slow to both start and stop. The Playback button is also hard to activate because it's so close to the protruding electronic viewfinder housing.
The Electronic viewfinder is the same gorgeous, gridless x design 1. It's hard to notice a difference between the Panasonic G3 and the GH2 we also have in-house, with the GH2 actually looking a little better. The Panasonic G3's LCD is the same ,dot display of its predecessor, and is a touchscreen design. The Panasonic G3 leans on the touchscreen for many controls, but most menu navigation and setting selections can also be done with the four-way navigator as well.
In our prerelease model, the Panasonic G3's touchscreen was a little finicky, not always obeying common gestures like swipe in Playback mode, often not registering direct touches on onscreen buttons. Compared to the 12 megapixel chip from the G2, the new imager not only has slightly higher resolution, but also appears to yield improved noise performance. Panasonic says they've achieved this through noise reduction at the pixel level, and through improvements to the signal amplifiers.
This would be an impressive accomplishment: 6dB translates into two full stops of noise improvement. In addition to the full The camera also offers aspect ratio options of , , and , in addition to the sensor's native ratio. In particular, the Panasonic G3 offers a significant step forward from the previous G2 model in terms of autofocus speed. As with the GH2, the company claims that the G3 will be able to lock focus with the mm lens in an impressive 0.
Of course, that's due in part to the lens itself, but the lenses offered in the two-lens kit version are also fairly fast.
The mm lens should yield a focus lock in 0. We measured slightly slower times in our lab tests, but we were all very pleasantly surprised by how responsive the G3 was in actual use out in the field: It easily felt the equal of any consumer-level SLR we've used in the past; an impressive accomplishment for a camera with contrast-detect autofocus.
ISO sensitivity. This is likely due to an increase in the image sensor's base sensitivity. Although the maximum sensitivity is unchanged, the higher sensitivity modes appear to be more usable, thanks to the improvement in noise performance.
Burst shooting. The increased speed of the Venus Engine FHD processor also shows up in the Panasonic G3's burst performance, which is significantly improved from that of its predecessor. Our tests showed 3. If resolution is reduced to the lowest four megapixel mode, the G3 is capable of a whopping twenty frames per second, using an electronic shutter. As noted above, the Panasonic Lumix G3 has inherited a significant step forward in its contrast-detection autofocus speed, as seen previously in the GH2.
The improvement isn't just related to the new image processor, but also hails from a doubling of the sensor drive speed from 60 to frames per second. As with other cameras using contrast detection autofocus systems--including all Micro Four Thirds models--the G3 performs autofocus by determining the contrast level at the focus point, then making a focus adjustment, and rechecking contrast levels to see if they've increased moved towards focus , or decreased moved away from focus.
The Panasonic G3's dwell time--the time taken to check contrast in between focus operations--is said to be halved, with respect to that of the G2. This results not only in faster autofocusing, but also in smoother AF operation, which is a major benefit for autofocus during movie capture.
Of course, the lens type in use also comes into play here. As with the G2, the Panasonic G3 has a area autofocus system which also offers a Single-area mode with adjustable point size, there's also a Pinpoint mode that uses a much smaller focus point area. When Pinpoint AF is selected, the G3 automatically zooms the display by 6x around the focus point, and the focus point position can be quickly adjusted while zoomed in. This struck us as particularly useful, as it would for let you select your subject's eye and then precisely focus on this point.
Another change from earlier models is that the Single-area mode now allows the focus point to be placed anywhere within the image frame, including the extreme edges. In the G2, the AF area couldn't extend to the edges of the frame. The Panasonic G3 also provides for focus tracking, which allows it to automatically follow your subject around the frame making focus adjustments as necessary, while a tracking lock is active.
Of course, if you prefer to focus manually, the G3 allows for this as well. To aid with precise manual adjustment of focus, the G3 provides an MF Assist zoom feature that magnifies a portion of the image frame by either 3x, 5x, or 10x. At 3x magnification, the G3 provides a new picture-in-picture MF Assist mode, which allows you to adjust focus while still keeping the overall image framing in the right area.
At higher magnifications, accessed by turning the Rear dial to the right, the MF Assist view occupies the full screen, and makes it considerably easier to judge in and out-of-focus areas. Face recognition. The Panasonic G3 also offers face-detection autofocusing, a pretty common feature these days on compact system cameras, as well as the vast majority of compact cameras, and in the live view modes of many DSLRs.
The implementation on the Panasonic G3 allows it to detect as many as 15 faces in a scene simultaneously, and their locations are taken into account when determining focus and exposure variables. Panasonic goes a step further than most, though, also providing face recognition capability. When enabled, the camera attempts to locate the faces of up to six individuals whenever they appear within the image frame, and they're then prioritized over any other detected faces in the scene.
You can also specify a priority order for the six faces, ensuring that your closest friends and family members are given the highest priority. Up to three recognition images can be recorded for each person, helping the camera to recognize each individual in a range of conditions.
Images can also be tagged with the name and age of each person, when they're recognized in the scene--handy for quickly locating images featuring your friends in Playback mode, or with compatible software on your computer. It can swivel degrees and tilt degrees. The LCD itself has a 3. That equates to somewhere in the region of , pixels, commonly known as HVGA Half-size VGA , with each pixel comprising adjacent red, green, and blue-colored dots. Touch panel. The Panasonic G3 retains the touch panel interface that was introduced on the G2.
This allows for control of a wide range of the camera's features by pressing on the live preview image, or on soft buttons shown on the display. At button-level or in the Quick Menu you can set aperture, shutter speed, exposure compensation, focus mode, movie settings, picture settings, image quality, flash options, metering, focus area mode, ISO, white balance, and frame advance. Plus you still have a function button left over to assign.
That's what I mean by user direct control. I found that in shooting I rarely had to take my eye from the viewfinder to set something. The few times I did, my eye was back at the viewfinder very quickly. I wish could say the menu system was as direct or as simple. The Shooting menu is 5 pages long, the Movie menu 3, the Custom Settings 7, the Setup menu 5, and the Playback menu 3 more pages. While the organization is decent FORMAT is at least at the top of a page, so I can leave my camera set there much of the time , the font used, the over reliance on icons, and the sometimes cryptical names will stop you dead sometimes.
For example, if you haven't read the manual and even then, maybe if you have , can you figure out what I. How about EX. And yes, the menu options are all caps, almost all the time, which doesn't help the presentation.
The depth of the menu system and the range of options—many of which will be new to someone new to a Panasonic camera—calls out for a help system. There also is some strangeness in organization. You have to pick to set those buttons to Fn1 or Fn2, then go somewhere else in the menu system to actually set what Fn1 or Fn2 are. There was a more direct approach available, but it wasn't taken.
Likewise, the image displays while shooting are a bit cluttered looking especially with touchscreen active as well as icons. Add a histogram and some grid lines and I've seen less complex heads up displays on fighter jets. The view through the EVF, fortunately, is a little better, especially since the touchscreen stuff goes away. About that touchscreen. I didn't think that I was going to like it, but I've found that leaving it active is sometimes very useful.
That's especially true when you're using the swivel aspect of the LCD. For instance, holding the camera over my head it's sometimes easier to trigger a shutter release directly from the touchscreen than it is the shutter release.
Since I tend to frame off center a lot, in those cases it's even more true. I've come to accept the touchscreen as useful, but not necessary. Some of you may find it more than just useful, but I suspect that very few of you would find it un -useful if you really give it fair shot. I didn't. It's easy enough to find and press the button if you shoot with the G3 for more than a few minutes at a time. Moreover, because the camera is designed well enough to keep my eye at the viewfinder while setting most things, I just don't have all that much use for an auto-switcher.
So while others have criticized Panasonic for omitting an auto eye detect function, I'm not going to. I was using the G3 side-by-side with a camera that did have an eye detection device, and frankly, the G3 wasn't the camera that annoyed me more when it came to switching the EVF.
These are all signs of a photographer driving design. My one smallish physical design complaint has to do with the size of the rear command dial. It's most recessed and it's a small control on top of that. The Picture Mode in the Motion picture menu lets you choose between movie and still picture priorities.
Selecting the former locks the image size at S 2M and the aspect ratio is fixed at Up to 30 shots can be recorded with a movie clip in this mode. The screen goes dark while the still shot is captured and audio recording pauses briefly during this time. Playback and Software Playback settings for still pictures are essentially the same as in the GF2 and GH2 and include the same touch-screen capabilities. MEGA O. H-X lens, which will be reviewed separately.
With the higher-resolution sensor in the G3, we expected and obtained improved performance across the board. Our tests showed the kit lens had good flatness of field for its type and only slight barrel distortion at the widest focal length.
Lateral chromatic aberration was negligible at all aperture settings. Performance Overall, we found the G3 very agreeable to use. It provides some worthwhile improvements on its predecessor, while taking on some of the more user-friendly features of other recent additions to the G-Micro stable. The key manual controls required by serious photographers remain reasonably quick and easy to access, not buried deep in menus where they can only be reached with many button presses.
Autofocusing was noticeably faster than we found with the G2, particularly while shooting video clips, where we found the focus tracking kept most subjects sharp while the camera was panned or the lens was zoomed in or out. Traces of the sounds made by the zoom and AF motors could be just detected on soundtracks but they were seldom loud enough to bother about.
There was a noticeable improvement in image quality at high ISO settings. In theory, the increased sensor resolution should deliver improvements to image quality. Raw files were well up to expectations for a megapixel camera.
JPEGs were slightly below expectations. Long exposures taken in dim lighting showed little visible noise right up to ISO , even without noise reduction processing. However, colour saturation appeared to be boosted, to an unnatural degree with a few hues, even at low ISO settings. Stepping up to ISO made granularity visible in test shots. By ISO , both colour and pattern noise were evident and shots were slightly soft.
Switching on noise reduction processing tended to reduce image sharpness further at this setting. At ISO the influence of ambient lighting could be seen and images were a little soft. One convenient feature of the G3 is the presence of an on-board flash. While this built-in flash is not very powerful, it can at times be useful as a fill-in light to brighten deep shadow areas.
For some imaging applications, the extent to which a camera can communicate with its environment can be an important aspect in the camera decision process. The table below provides an overview of the connectivity of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G3 and, in particular, the interfaces the cameras and selected comparators provide for accessory control and data transfer. While the comparison of technical specifications can provide a useful overview of the capabilities of different cameras, it says nothing about, for example, the handling, responsiveness, and overall imaging quality of the G3 in practical situations.
User reviews that are available, for instance, at amazon can sometimes shed light on these issues, but such feedback is all too often partial, inconsistent, and inaccurate. This is where reviews by experts come in.
The review scores listed above should be treated with care , though. The ratings are only valid when referring to cameras in the same category and of the same age. Hence, a score should always be seen in the context of the camera's market launch date and its price, and rating-comparisons among cameras that span long time periods or concern very differently equipped models make little sense.
It should also be noted that some of the review sites have over time altered the way they render their verdicts. Below are some additional questions and answers concerning some particular features of the G3. Which image processing chip is used to convert the raw signal into an image file and perform noise reduction and image sharpening? Yes, the LCD-screen of the G3 is flexible and can be turned to be front-facing for capturing selfies.
Panasonic does not publish a shutter rating for the G3. Yet, shutters in comparable cameras from other manufacturers are said to be good for at least actuations. It should be noted, though, that this number represents a Mean Time before Failure. The shutter might fail earlier, or it might last longer. Anyway, in order to exhaust an expected shutter life of shots over, say, three years, one would have to take about pictures each and every day.
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