GH2 Gh3 full specs now posted
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roxics
Veteran
I really hope so. Looking to pick up a couple of them.
Barry_Green
Moderator
According to Emmanuel Pampuri, who posted the cat video on vimeo 
, the GH3 is "la commercialisation est prévue pour fin novembre". My French is not as strong as it should be, but I believe that's saying that it should go on sale predicted for the end of November.
, the GH3 is "la commercialisation est prévue pour fin novembre". My French is not as strong as it should be, but I believe that's saying that it should go on sale predicted for the end of November.
Rolf Silber
Veteran
Just to explain and then I rest my case and stop moaning: It's not a bit overrated when you try to shoot video or stills of, say, swifts or birds of prey in mid-air with a manual 500er or in any other situation where the existing lenses with AF-function will not be long or fast enough and/or may react nutty and start searching focus...... you have to have a fast, rough estimation where you are focus wise. Second: Both for video or stills if you shoot in extreme low-light documentary situations with somethings like the Voigtlaenders or so where you do not have the time to first check the focus and are on 1.2 or even 0.95....
But, as I said: Even hunnish me stops complaining now and kick my dealer in the behind to deliver.... ;-)
A few points:
1) no mention of an XLR adapter. That leads me to think there is no such custom device, and they were probably thinking that the 3.5mm mic input jack could be used with a BeachTek or such other device. Oh well.
2) It's NTSC/PAL switchable, and you can use 50fps for slow-mo in a 24fps project, that's really cool. They call it "0.48x" playback speed. Not exactly 48fps, which would have been stupendous, but really close!
3) The wide-DR mode seems at first glance to be a sort of Red HDRx type of mode. They show over/underexposed frames being combined for a wide-DR, and then they say that it's available in video shooting too.
4) 72mbps All-I, yeah, whatever, I'll have to try it to see how good it is, I think 72mbps is a bit low for All-I, but 50mbps IBP sounds extremely good. Extremely.
5) Wifi -- can't even imagine what this means. Jib shots, remote shots, start/stop for car and crashcam shots, who knows what all control there is? Apps? Who knows?
6) Multi-aspect sensor does indeed appear to be gone. In the older GH cameras it used a larger-than-Four-Thirds sensor to optimize frame size, and video recording was quite a bit oversized (18.8mm vs. the 17.3mm standard of Four Thirds). Based on the pixel count of the stills modes, it does look like the GH3 uses a standard 17.3mm sensor. Oh well.
7) Optimized low-pass filter and intelligent noise processing sound like pretty advanced tech. Quite interested to see how this plays out.
8) Anyone wanna buy a GH2? Lightly used...
I am guessing the WiFi is just like Canon's remote control system, and it does seem to have a multi aspect sensor because it does support multiple aspect ratios as well as multiple ETC modes.
I also found this tidbit exciting, under the Focus section, it says "Eye Sensor AF", I am wondering if that is like what Canon used to have, the eye tracking autofocus, where you look is where it focuses. Which would be pretty awesome for video-journalism/documentary work.
Barry_Green
Moderator
That's not what the multi aspect sensor is.
Yes the GH3 supports multiple aspect ratios, but they are all crops off the same width of the 4:3 sensor. In the GH1 and GH2, the sensor was oversized so the various aspect ratios could take advantage of the maximum diameter of their common imaging circle.
Said less clunkily: with the multi-aspect sensor design, the GH3 was 18.8mm wide when in video mode. With a standard Four Thirds sensor, it would be 17.3mm wide. According to the specs I'm reading, the GH3 appears to have a standard Four Thirds sensor.
The specs for the GH2 lists the exact same dimensions for the sensor as the GH3 unless I'm missing something.
I guess this stops me from putting up my juicedlink, _dn101 and gh2 (dn101 is not perfect but it works) this camera is great but , feature set and all, but I don't think it warrants the upgrade premium for me, right now at least... and I really dont need two cameras, and if I did it probably would be a Nikon d600....
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Barry_Green
Moderator
Here's a pictorial example, from www.dpreview.com's review of the GH1:
In there you'll see that when in 4:3 mode, the GH1 and GH2 sensor is using 4000 pixels, but when in 16:9 it uses 4352 pixels. It's actually wider in 16:9 than it is in 4:3. When in 4:3 mode, it uses the full height of the chip and crops some off the sides, so it's 4000 pixels wide, which was at 17.3mm, the standard size for Four Thirds chips. When it went to 16:9 mode, it actually used a larger-than-4/3 chip, growing by about 7%, to about 18.9mm.
In the GH3, it lists all modes as using 4608 pixels wide, and the only difference is in the height. So it's always using the same width, and that width is specified as 17.3mm.
That's the difference, and that's what we mean by it being no longer a "multi aspect" chip.
On the other hand, in every mode it's higher resolution than the GH2 was, so does it really matter? Only a little; it means the GH3's chip is slightly smaller than the GH2 (and AF100). The GH2 was 18.8mm, the AF100 is 17.8mm, and the GH3 is now 17.3mm.
In there you'll see that when in 4:3 mode, the GH1 and GH2 sensor is using 4000 pixels, but when in 16:9 it uses 4352 pixels. It's actually wider in 16:9 than it is in 4:3. When in 4:3 mode, it uses the full height of the chip and crops some off the sides, so it's 4000 pixels wide, which was at 17.3mm, the standard size for Four Thirds chips. When it went to 16:9 mode, it actually used a larger-than-4/3 chip, growing by about 7%, to about 18.9mm.
In the GH3, it lists all modes as using 4608 pixels wide, and the only difference is in the height. So it's always using the same width, and that width is specified as 17.3mm.
That's the difference, and that's what we mean by it being no longer a "multi aspect" chip.
On the other hand, in every mode it's higher resolution than the GH2 was, so does it really matter? Only a little; it means the GH3's chip is slightly smaller than the GH2 (and AF100). The GH2 was 18.8mm, the AF100 is 17.8mm, and the GH3 is now 17.3mm.
Barry_Green
Moderator
The specs for the GH2 only listed sensor size "in 4:3 mode". But in photos it went wider, and they showed the diagram of how that worked.
In the GH3, it spec's "17.3mm", and it lists the exact same pixel width for more modes, so -- assumedly -- it is using the same sensor area for all modes. That is unquestionably a change from the way the GH1/GH2 worked.
Not a HUGE deal, I mean, the difference in FOV from 17.3 to 18.8 is 1.5mm, or about 8.7% tighter field of view. It's a 2.0x crop vs. "full frame", vs. the GH2's 1.86x crop.
Thomas Smet
Veteran
A few points:
1) no mention of an XLR adapter. That leads me to think there is no such custom device, and they were probably thinking that the 3.5mm mic input jack could be used with a BeachTek or such other device. Oh well.
2) It's NTSC/PAL switchable, and you can use 50fps for slow-mo in a 24fps project, that's really cool. They call it "0.48x" playback speed. Not exactly 48fps, which would have been stupendous, but really close!
3) The wide-DR mode seems at first glance to be a sort of Red HDRx type of mode. They show over/underexposed frames being combined for a wide-DR, and then they say that it's available in video shooting too.
4) 72mbps All-I, yeah, whatever, I'll have to try it to see how good it is, I think 72mbps is a bit low for All-I, but 50mbps IBP sounds extremely good. Extremely.
5) Wifi -- can't even imagine what this means. Jib shots, remote shots, start/stop for car and crashcam shots, who knows what all control there is? Apps? Who knows?
6) Multi-aspect sensor does indeed appear to be gone. In the older GH cameras it used a larger-than-Four-Thirds sensor to optimize frame size, and video recording was quite a bit oversized (18.8mm vs. the 17.3mm standard of Four Thirds). Based on the pixel count of the stills modes, it does look like the GH3 uses a standard 17.3mm sensor. Oh well.
7) Optimized low-pass filter and intelligent noise processing sound like pretty advanced tech. Quite interested to see how this plays out.
8) Anyone wanna buy a GH2? Lightly used...
Kind of agree on the intraframe format. Yeah there may be no macro blocking but you will likely get other forms of image compression artifacts. To be fair however AVC-Intra is only 100mbit and that has to push 10bit and 4:2:2 which take up a lot of the extra bits compared to 72mbits. So in terms of compression it may be similar. Nothing a good hack won't fix, eventually, a year from now.
Are we sure about the sensor. Some sites like DPReview insist it is still multi-aspect. Maybe they just don't advertise it since it was kind of confusing to some people.
PopcornFlix
Well-known member
Does anyone know if the GH3 can do 1/48 shutter (180º) at 24p? GH2 could only do 1/40 or 1/50...
Barry_Green
Moderator
Barry_Green
Moderator
From the Panasonic site, it looks to be perhaps the same kind of thing as Red's HDRx, two exposures at different exposure levels, merged to create an HDR image. But they haven't really explained it.