Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH3 review

The Panasonic GH3 is the company's latest flagship Micro Four Thirds camera, and it's much more than a revamped Panasonic GH2. With its larger, weather-sealed magnesium alloy body, vast array of buttons and dials, optional battery grip, PC sync socket for triggering external flashes and four-figure body-only price, it's aimed at a more demanding user than any compact system camera (CSC) that has gone before it.

Buy it with the new 12-35mm f/2.8 weather-sealed lens and it will set you back £1,995 including VAT. That's more than the magnificent Nikon D600 costs with its kit lens. Is the GH3, with a sensor that's just a quarter the size (by surface area), really able to compete?

HANDLING

The answer is an emphatic yes. The GH3 looks, feels and behaves like a professional camera. It doesn't have the same low-light capabilities, but it has its own strengths that make it an extremely compelling alternative to the D600.
The taller body and more substantial handgrip compared to the GH2 are big boosts to ergonomics, and it includes many more physical controls. There are dedicated buttons for white balance, ISO speed, exposure compensation, AE Lock, five customisable Fn buttons, dual command dials and a rear wheel.

The dual dials are used in tandem to good effect. Direct access to shutter speed, aperture and exposure compensation (depending on the exposure mode) is the most obvious example, but we also appreciated being able to adjust the manual ISO speed and the Auto ISO range via the dual dials. The sculpted shape on the rear of the camera makes it a little tricky to perform full revolutions on the rear wheel, though. We accidentally popped the card slot door a few times, but these are our only complaints regarding ergonomics.
The 1.7-million dot electronic viewfinder is only a little smaller than the D600's full-frame optical viewfinder, and being electronic, it can overlay lots of useful information. Meanwhile, the 3in screen offers significant advantages over the D600's, being both articulated and touch-sensitive. The menus benefit from touch operation, and it's extremely useful for moving the autofocus point.

Autofocus is spectacularly quick for a contrast-detect system. It delivered 4fps shooting with continuous autofocus, increasing to 5.6fps with fixed focus. When saving JPEGs to a fast SDHC card, it kept these speeds going until the card was full. The only caveat is that noise reduction at ISO 3200 and higher sensitivities is more processor-intensive, so continuous shooting slowed to 2.2fps after 32 frames. Raw shooting slowed to 1.9fps after 23 frames, regardless of the ISO speed. With just 0.4 seconds between shots in normal use, performance is comfortably a match for the D600. It was faster in a few areas, such as when it let us carry on shooting while the camera merged HDR shots in the background.

WI-FI AND APPS

Wi-Fi is built in, and it's the most sophisticated implementation we've seen to date. The camera creates an encrypted network for an iOS or Android device to join, whereupon the free Lumix Link app becomes a comprehensive remote control for the camera. The app's Live Control tab receives a VGA live view feed, which can be touched to move the autofocus point. It's suspended while the camera is recording video, though, dashing our hopes to use an iPad as a remote monitor. There's control over everything from exposure and white balance settings to autofocus mode, aspect ratio and video codec, although they could be quicker to access.

Here's the Android app on a smartphone ...

... and the iOS app running on an iPad
The Playback tab shows thumbnails or full-screen previews, and photos can be transferred to the phone or tablet at various resolutions. A Location Log tab uses the phone or tablet's GPS facilities to geotag photos, but we weren't able to get this to work. Browsing photos on an HTC phone didn't work either, but both the Android and iOS apps worked faultlessly in Live Control mode. We're yet to see any camera's Wi-Fi functions work exactly as advertised, but this one shows more promise than most.

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Canon PowerShot G15 review

Now that compact system cameras (CSCs) are available for as little as £350, is anyone going to buy a conventional compact camera that costs over £500? Canon clearly thinks so, but then, the G15 doesn't bear much resemblance to most compact cameras.
It's built around a 1/1.7in sensor – smaller than CSC sensors but bigger than the ones used in most other compacts. It sits behind a wide-aperture lens, at f/1.8 for wide-angle shots and f/2.8 for telephoto. Together, the sensor size and wide-aperture lens are a potent combination for maintaining high image quality in low light.

The G15 isn't the only camera with this combination of sensor and lens. It has some formidable opponents in the forms of the Panasonic LX7 and Fujifilm X10. The G15 is marginally the heaviest of the three but its chunky body inspires confidence for build quality. We'd be more worried about the floor than the camera in the event of a fall. There's just enough shape to the textured handgrip to sit securely in the hand, so hopefully it won't be slipping through fingers too often.

This is one of very few compact cameras to incorporate an optical viewfinder – a crucial feature for long-sighted people who struggle with LCD screens, and useful when shooting in bright light when the screen is hard to see. The viewfinder zooms in tandem with the lens, but it's a small, blurry view that's heavily cropped compared to what the sensor sees. The viewfinder on the Fujifilm X10 is much better quality. The G15's screen is much better with its sharp 922,000-dot resolution, but it's disappointing that it doesn't share the older G12's articulated design.
This chunky camera affords lots of room for controls. There's a wheel and command dial for controlling shutter speed and aperture in manual exposure mode, plus a dedicated exposure compensation dial. The latter encouraged us to adjust the exposure much more often than with cameras that require a button press to bring exposure compensation up on the screen. With dedicated buttons for AE Lock, ISO speed, autofocus point, metering mode and an option to assign white balance to a customisable button, there's little reason to reach for the menu.

Drive mode is one reason, though. We wonder whether Canon chose to hide it away in a menu because the G15’s continuous performance isn't much to get excited about. It managed 1.8fps for JPEGs, 1fps for raw and just 0.8fps when updating autofocus between each shot. It doesn't compare well to the Panasonic LX7's 5fps with updating autofocus. Canon tries to make up for it with a scene preset that captures 10 shots in a second, but with a blank screen during capture and six seconds to recover, for us the compromises outweigh the benefits. General shot-to-shot times are on the slow side, too, at 2.3 seconds in our tests. The LX7 and X10 were almost three times as fast. At least the G15's flash refresh times are reasonably nippy, at 3.1 seconds at full flash power.

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