Panasonic GH4 Shoots It Out With RED EPIC And Canon 5D Mk. III

Panasonic GH4 Shoots it Out with RED EPIC and Canon 5D Mk. III. And it really isn't a fair fight. More and more of the shooters I know are starting to get their hands on the Panasonic GH4, and as a result, we're starting to see some amazing 4K test footage on the Internet, showing just how sharp the ultra high definition camera is in testing. But what we didn't expect was how well this plucky $1800 mirror-less camera would do against some of the big boys, like the RED EPIC. I mean, I expected it to beat out the Canon 5D Mk, lll, since that platform is really starting to show it's age. But could it beat out a platform that costs up to 20 times more? Well, take a look at the video below, I think you'll be stunned. .

The test video, which admittedly is only about a minute and a half long, shows the Panasonic GH4 shot at both 100% zoom and then 300% zoom to see if the image can break, but not before we get a few shots of a model in various lighting conditions so we can see what the GH4 does as a base line.

Once that’s set, we get this daylight image of a barn with trees in the background and a cloudy day. Not a bad image since there’s plenty of opportunity for moire in the roof line and there’s also various lighting conditions along the dynamic range.

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The footage is all ungraded so you get what you get coming straight out of all three cameras – the Panasonic GH4, the RED EPIC, and the Canon 5D Mk. III, the last of which really shouldn’t be in this mix at all since the state of the art has really left it behind. But since it has Magic Lantern Raw on it, you can see at least some nice dynamic range.

When the GH4 is shot at and goes from 100% zoom to 300% zoom, you really don’t see any loss of detail (note the telephone pole in all three scenes, that tells the tale). That’s what 4K buys you. But when you see the RED Epic get zoomed in, you start to see the image get really soft. Almost muddy.

And the 5D Mk. III is even worse since Neumann had to upscale the image to 4K in order to keep the test consistent. But the GH4′s performance in this test is stunning when you think that an $1800 camera can out perform a $35,000 camera platform like the Epic (note, it isn’t a Dragon model). It’s all for you to see in the video below. Amazing clarity and sharpness.

No Film School breaks it down rather nicely in pointing out that even though sharpness can be fudged by enhancing the edges of an image, the GH4 is doing what both the RED Epic and Canon 5D Mk. III Raw aren’t doing … processing the image in camera. And the result is a more sharp image writing to the card. And that the GH4 is designed to take that 4K image and run it down to 1080p without losing any detail is where it works best. But this is straight out of the camera to 4K for testing purposes and even then it holds up.

Now sure, you can massage the 5D Mk. III’s Magic Lantern Raw image to draw out more dynamic range, and use color correction like Davinci Resolve to make the RED Epic look far better than it is out of the rig.  And frankly, I’d love to see it go up against the Dragon, just so see how close it can get. But that wouldn’t be a fair fight on the other side either. Still, I rather doubt that shooters are going to be putting their Epic up on eBay. But the bottom line for NFS is this … “ the camera that costs the least, looks “the best,” and requires the least amount of work to get to a satisfactory image might be the one they favor …”

I know I would.