GH3 vs 5D MKIII for stills?

[acuriousman]

I know the 5D3 beats the GH3 for depth of field, but what about actual still image quality? I'll be doing food photography for which I won't be making large prints, just for the web.

 

Has anybody here used both the GH3 and the 5D3 who can post their experiences/examples?

 

Thank you.:)

 

[dhessel]

Image quality on the 5D3 is very good, I don't think you would have any issues at all with it. I would think that the shallower depth of field from a full frame sensor would be more the issue than quality in any way.

[Ben Prater]

The 5D3 is the king of stills. You'll have access to great lenses like Canon's 100mm macro, which will help in close focus on the food. 

 

However, the GH3 is about 1/3 the price. 

 

If you are shooting for the web and not for print, get a white lightbox to put your food inside and grab a GH3 -- I think you'll be really happy with the results.

[Zach Ashcraft]

I've shot portraits with both, pretty low light downtown in a big city. GH3 holds up fairly well to about 800 ISO. 5D3 I shoot with to about 1250. In a controlled environment such as food photography, i'd doubt that would really be an issue though.

 

As mentioned above, the smaller sensor is probably more beneficial for food photography. Generally extremely shallow depth of field doesn't work so well in food photography. The GH3 should give you fantastic still quality. Just do some research on lighting for food photography - tons of resources available! 

[Brian Brown]

To aid in DOF, you can also purchase or rent tilt-shift lenses. They give all sorts of other creative looks, as well as practical ones like deep focus. Assuming you haven't bought into a lens system yet, you could also consider Nikon's D800, the full-frame competitor to the 5D3. Either model is a lot more $ than the GH3, of course, and lenses that cover full-frame are typically more expensive for equivalent field-of-view than their crop counterparts. 

[Zach Ashcraft]

For the record - the Canon 6D gives almost identical still image quality as the 5d mark 3 for a fraction of the price. Just something consider if you do want to go the full frame route

[gloopglop]

For the record - the Canon 6D gives almost identical still image quality as the 5d mark 3 for a fraction of the price. Just something consider if you do want to go the full frame route

 

thats a good point zach

 

yes, op, its hard to consider your query without price being a factor? but in the event that its not then 5d3 all the way

 

or 6d, if we're just talking about stills and you want to save some money

[gloopglop]

oops double post 

[Brian Brown]

Agreed, great point, Zach. I had forgotten about the 6D. Same with the D600 as a more affordable full-frame body in the Nikon line (compared to the D800).

[maxotics]

For food photography, my guess would be that the body is the least important piece of equipment.  Lighting would be first.  Glass second.  Also, you'd want to shoot tethered, so PC equipment and a calibrated monitor to think about. As much as I like Panasonic cameras (for video), i would not buy it primarily for stills.  You can get used Canon or Nikon DSLRs with nice lenses and larger sensors.