@MoonMind, I guess my only question would be, how does the GRIII compare to the GR you use to have?
You know, that's the really strange part, but it's crystal clear that the GR III beats the GR in all respects. But ...
Well, it's not the first time I experience this. I was a big fan of the original E-M10. I have a harder time to bond with the - much, much better! - E-M5 III; it's not such a fundamental case as with the GR III, though, because I "get" the E-M5 III, and I forget about my niggles in use (except for the power switch - nostalgia can be a very stupid thing sometimes; remapping it doesn't work for me, either). And since I can use some of my favourite lenses and the camera performs so well and predictably, I can easily put up with the things I'm not exactly happy with.
The GR was, at its core, a much more unforgiving camera than the GR III, but simple in a good sense. Once you had it set up, you could just use it and forget about fiddling with it - it was possible, but the camera didn't invite you to. Moving the focus point (e.g.) was so fiddly I never did. With the GR III, moving the focus point and adjusting EV correction is easy - but it makes getting the camera back into a known state a chore. And it does encourage you to attempt to get things right in camera, so you have two effects exacerbating each other. The experience is not too bad overall, but things get a lot more busy. Add the framing issues I have, and I'm not feeling exactly confident when shooting. btw. I still don't get why I never had these troubles with framing with the GR, but I have to check things really thoroughly with the GR III - and it still doesn't work out often enough for my taste.
To make all that a bit more transparent: I shoot very few images usually, process around 20% to 30% of the ones I take, publish maybe 80% to 90% of those. Now, with the GR III, I took 40 shots with the GR III yesterday, and I found I could process 5 ... I guess most people would shrug that off. but I'm feeling as if I can't shoot accurately enough, as if there was too much trial and error involved.
To further illustrate this: I had the M8 with me yesterday - with its congenial partner, the Voigtländer 28mm f/2. Result: Not even one shot taken twice (with the GR, III more than a third were doubles, and some shots, three attempts), came home with 7 shots, could have processed 4, but since it was the sidecar camera in this case, I did "only" 2. That's what the Leica M cameras do for me: They all but double my hit rate ...
With the GR, I shot even less than with the Leicas - but ususally processed two thirds of the images. And I can't seem to "reduce" the GR III to just being a GR with better tech under the hood. It's a different camera in use, and I can't seem to get comfortable with it. That's just a fact, not a tragedy, because it obviously works, it just doesn't fit my way of photography. It's what it is, a superb visual notebook, but I'd be more at home with a solid typewriter, to exhaust the analogy ...
Oh, and the E-M5 III is completely unaffected by this phenomenon. A shot, a hit. If I do my stuff right, the camera delivers. Only the fact that it makes shooting quickly so easy leads to me shooting a tad more and having more images to review and discard. It's never the *process* that's the problem. My keeper/pp rate is about as expected. It's not different enough to make me wish I had the E-M10 back (or never bought the E-M5 III). The E-M5 III is one fine performer.
Ironically, so is the GR III. For people that *aren't* shooting like me, though.
M.
P.S. I found another irritating fact yesterday: If you want to be able to reset the focus point with the OK button, you have to set the D-pad to focus point operation; however, that's redundant because you can use the touchscreen for that. Yet, set up like this, you don't have an obvious way of accessing macro mode ... I could use the Fn button for that, but I use it for AEL to make things a bit speedier when light is difficult ... Yes, I know, there are miriads of ways to make the camera work better than I do, but why can't I customise the very few things I'd really need? And why the heck doesn't it reset the focus point on switch-on?