Panasonic Lumix TZ5
Discussion
I just got one, £204 or thereabouts off ebuyer. Silver but I'd have prefered blue.
Took it to China and was pretty pleased with the pics. If you PM me I'll link you to all my photos.
Plus points: Battery, screen, well featured, HD video is nice looking, zoom, pretty small camera for the zoom, lens is good, feels well constructed.
Minus points: Medium-high ISO levels much noisier than a DSLR, using zoom can mean you struggle for light, would be better to have a proper compact to go in your pocket - those few mms make a noticeable difference. For the cost of the camera my photos didn't print out that well but that may be bonusprint who downsized the pics from 3MB to 900k to upload & print. I expected not to really notice the difference against a Digital SLR (these are not pro photos but holiday snaps) but I really can on these prints.
If you want the zoom I'd recommend it, but otherwise for purely size reasons I'd have gotten something smaller. There's a tiny £200 Olympus with 7x zoom whose lens fully retracts. Also for £300 I don't know what's so good compared to a cheaper camera apart from that zoom, and the zoom means it's bulkier than it could be.
This said apart from the above reasons I'm very happy with it. The intelligent mode is cleverer than I'd expect and I don't use manual mode. It detects all sorts of types of pic and changes the settings to match - e.g. lots of green in the distance = landscape so it turns off the flash and focuses far. Face detection = portrait type mode so it turns flash on (not sure if I like flash in portrait pics though) and focuses on your face even if you're not central. And so on.
Took it to China and was pretty pleased with the pics. If you PM me I'll link you to all my photos.
Plus points: Battery, screen, well featured, HD video is nice looking, zoom, pretty small camera for the zoom, lens is good, feels well constructed.
Minus points: Medium-high ISO levels much noisier than a DSLR, using zoom can mean you struggle for light, would be better to have a proper compact to go in your pocket - those few mms make a noticeable difference. For the cost of the camera my photos didn't print out that well but that may be bonusprint who downsized the pics from 3MB to 900k to upload & print. I expected not to really notice the difference against a Digital SLR (these are not pro photos but holiday snaps) but I really can on these prints.
If you want the zoom I'd recommend it, but otherwise for purely size reasons I'd have gotten something smaller. There's a tiny £200 Olympus with 7x zoom whose lens fully retracts. Also for £300 I don't know what's so good compared to a cheaper camera apart from that zoom, and the zoom means it's bulkier than it could be.
This said apart from the above reasons I'm very happy with it. The intelligent mode is cleverer than I'd expect and I don't use manual mode. It detects all sorts of types of pic and changes the settings to match - e.g. lots of green in the distance = landscape so it turns off the flash and focuses far. Face detection = portrait type mode so it turns flash on (not sure if I like flash in portrait pics though) and focuses on your face even if you're not central. And so on.
As a point and shoot camera I think some of the Panasonics take some beating. Extremely well made cameras. If you weren't so concerned by the reach of the zoom then the FX35 is also worth considering.
I took a FX33 and Canon G9 on holiday and found the FX33 consistently better to handle, more responsive and as a point and shoot it consistently produced correctly exposed shots. I found the Canon to be slow, it had trouble with white balance in some instances and in low light it sucked quite frankly. Although the photos in good light were obviously much better.
I took a FX33 and Canon G9 on holiday and found the FX33 consistently better to handle, more responsive and as a point and shoot it consistently produced correctly exposed shots. I found the Canon to be slow, it had trouble with white balance in some instances and in low light it sucked quite frankly. Although the photos in good light were obviously much better.
My other half has one, and it not bad if you're not too picky. However the noise reduction off the sensor means that there's no fine detail at any ISO, the focussing is slow at the telephoto end of the zoom, the close focus is not great at all, and there's no optical viewfinder. But if you want a big zoom in a small camera it's not a bad compromise.
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