A while ago, I brought a new camera I’ve been hankering over for a good year now. With my older (and I think better) camera literally bitten the dust, I’ve an excuse to buy one without too much of a guilty conscience.
Now, thumbs down to Pixmania.com – they have a price promise and I saw one over £30 cheaper elsewhere just a day later. They haven’t bothered to credit me the difference. Secondly, while their site warns the cameras are of European specification and so it may not have English manuals but it will say on the products page when this is the case. Well, going from this info, my camera was supposed to come with printed English manual, not one in French. Finally, it comes with a EU plug, and they were suppose to send a free UK adapter with it, and they haven’t bothered with that. Communications is slow despite their 48-hr response promise. I’ve used them before and they were good but I think they got too popular or too greedy and will go elsewhere in future.
The camera itself, a Panasonic FZ-50 is a big camera but surprisingly light for its size. It is well featured, with a liquid damped manual zoom control, optical stabiliser motors, manual focus control (can be switched to auto focus on the fly), focus assist lamp, 2.5″ LCD and electric viewfinder with diopric adjustment for glasses wearers, 12x optical zoom, fast response times, hotshoe, and much more. It has a lot of features from dSLRs except the lens are fixed in this case.
Battery – li-ion custom design battery – it does last a good long time, I’ve not had to use the second battery I purchased yet!
The biggest problem with this camera is noise reduction – it is too aggressive, causing images to come out blurry at 100% size at 10 megapixels. Frankly I don’t care about how many megapixels beyond 4, but the more there are, the more noise it creates, so it’s not a good thing if your camera can do 20 megapixels anyway.
After a while of learning its behaviour, I’ve started to get some decent shots, but it does take a while! I still like the old one for superiour continuous shoot and faster startup times (Kyocera M410R). But I do like this in a lot of ways, worth it if you can afford the high price, but you do get a lot for your money. Lets hope Panasonic issue a firmware upgrade for the overly aggressive noise reduction engine!
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