Product Reviews

The average photography enthusiast with around £400 to spend has two choices: an entry-level digital SLR or a top-of-the-range compact camera. The two types aren't actually that different, with comparable image quality and similar sets of photographic options. The star attraction of a digital SLR is the optical viewfinder, which helps to make manual focusing easy.

However, a premium compact camera such as Panasonic's FZ50 has its own benefits, not least its 12x zoom lens with optical image stabilisation for counteracting camera shake. You can replace the 3x lenses usually supplied with budget digital SLRs, but you'd need to spend over £1,000 to get one with similar specifications to the FZ50's. Digital SLRs can't record video, but the Panasonic has an excellent widescreen video mode and while an LCD viewfinder is far less detailed than an optical one, it can still show exposure and white balance settings before the picture is taken.

Fingertip control

Fixed-lens cameras usually fail to compete with SLRs for hands-on control, but here the FZ50 scores highly. There are lens rings rather than the usual buttons for zoom and focus, which makes it easy to jump from one end of the camera's range to the other, or to make fine adjustments. Two command dials give tactile control over shutter speed, exposure compensation and aperture. Meanwhile, various other key settings are available via a simple Function menu, which saves delving into the main hierarchical menu when you're

ADVERTISEMENT

setting up a shot.

One of the biggest challenges for a non-SLR digital camera is providing an effective manual focus mode, as their screens' typical resolutions of 200,000 pixels don't provide enough detail to show whether the resulting 8- or 10-megapixel photo is sharp. The FZ50 gets around this by showing a digitally magnified area in the centre of the screen while focusing. Along with the tactile focus ring, accurate manual focus is remarkably easy. However, the screen becomes sluggish to update in low light, making it hard to fine-tune settings.

Say goodbye to camera shake

For extreme telephoto photography, blurry images are more likely to be caused by camera shake than inaccurate focus. Here, Panasonic's optical image stabilisation makes a big difference. Gyroscopic sensors measure camera shake as the picture is taken and a moving lens element counteracts it.

The 10-megapixel sensor means that the FZ50 has to process and save a lot of data for each shot, but with a fast SD card, the camera performs admirably. It captured a picture every 1.5 seconds in standard mode and almost two per second in continuous mode. This isn't as fast as the current crop of entry-level digital SLRs, though. Battery life is respectable at 360 shots, but spare batteries are expensive at around £55.

A digital camera costing over £350 should provide fantastic image quality and the FZ50 doesn't disappoint. Colour reproduction was extremely difficult to fault and although photos weren't bursting with colour, they looked more natural than many cameras. Tricky lighting conditions, such as high contrast scenes and gloomy artificial light, were handled superbly. Some 10-megapixel cameras fail to live up to their specifications, but the FZ50's shots were packed with detail, especially in bright conditions. In low light, image noise became a problem and Panasonic's noise reduction tended to smooth over fine detail too. The problem was typical for a camera of this type, but digital SLRs invariably produce cleaner, more detailed shots in low light.