Product Reviews

A digital camera is more than its megapixel rating. Features, lens and optical zoom all have an important part to play when choosing the right camera. With the 4-megapixel Lumix DMC-LC70, Panasonic is aiming for the newcomer to digital cameras. To this end, it's designed to be as simple to use as possible.

All of the shooting modes, including automatic, macro, night and landscape, are mounted on a dial on the rear of the camera. Just selecting the mode for the setting is all you need to get snapping.

The red heart on the dial is confusing at first and doesn't match modes on other digital cameras. After trawling through the manual it turns out that this is a simple mode for beginners. It disables the more advanced menu options and renames others so that they're easier to understand. It's a winner for amateurs and it's good to see Panasonic apply this much thought.

Taking a picture is unusually simple. The trigger button is used to engage the auto focus. Once it's ready, the cursor on the 1.5" screen turns green (it turns red if it can't focus). For objects in the distance the 3x optical zoom will suit most

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photographers. The zoom controls are mounted on the top of the camera and are easy to operate.

More advanced photographers will not be so impressed with the LC70. It doesn't have a manual mode for finer control of pictures. It allows you to adjust only the ISO mode, white balance and colour settings. The last option has the option for warm, cool and black and white. It's nothing that can't be achieved using a photo-editing application on a PC, though.

Image quality is where a camera lives or dies and in this case, we weren't especially impressed with the results. Pictures taken outside were slightly overexposed, although colour reproduction was good, and areas of shadow were particularly grainy and very noticeable. There were also slight chromatic aberration issues, although you have to look hard to find them.

Indoors the camera's performance was a great deal worse. Every picture had a grainy appearance that was immediately noticeable. When zooming in we found all the trademarks of high JPEG compression, which doesn't help. In particular there were a lot of artefacts around text on some signs.

We checked the menu settings on the camera for compression settings, but the camera was set to the highest quality setting (lowest compression). We tried the lower quality setting anyway, but this produced even worse results. Even adjusting the camera to ISO 50, for the least grainy image, wasn't much better.

It's disappointing that an initially promising camera slips into mediocrity. At £164 it is cheap, but it is not worth spending the money. There are plenty of 3-megapixel cameras available for the same price that offer far better image quality and are therefore much better buys.