The rapid demise of the conventional SLR market took the best in business by surprise. The charm of holding a heavy (chunky!) Nikon F5 and the sheer pleasure of hearing the wound of the shutter alas! is no longer in fashion. I am told the biggies like Pentax, Canon, Nikon have bid adieu to the conventional film cameras and are all figuring out the next generation of digital cameras. The conventional SLR is dead, long live SLR. ok enough tears for my good friends. (BTW a good F5 can be picked up for below INR 15000/- now it used to be INR 90000/- not some time back).
The sheer convinience of the digital photography got me and to protest the rapid demise of the SLR I decided to invest in a PROSUMER camera (Professional + Consumer) after evaluating a number of cameras I settled down for the Panasonic (hey when did they start making cameras) DMC FZ 20.
The camera comes in two colors (Silber and Schwarz sorry Silver and Black). The primary reason for my buying the camera was the fantastic Leica lens that the camera supports. As usually in my reviews I hate to repeat and cut paste the stuff that you can gather from the Web, and focus on my experiences with the device.
The camera is surprisingly light to handle. The lens size may overwhelm the photo- virgins but you will soon get to respect the fact that this is a very fast lens (does 432 mm at F2.8 all through!!!). This lens is a technical marvel and the results show.
The large LCD screen (i think it is 2’’) shows the previews beautifully. The 5 Mega Pixel engine is good enough for most. The camera is a bit slow to start up (about 4-5 seconds to switch on) but is reasonably fast on the images it captures (except in the raw mode).
The images get stored in the SD card (sensibly small and inexpensive) but a word of advice here do invest in a good fast SD card I recommend the Panasonic SD (atleast 1GB @ 90Euros or INR 4500/- is a good buy) else the lexar media Ultra II card is a good buy. The faster SD cards allow you to capture photographs rapidly and you can get a decent 2-3 exposures per second. Do not compromise here.
Some quick pros and then I get to the cons:
Good battery life
Great telephoto lens with Vibration Reduction (2 modes) built in
Small but capable flash built in
Light weight
Great LCD for preview
5 Mega Pixel (you can live with that)
Ok some limitations:
The lens would not accept a filter (58 mm filters are hard to get any way!). Result is that the lens can get smudgy and needs to be cleaned more often
The lens cap is to be kept carefully its a bit cumbersome to put
Slow startup
Comes with a stupid 32 MB SD card which wont be useful with the next generation Barbie dolls too
The software bundle is fairly useless and panasonic needs to look at Nikon to get their act in place
LCD screen is not the swivel/tilt type aka Nikon 8800
DMC FZ 30 with 8 MP is already in the market (read my review in a few weeks)
Night photography will need some practice due to enhanced noise (isnt that a fact with most digital cameras, low light photography sucks! I want my F5 back!!!)
The Sun Visor is Stupid and absolutely unusable. (try slipping it on and put the camera in a bag)
Coming soon the Nikon 8800 review (my dad just bought one).