I am very fascinated with well-shot beautiful pictures on net and would normally spend hours continuously surfing photographs on flickr.com. After some time, I had decided to buy a DSLR preferably Nikon D40(the cheapest of the lot). But then I realized that to get serious with a DSLR camera, I will further need a tripod, set of lenses and maybe few filters too. Due to limited budget, I finally dropped the plan(for later).
I started searching on net for a point-and-shoot ultra-zoom cameras that will be most suitable for me; the one with most of the manual controls as in SLRs. Later on, when I was browsing different cameras on internet later when I came across Panasonic FZ18 and then got to know about its 10MP upgrade: FZ28.
I took much time before making a decision. I compared the camera with many others(Canon SX10 IS, Olympus SP-570 UZ, Sony DSC-H20, etc.) but finally decided on FZ28 because it’s cheaper, compact, wide-angled, has 18x zoom, offers RAW support and boasts lots of in-built features. The reviews on all the sites I visited were highly satisfying. I got this camera purchased through my friend in US. I had to pay him Rs. 14300 with the then dollar rate. In India, it can be availed at around Rs. 17000 in grey market which is not a bad deal at all.
It’s was a bit difficult first to know about all the features and tweaks this camera offers. The user manual is quiet long. But in a month now, my hand is well-set on camera. I recently went to a trip to "valley of flowers" and had wonderful pictures there.
While using the camera, I was highly pleased by some of its features:
Can focus on an object as near as 1 cm in manual mode with macro.
Very good image stabilization even with maximum 18x zoom.
"Intelligent Auto Mode" can change modes quickly with scene changes.
Large range of options with AF metering and focussing modes. Manual focus is also available.
Advanced ways to set white balance and color temperature.
Some problems I encountered with camera were:
It took relatively long time to get used to camera with a number of buttons on its panels.
Green pictures of leaves and grasses were highly saturated with automatic white balance. Had to use photoshop to make some pictures look natural. Even custom white balance results in photos with a greener tint.
While using the flash in dark, detach the lens hood that comes along with the camera pack. Or else you will find a shadow in the lower area of photograph.
And lastly some tips I follow:
I always shoot photographs with RAW enabled. RAW has the property to store much higher details as compared to JPEG. Saving into JPEG saves around two-third of memory-space but the photograph looses fineness which is unrecoverable. I use Adobe Photoshop with freely available "Adobe Camera Raw 5.4" to later fine-tune these RAW images and export them to JPEG for printing/sharing. Note that computer’s RAW to JPEG converter is much sophisticated than camera’s own JPEG converter. So the details are not much lost when saved to JPEG via computer.
Before starting to shoot photos, I generally use the back side of my(white-colored) visiting card to set custom white balance. Helps me to acheive nice photographs irrespective of surrounding lighting conditions.