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April 10, 2008
[REVIEW–PANASONIC DMC-FX36 compact digital]
Price: $660
A little camera with a brilliant lens
The low-down: This is a 10 megapixel camera with a Leica-branded 25-100mm (film equivalent) lens. It is the latest version of the beautifully made FX pocket cameras. There is no optical viewfinder and the LCD screen is useless in bright sunlight. There is effective optical image stabilisation. Manual controls are limited and easily accessible. There is face recognition which doesn’t seem to work as reliably as in some cameras. A feature is made of iA – “intelligent automation”. In this mode the camera recognises scene types – faces, landscape, flowers etc – and also a shaky hand and moving subjects, and makes its own exposure calculations. Fortunately it can be turned off. In many situations the camera selects an ISO speed that is too high for clean results.
Like: The 25mm wide angle feature is a winner. We were astonished that the camera could take such wide angle shots with no barrel distortion at all. Expensive, dedicated wide angle lenses on SLRs don’t do as well. Combined with high resolution and clean images at ISO100, the results are impressive. Colour is good, if inclined to cold, which is not flattering in portraits.
Dislike: Above ISO 200 noise is a problem, and so is the in-camera noise reduction. We compared the FX-36 with the 6 megapixel FX-9 and the results are intriguing. The appearance of noise in the new camera is greatly reduced. Blue skies at ISO100, have no obvious mottling. But when we do a bit of pixel-peeping in 100% view it seems that the noise reduction has been achieved at the expense of some loss of detail. However, the average user won’t notice this, so perceptually noise is well handled.
Verdict: This camera is ideal for a European holiday. Avoid the iA and keep the ISO low and this is a good camera to take to Venice, Paris or Rome – or anywhere where the buildings are close together and gorgeous. Because the zoom range is a modest 4x the image quality is good from wide to its moderate telephoto. Bravo to Panasonic/Leica for daring to create a lens that looks pathetic in advertisements but works like a dream in real life. We like it!
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Posted by terry at April 10, 2008 06:01 AM
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