Panasonic has recently unveiled its latest digital compact, the LUMIX DMC-FZ7, the successor to the FZ5. Improvements over its older brother is a 6 mega-pixel sensor, a zoom ring set-up on the lens (this was removed by Panasonic), an intuitive menu joystick for setting manual focus and exposure when framing shots, and a 2.5inch LCD (rather than the FZ5's 1.8inch screen).
It's now got a 12x optical zoom lens provided by Leica and 4x digital zoom. The camera also has an Extra Optical Zoom feature that can bump up the zoom to 16.5x but decreases the resolution to 3 mega-pixels, allowing a ridiculously big 66x maximum zoom. The camera has Panasonic's latest Optical Image Stabilizer (MEGA O.I.S.) technology that compensates for hand-shake even at higher shutter speeds.
As expected with cameras these days the FZ7 is quite feature rich with sixteen scene modes, including a new “Starry Sky” scene allowing photographers to get perfectly sharp photos of star-filled night - no doubt benefiting from the image stabilization mentioned earlier. Another quite interesting feature is a new “High Sensitivity” mode allowing incredibly high shutter speeds of ISO 1600 to get action shots of sports or animals with hardly any blur. Although this is at the expense of image resolution the image is still good enough for standard 4x6 prints.
Like the rest of Panasonic's DMC-FZ range, the FZ7 is nicely styled with an SLR-like design available either in silver or black. It's due out over here in March with the price still to be announced.
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