Good camera

Cameras have become very complex. The software in these devices is very sophisticated, it tries to handle many things for the user. The downside is that it becomes increasingly hard to describe if a camera is good or not. A camera maybe good at some or many things, but not so great in other circumstances.

I've recently tried the Fuji A500 ($79) and have an old Fuji 2600. I've also looked at the Canon A560 ($200) and considered the Fuji V10($140-$300). Since I originally wrote this review, I've now also tried a Fuji F20 ($100-200) in detail and have updated the review accordingly.

The Panasonic LZ7 is feature packed. Its not really a super simple idiot proof camera. It has many options, many features. If you like photography and aren't intimidated by technology, this is a plus.

Overall pictures seem to be pretty good. Many ways to interpret how well a camera does:
- Sharpness: Lens seems pretty good. The camera is able to take clear sharp pictures. For whatever reason, the Fuji A500 and Canon A560 that I tried consistently took fuzzy pictures, so fuzzy that the 2mp Fuji 2600 produced sharper pictures.
- Noise: This is one of those that get harder to describe as the camera software tries to do more for you. The Fuji V10 in particular tries so hard to sharpen the picture and reduce noise, that it consistently morphs the picture so that it simply looks weird when you look at it at the pixel level. If you look at the overall picture, all this processing can make the image look cleaner and sharper, but overall I find all this meddling with the picture disconcerting and I do notice the changes when zoomed in and I don't particularly like it.
The LZ7 has plenty of noise at ISO 800. It can be tolerable. At ISO 1250 noise jumps much higher and the color balance is messed up becoming too "cold". iPhoto allows adjustment of the temperature, setting it +10 warmer fixes the color balance. The LZ7 also supports ISO 3200 which is consumed by noise. There maybe cases though where you can't get the shot any other way, its nice to have the option, but its hard to imagine actually using it.

When I originally wrote this, I was impressed by the low light performance of the LZ7, but after trying the Fuji F20 for an extended period of time, I can report that the F20 at ISO 2000 has LESS noise than the LZ7 at ISO 800. Thats a dramatic difference. The Fuji F20 is dramatically better at taking most low light shots than the LZ7.
- Color balance: Of the camera I've tried, the Fuji 2600 seems to have the most pleasing color balance in bright conditions, slightly warm. The Fuji A500 and F20 do an EXCELLENT job maintaining VERY accurate colors even in very dark conditions. I haven't tried the V10 enough to know. The LZ7's color balance seems a little off, auto balance doesn't handle conditions as well as the Fuji A500. Color in very low light shots becomes very red and overall color is lost.
- Dynamic range: Some cameras have a limited ability to preserve very bright and very dark portions of the same scene. This camera seems to do reasonably well, the Fuji A500 did an excellent job with shadows. I had tried an old Nikon that did very poorly at this. I haven't decided on the F20 yet, some pictures appear to blow out bright areas, so the LZ7 might win out here.

The Panasonic does have a number of features which are all helpful in varying degrees.
- Intelligent ISO. Its not perfect, but it can help to automatically set the ISO depending on how much the subject is moving. Sometimes it sets the ISO too low and you still end up with a blurry picture, but its generally nice that you don't have to fiddle with the ISO setting. You can take a picture of a stationary object at ISO 100, or if the subject is moving, the camera can automatically up the ISO to 800 or even 1250 if you can tolerate the noise. You can adjust the highest ISO.
In practice, the "anti-blur" setting of the F20 performs better, mostly because of its impressive ability to take acceptable pictures at high ISO.
- Image stabilization: I haven't been able to test if this really helps the picture or not, but I have been impressed at how sharp the pictures turn out even at shutter speeds as low as 1/8-1/4 of a second. So chances are it helping quite a bit.

Overall for my uses the camera does reasonably well. My primary use is for indoor pictures of kids, so I need excellent low light capability. In this regard the camera works, intelligent ISO is really nice, you end up with lots of noise but I'm not sure you can avoid that in this price range and in a compact camera.

Flash generally seems ok, not great, but ok. The flash on the F20 is much more impressive. The F20 will throttle back the flash and bump up the ISO to make a flash picture less harsh. It allows natural light to fill in the background and not make the use of flash so obvious. In an identical picture, the LZ7 will brightly illuminate the subject with a potentially dark background making for a much less pleasing picture. Regarding flash, I have to give a big win to the Fuji F20.

Other features:
- Display shows shutter speed, aperture, ISO for each picture. I really like that.
- You can zoom way in on pictures you've taken, down below pixel level. This can make the picture seem fuzzy but its not. The Fujis (A500, V10, F20) annoyingly don't let you zoom in very far so you can't really tell if you just took a sharp picture or not and you can't adequately see how much noise has ended up in the picture. This probably makes the consumer in a store think the Fuji's are taking sharp pictures when they may or may not be.
- The camera has a bunch of scene modes. There are almost too many, they tend to get in the way. Would be easier to give manual controls. The "starry night" mode allows ISO 100 pictures with shutter speeds of 15, 30 or 60 seconds. Although the resulting color balance was messed up, the resulting pictures are amazingly sharp, clear and noise free. I tried this with an Olympus camera 5 years ago and was amazed at how noisy the picture was. Apparently this problem has been solved.
- Zoom. I'm not generally a huge fan of a big zoom range, I'd rather have a small camera. But this camera has a 6x zoom and it is spoiling. You can take amazing close-ups from across the room, just make sure you have a steady hand. And it has a useful extended zoom to 9x which reduced picture resolution to 3mp. This is a real zoom, not the silly digital zoom which is better done by cropping in a photo editing program.
- Camera size: This camera is larger than the Fuji A500 or V10, but its still smaller than the Fuji 2600 and reasonably compact. It feels solid, heavy, durable.
- Battery: Takes 2 AA batteries, definitely a plus that you don't have to deal with a proprietary Li-Ion battery like on the Fuji V10 of F20.
- Display: Feels large, clear, bright. Can be seen surprisingly well in bright sunlight. No viewfinder.
- USB connection. Seems to be a USB 1.0 connection at least speed wise. That was ok on a Fuji 2600 with 128meg card, but now with a 2gig card, it takes forever to download all the pictures... make sure you have a fully charged battery if you try to download a full card. The Fuji F20 apparently has USB 2.0 and is much faster downloading.
- Video: I never really thought about taking video on a still camera. I have a camcorder for that and it does really well. However, this camera does do surprisingly well. The 2gig card can hold somewhere around 30 minutes. Plenty for a day out. Audio, video, clarity etc all seem good, although I think I read that focus and zoom are fixed from the beginning of the video sequence.
- Night shots. I'm accustomed to taking pictures of night scenes by putting the camera on a solid object in the area and letting it take a multi-second exposure. This camera won't let you take a picture longer than 1second, and if it does, it seems to give up on metering. However this camera can take pictures in the dark with the 15, 30, 60 second modes and its ISO can go much higher than the 400 in the A500. The F20 limits exposure to 3-4 seconds. It can take excellent pictures at that level, but the LZ7 can go somewhat darker at 60 second and ISO 100.
- The camera allows several focusing modes for point or broader, regular or fast focus. I haven't determined if this affects exposure as well or if its just focus. Focus does ok. Exposure sometimes is not as point focussed as I'd like, especially when trying to take a backlit subject.
- Exposure: Seems ok. Would be nice if it allows a bracketing mode where it would take a series of pictures +-some EV value. The V10 provides a mode where it takes two pictures in rapid succession, one with and without flash. That would be nice, but not available here.
- Rapid shooting: The camera does provide a rapid/continue shooting mode. Pictures are taken reasonably fast. It seems to go faster if you lower the image resolution. Really annoying though is that the display shows the picture taken and doesn't let you track the subject your trying to take pictures of. Unfortunately, this makes this mode essentially useless for moving subjects. The F20 is much slower taking sequential pictures.
- In camera editing. You can crop a picture within the camera. Very nice. You can also lower the resolution of a picture to save on memory.
- Auto picture rotate. This is really cool. The camera apparently has a sensor that detects if you took a picture while holding the camera vertically instead of horizontally. If you then view the picture on the camera, it will turn it for you automatically. A bit is apparently set in the resulting jpg. When I view it on a Mac system using iPhoto, the picture is correctly oriented without me having to rotate it. This is awesome! For some reason, this doesn't seem to work in Windows XP or at least the programs I used to view the pictures with.

Thats about everything I can think of to describe so far. Overall I'd rate the camera pretty high, it has lots of capability, flexibility, many features. Takes good pictures, reasonably good job at indoor no-flash pictures.

I had been leaning to keeping the LZ7, but after trying the Fuji F20, I'm not leaning towards that camera instead. My primary need is to be able to take pictures of kids without flash. The F20 does significantly better at that. Its unfortunate because I like just about everything on the LZ7 and I have several issues with the Fuji. But the bottom line is that the purpose of a camera is to take pictures, and the F20 takes better low light pictures.
I prefer the mechanical design of the LZ7. It feels like a more expensive camera. Nice solid doors to cover connectors, impressive looking lens, generally high quality. The F20 in comparison feels cheaper with more easily scratched materials. The connectors are covered by a cheap rubber plug that is hard to get out of the way.
The LCD on the LZ7 is uncoated, making it easy to clean. On the F20 its recessed and coated. Finger prints are annoyingly obvious and more difficult to remove due to the coating.
I really like the 6-9x zoom on the LZ7, but I didn't originally need that and can probably live without it.

In summary, I'm leaning towards keeping the F20 after having tried the LZ7 in depth.