Very compact 10X optically stabilized value

Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1


Mission statement: The main features of this camera which prompted my purchase of it was the 10X optical zoom with stabilization, and its ISO 1600 capability. The Leica name emblazoned on the front of the lens was a selling point for me too- It has a very nice appearance, high quality construction and design.

The camera has a unique right angle optical path using a prism and a retractable Leica DC Vario-Elmarit lens system, which allows the 10X zoom to be packaged in a lens extension at full zoom that's not much different from a regular 3X zoom. It's not a micro credit card camera that are popular nowadays, but it's one of the most compact cameras with this zoom capability, equivalent to 35-350 mm zoom on a regular 35 mm film camera. Kodak has a 10X camera that is significantly smaller, but it makes a tradeoff in image quality, and uses two separate lenses to handle the zoom range. With this level of zoom, stabilization is pretty much a necessity, as you won't always be shooting in brightly lit situations, so the slow shutter speeds will make it difficult to keep the zoomed in image from swirling around.


Ergonomics and Menu Design
It requires more steps than ideal for setting color balance, ISO, and picture size, but still easy and intuitive to navigate. You can use the zoom lever to quickly page through menu screens, so you don't have to click away so furiously to get where you want.
The placement of the focus assist LED is right at a spot I would normally hold the camera on the left, so I have to remind myself to hold it differently to keep from covering it. When you notice your fingers glowing glowing orange, you'll know. The right grip has a raised area to accommodate the battery, which gives a secure grip, without the feeling it can slip out of your hands. Still a good idea to loop the provided wrist strap around your hand as a safety.

The cursor buttons are more flush than I find ideal, needing a more delicate touch to locate than if it had a higher profile button, but with some practice, becomes second nature. Compartment doors are nicely designed with a nice precision feel to them. The video out and DC power input cover flap flips open and closed with a nice click to it.
The menus are pretty clear and I didn't need to look at the manual until exploring the more specialized features, which means they did a good job setting up the controls and menus.
They opted to omit manual selection of shutter speeds and apertures, so you need to rely on the automatic functions for this. Exposure Value (EV) compensation is available right at your fingertip by pressing the up cursor. I generally don't even use that, preferring to use spot metering mode and adjusting exposure on the fly by pointing at darker or lighter areas in the scene, locking it with a half press of the shutter button. If you really have to use a particular speed or aperture, you can do it by adjusting the ISO and EV compensation- it's just more fiddly to do it that way. Not a major concern for me, as I rarely use manual selection much on my other cameras that do allow it.

Mode selector
The thumbwheel knob on top is a workhorse, used to switch between the different modes. It clicks in easily between modes, but feels like it might be a bit delicate for the amount of use it's going to see. It allows you to select the available modes of Movie (film icon) / Macro (flower icon) / Standard (camera icon) / Playback (play icon) / Simple (heart icon) / Scene 1 (SCN1) / Scene 2 (SCN2)/


Would have preferred putting the simple mode off at the end rather than before the scene 1 position, but that was likely a concession to the users that use the simple mode, right next to the playback.
Would have also liked a playback mode that is accessed with a push button rather than the rotating control knob, but the review mode compensates for that somewhat, which is entered with a single push of the down cursor. The review mode is limited in the options you have, so it's not really the same. For example, you can add an audio annotation to each picture to describe them, and it appears as a separate .mov file when you download it.
It's a bit odd how they implemented the audio annotation (called Audio Dub in the menu); it appears that it's a standalone file that contains a downsized copy of the picture, rather than a wav file with sound only.
*Warning* One thing to keep aware of is that there doesn't seem to be any way to delete the audio dub from the picture once you do it (you can overwrite but can not delete), and from that point on, you won't be allowed to resize or trim the picture. So if you want to use both features, do the Audio Dub last. Seems like a bug, but if anyone finds a way to remove the audio note, be sure to let me know..


Optical Stabilization
It has a separate button for stabilization mode selection on the top, which is really not necessary; could have buried it in the standard menus and allowed that button to be used for a more common purpose like color balance/ISO/resolution selection. Probably more to emphasize the presence of optical stabilization for marketing purposes than an actual need. I generally just set it in mode 2 and leave it alone.
-Mode 1 stabilization on continuously, correcting for camera shake
-Mode 2 more effective stabilization effect, because it only is enabled at the moment the picture is taken, so the stabilization mechanism always starts from the center. With the mode 1 continuous stabilization, chances are that it may be near the edge of a correction capability when the picture is snapped, which decreases the ability to correct if the movement happens to be in the same direction.
It's fairly effective, allowing handheld shots to be made at lower shutter speeds than would otherwise be possible. There is a limit to how much it can correct, however, so don't expect it will give stabilized pictures when you wave it around; you should still give it a best effort to hold it steady for the pictures, especially when you delve into 1/4 second and longer shots.

Focusing
A selectable AF assist lamp comes on in low light levels to enable the camera to find focus. At short distances, it works well, so you can take flash pictures in total darkness if you were so inclined (though you'd find it hard to compose the picture with nothing showing but a small dot lit up)
The autofocus works quite rapidly, and a lock is indicated by a steady green dot in the display. No complaints about speed of acquisition here-

Image quality
Images are generally quite good, though full zoom examination sometimes seems to display something of an ethereal softness to it.
It has color balance settings of Auto, Sunlight, Cloudy, Tungsten and Custom. No fluorescent lighting setting, but the custom white balance works very well, and you simply set it while pointing at a neutral white or gray surface, and it'll compensate for the lighting to get your whites white. It retains the setting though a power off so you could use that for your most common lighting situation.
It has a setting for "Pict. Adj" which was a bit confusing, it refers to sharpness rather than color saturation when it says Natural, Standard, and Vivid. Natural introduces a soft focus effect to minimize noise and imperfections, at the possible expense of details.


Auto review:
After taking a picture, the auto review mode can be set up to display the picture for one second, and then zoom in for another second to allow you to see the details of focus and exposure, without needing to push any buttons. Handy setup. If you need a longer look, it's easily done by pressing the down cursor button, which takes you into review mode, where you can zoom in and pan around to examine the shot.

It has a Highlight feature makes overexposure evident when using the review mode. Areas that are saturated flash on and off, signalling possible overexposure and blown highlights (for some reason, it does not work on playback, only on auto and manual review)

ISO 80 to 1600
Auto ISO setting selects the lowest ISO speed for the lighting available; in low light levels, it bumps up the ISO to higher levels to enable taking the picture, up to 200. For higher ISO settings of 400 or 800, you need to select it from the menu manually. To access its ISO capabilities from 800 to 1600, the mode has to be set to one of the Scene modes, and High Sensitivity mode selected. See High Sensitivity mode below for description of pictures produced by the high ISO setting-

Auto bracket and EV adjustment easily accessed with the up cursor button while in picture taking mode. The auto bracket takes three shots in sequence with the EV setting spaced out as you choose, so you have a better chance of getting a suitable exposure. Personally, I prefer to take the shots individually rather than have to cull the shots later on. The shots are not taken at the same time, so there's an shutter lag factor to consider also.


Resize/Trim feature
This is a very nice set of options I didn't have on my older cameras, which I find very handy. From a picture you already shot, you can opt to crop it and save the picture as another picture, or replace the original. If you replace the original, it takes the position of the original picture, otherwise, it creates another picture at the end. In either case, the date time stamp is retained, which I find essential for file organization.
The resize feature allows you to change the picture resolution down to any of the lower modes, so if you shoot all your pictures at 5MP, you can go back and selectively downgrade the less critical shots to lower resolution for memory conservation.
It does a pretty good job of downsizing and combining the pixels from the larger picture. I normally tend to leave my cameras at a lower resolution setting, and going up only for situations that warrant it, but with this feature available, I can shoot at maximum resolution by default, and then reduce it afterwards if necessary for space conservation.
It's a painless process to run through the shots to resize and trim, and as you go through the shots, it maintains the position in memory so you don't have to start over.
Pretty obvious setup, but my Minolta G400 had the exceedingly bad habit of going to the end of the pictures every time I deleted a single picture. Not good when you want to cull a bunch of pictures. Panasonic has all their user interfaces thought out well.


Flip Animation feature:
Up to 100 shots can be taken and made into short movie clip, if you aspire to bring Gumby to life. Could be fun to play with, but it probably won't be a regular use item for me-


Scene modes:

When you select one of the Scene modes using the selector, you have the choice of 19 preset modes for different situations.
In 6 screen groupings, they include:
-Portrait, Soft Skin, Scenery, Sports
-Night Portrait, Night Scenery, Self Portrait, Food
-Party, Candle Light, Fireworks, Starry Sky
-Beach, Aerial Photo, Snow, High Sensitivity
-Baby 1, Baby 2
-Underwater

I usually prefer to set up the camera manually most of the time, since they're generally just different combinations of color balance, ISO settings, and image sharpening, but some of these modes enable you to access settings that would otherwise be unavailable, such as the high ISO or extended exposure times. Some of the modes that are unique:

-Night scenery
This is one of the modes selected in the Scene setting of the mode selector knob. Exposures up to 8 seconds are enabled, and ISO is fixed at 80 for noise minimization. Tripod is a must for long exposures; image stabilization can only do so much-

-High Sensitivity
This is a mode which boosts the ISO setting to 800 to 1600 depending on the lighting. The High Sensitivity mode does quite well in boosting the image brightness with surprisingly good color range, however, this does result in a picture that has something of an artist's rendering, a bit of a pastel drawing effect, from the noise reduction and processing needed to implement such a high ISO sensitivity. The fine details appear as if the artist deliberately smudged them out with a thumb, with the coarser details remaining intact.
I still find it useful for situations that just wouldn't allow any picture to be taken otherwise; you just need to maintain reasonable expectations for the mode.

-Starry Sky
This allows selectable exposure times up to 60 seconds, with ISO fixed at 80. Tripod or equivalent is necessary, of course. Don't know if it'll have much use for actually shooting pictures of the stars, but it is neat to set it up in the dark and then run around the room shining a light on your face at different locations, for a ghostly floating head picture. :)

-Baby 1 and Baby 2
They seemed to find this mode important enough to have two separate modes for each of your two babies. Those with more are outta luck. They had room on the screen for many more babies, for the more prolific among us-
Anyway, this mode displays the age of the baby at the time of the picture based on the birthday you set for each baby, but only on the camera display or using their included software. It can be imprinted on the picture itself if you use the software, but doesn't show up on the picture from a straight transfer to your PC. They were clever enough to restrict the date setting to year 2000 and up, reasonably figuring anyone born before 2000 can not properly be called a baby any more. Darn, missed by a few years, no fun..

Noise reduction artifacts and compression
The higher ISO settings have discernible noise in the picture, which looks like colorful blotches when examined in full zoom. The playback zoom they've provided for review of the pictures goes all the way up to 16X, which probably is why it's more noticeable- if they didn't let you examine it so closely, you might not notice- ;)
Two compression settings are available for picture taking, called Quality. It wasn't immediately apparent to me at first which was which, but the one with more dots is the higher quality, low compression mode.

They thought up all kind of picture shooting situations, from aerial (blue reduction) to underwater (no, you can't take it underwater unless you put it in a protective house). You may find some of them useful, and it's easily accessed by spinning the dial. With the extra space on mode dial, they could have added a few more preset scenes, but it's easy enough to switch as needed.

Flash
Flash output is on the weak side, as might be expected from the tiny aperture the flash is expected to emit from.
The range is 12.1 feet in auto ISO or ISO 400 mode, and goes down to 5.25 feet if ISO 80 is selected.
If zoomed in, the range becomes shorter in all ISO modes, due to the smaller effective aperture.
Redeye - everyone complains about redeye, and as is usual for all these cameras with the flash positioned at just the right spot next to the lens to maximize the redeye effect, there is a redeye flash setting to put out a preflash in hopes of getting the subjects pupils to constrict right before the actual picture is taken. Personally, I never use it, because it probably just induces a blink response to get a nice shot of the eyelids. It's easy enough to remove redeye with postprocessing, so I don't bother with the redeye mode and its extra shutter lag. If it's really something you want to avoid, you could turn on some room lights or have them momentarily look at a bright light before the shot.


Display size and pixels
It has an expansive 2.5" diagonal, 207,000 pixel display allows you to compose and review pictures in detail. Advantage of the higher pixel count is that it lets you see details on playback review without having to zoom in as much, so you can see more of the picture at once. I often like to use my cameras as a quick and dirty scanner, and this allows you to take a picture of a full page of text and easily read it back with minimal scrolling.

Holding the LCD display mode button down for a couple seconds brings up a menu to quickly brighten up the LCD display if needed-
Power LCD - increases brightness in situations where bright ambient lighting makes viewing difficult.
High Angle - for use when shooting with camera held overhead, shifts the viewing angle downward to allow composing the picture where it normally would appear solarized or washed out. Only works in one direction; not nearly as useful as a true tilt and swivel screen, but it could come in handy in some situations.

Viewfinder is fairly well set up with pretty much all the information contained on it, such as stabilization mode, mode selection, focus indication, shutter speed, etc. You can turn off the information for an uncluttered display if you choose, by just pressing the mode button briefly. They also added a mode with composition lines, a 9 box grid put up as an aid. I'd have left it out, but some might find it useful as a composition guide.

The LCD is not recessed in the back, so some care should be taken to avoid getting it scratched up; you probably don't want to go sliding it around the table with the LCD facing down- A form fitting hard case from Panasonic is available for under $15 that provides good protection, but it doesn't have provisions for a spare battery, even one as tiny as this one, so you end up having to carry another bag for the necessities like the charger and spare battery anyway.
I'm using a larger bag that has separate compartments to hold the extras, and it works for me.

Playback Mode
In between the Simple mode (heart icon) and the Standard (camera icon) modes is the playback mode, which is used to look at the shots you've taken. The review of pictures is excellent, allowing you to skip through the pictures very quickly even for full resolution pictures. With some cameras, it would take a long time to go from one picture to the next as it loads up the picture buffers. Not so with this one, it's nearly as instantaneous as you could reasonably expect. If the single picture review is still too slow for you, hit the zoom lever once to wide angle, and it brings up a 9-at-a-time view, and you can use the up down cursor to jump through things very quickly. A scroll bar on the right shows you where you are in the grand scheme of things. STILL not good enough? Wider still, and 25 pictures at a time. And you don't need to wait for it to load up the full screen before continuing on to the next screen.
And a final mode which I found very neat, where it displays a calendar, and a tiny thumbnail of the first shot on that day. You can immediately see what days you took pictures on, and jump to that day for review.
Playing back movie clips: it doesn't allow you frame by frame advance like some cameras do, but you can pause, fast forward and rewind, with a elaspsed time display for a guide. It'd be useful if you take extended length movies.

Histogram
This is a feature provided to give you an indication of the contrast and brightness of the picture, and is available both while shooting, and on playback. For an average scene, you look at the histogram chart to see the distribution of brightness is centered, meaning that most of the details are within the range of the camera (not too dark or bright). You can adjust exposure to get things centered for best results. Of course, if the type of subject you're shooting involves a lot of dark areas (like a night scene), or bright (snow scene), you should expect the histogram to be skewed one way or the other, and not try to adjust for it. It's a useful tool for evaluation and setting exposure-


Movie mode
While I don't plan to use it for movies all that much, it has a movie mode that creates .mov files selectable at VGA resolution (680x480) or QVGA (320x240) at either 10 or 30 frames per second. An SD card is necessary for the higher speed and resolution modes.
A rare feature: it allows you to zoom while filming, something that is normally locked out on cameras that record sound, due to the noise of the zoom mechanism. This zoom is nearly silent, and zoom speed is slowed up in movie mode, so it doesn't detract from the film clip.

Macro mode
Down to 5cm or about 2 inches at wide angle. Macro mode is acceptable; still nothing like my Nikon 995, but t'will serve. Details are still softer than the Nikon, 3.3MP of the Nikon standard bearer notwithstanding.


Lens Cap
This is something most cameras don't use any more, an actual lens cap to protect the lens, which is the best method to protect the large diameter film camera-like lens. While some might think it's a hassle compared to the types that have sliding covers that retract automatically, this should prove to be more reliable and rugged. A tether is provided to attach the cap to the camera, so there's no chance of it being dropped or lost, so in practice, it's an easy process. Just squeeze it by the two spring loaded release points, remove, and drop. The only difficulty that arises is if you're shooting downwards, and the dangling cap moves into the field of view. In that case, just hook the tether with your fingers as you grip it. If you forget to remove the lens cap, you won't see anything in the display as you try to take pictures, so no worry about getting pictures of the back of your lens cap. If the zoom is used while the cap is on, the camera senses the obstruction and displays a message reminding you to remove the lens cap, at which point you need to turn the camera off and on again.


Power save and Economy mode
It has a power save and economy mode selection available for saving on the smallish 3.7 watt-hour capacity of the diminutive Li-ion battery, by turning off the monitor a short time of inactivity. I use the mode, and though it shuts down the LCD display perhaps a tiny bit sooner than I'd like, it saves on power, which is the goal. Pressing any button brings the display right back on again, so it's not a big deal that it shuts off quickly.

Battery size and life
The battery is a tiny 3.7V 1000 mAh lithium ion rechargeable. Battery life is as would be expected with a small battery; not spectacular, but acceptable, based on my impression of it from the test pictures, reviewing the pictures, and exploring the menus. At least one spare battery should be purchased, along with an SD card or two, to complete the kit. Inexpensive aftermarket batteries are available from sources on ebay for about $9; Panasonic OEM ones will run closer to three or four times that for each. Clones will do it for me.


Charger/charge times
A very lightweight and compact charger is provided, which has retractable contacts to make a very neat tidy package, easily stashed in your bag without fear of poking a hole in it. Plug in the charger to your outlet and pop in the battery. A full charge takes 170 minutes, and charge complete is indicated by the green charge LED turning off. I might have picked a red LED to indicate charging in process as is the usual standard, but it's fine either way.


Memory card
No memory card is provided with the camera, so you will need to get an SD card for any real use. It accepts up to 2G cards from the official spec in the manual, which should be plenty. I use 1G cards, which is more than enough for my purposes. Too large a card may encourage you to be lax about offloading to your computer or other storage media, so you stand to lose a lot of pictures if the card should fail.
There is 13.4MB of built in memory that can serve as a bit of backup if you fill up your memory card.

If you take pictures using the internal memory, you can transfer it to your removable memory card by selecting the "Copy" option, which is the next to last menu item in playback mode. It can also transfer from the memory card to internal memory, though there's not much call for doing that. I simply use a tiny USB SD card reader to transfer the pictures rather than use the camera interface, which takes more time and uses the battery up unnecessarily. If you get a card reader, you just slip out the memory card from the camera and insert into the reader, then plug the reader into your PC's USB port, and your pictures are in the DCIM folder for transfer. Simple and fast, no cables needed.

MMC cards can be used also, but aren't recommended because they're limited in speed and capability when shooting movies. Probably hard to find them nowadays anyway, but if you have them already, you could use them.


Dimensions:
4.4 inches wide
2.36 inches tall
1.78 inches depth (incl. lens cap)
Weight is 9-1/4 ounces

Summary
All in all, a very nice design from Panasonic that will handle everything I need. It's fast handling and responsive to the controls, quick to start up. I'll still have my Nikon 995 for its superlative macro capability, and my more compact Minolta G400 for times I want minimal bulk, but this can pretty much do it all, and does it well.