Versatile (Almost) Pocket Camera

I've had this camera for a couple of months now, so I can now write a reasonable review...

Our Minolta Dimage Xt is getting a little old now. Its had several new batteries, none of which last very long now. It doesn't reliably charge when stood in the base station, the batteries can only be charged properly when removed from the camera. The case is a little beaten up, and feels a bit loose, due to my wife's buttery fingers, and too many close encounters with the floor. Still the point is, it was time to get a replacement.

I ummed and ahhed over several cameras, and had decided the Panasonic DMC-TZ3 was the one to have. My wife was dubious, as she liked the small size of the Xt, but I pointed out that the majority of the times it was used were in less than ideal conditions for a camera with such a small lens and flash. So she was off to New York for a weekend break, which I couldn't go on, due to work commitments, and she bought the TZ3, and left it boxed for me to play with when she got back.

In the UK, a TZ3 can be found for about 210 GBP, which at the time of writing is about 420 USD!! She found it at a high street electronics store in New York for 220 USD, so about half the UK price, bargain!

They even supplied a US-UK mains adapter so we could use the Panasonic battery charger in the UK. Now that is good service, even if not directly related to the product itself.

Back to the camera...

It is very solidly built, with a nice weight to it. It is bigger than the Xt, mainly in depth (front to back), but still pocketable but not as discretely as the Xt, hence the "(Almost) Pocket" title. Then again that x10 zoom has to go somewhere.

It is a nice big lens on the front, so low light performance should be better than the Xt, which was the main point of this camera, however the flash lives behind a disappointingly small lens, in fact it is smaller than the flash of the Xt which was a surprise.

The most eye catching feature is the huge LCD screen on the back, all 3 inches of it! compare to the 1.5 inch Xt screen. The Xt had an optical viewfinder, but rarely used it. I had thought it would be good idea to eke out more battery life, but with the TZ3 there isn't the choice. Often the problem with LCD screens comes when trying to use them in strong sunlight. It hasn't been a problem with the TZ3, as discovered on a recent trip to Milan, Italy. The viewfinder has three modes to help: Off, Power LCD and High Angle. The mode names are a little misleading, as Off means normal brightness, Power LCD boosts the brightness for use in bright sunlight and High Angle is even brighter still, which helps when trying to see the screen at a odd angle, like for instance holding the camera over your head to shoot over a crowd of people.

For people like me who just want to take snaps, there are plenty of picture taking modes, from very basic simple modes to scene modes, which gives you settings from portrait to underwater. No professional settings ability here, but then I don't believe this is camera that professionals would choose anyway. Personally I just want a camera that I can switch on, take a picture and switch off again. The more the camera does for me the better.

It switches on in under 2 seconds, which is a massive improvement on the Xt, which feels glacial now, when it works at all! I was quite impressed with how quickly the lens mechanism of the TZ3 moves out into the ready position. A quick snap can be made in about a second or so, once the camera is on. As usual giving the camera time to pre-focus can often result in better pictures.

Battery life is good in comparison to the Xt too, taking about three times as many shots on a charge. A quick search online for replacement batteries reveals that these are cheaper too, so carrying one or two extras is not a bank breaking proposition.

The higher pixel count is obviously going to mean fewer shots on a memory card, however, SD cards are so much cheaper now than when we bought the Xt, so no big problem, and of course being able to reuse the cards we had for the Xt is useful. The TZ3 is also able to use SDHC cards, so cards of 4GB and upwards can be used.

The abilities of the TZ3 have already been useful. All cameras we had used before including the Xt, taking a picture of a group of people at a party or at a restaurant table usual meant a lot of squeezing together. The wide angle performance of the TZ3 has meant the less squeezing together required, and better looking group pictures. A handy tip here is to use the 16:9 picture mode, which increase the frame width even more. Why is this? well the TZ3 has a 8 megapixel sensor, despite being a 7mp camera. So when changing from 4:3 to 16:9 mode, it stays at 7mp, but uses a wider and shorter section of the pixels from the sensor, meaning it has a wider field of view. Naturally this gives good panorama shots as well.

The image stabilisation is quite useful, and I suspect that for most people this will be left on most of the time. It is still no substitute for a tripod though, but minipods are difficult to use, see my niggles.

Well, that's the main features that will be useful to a casual user, now for some niggles:

(1) The tripod mount is right at the left hand end of the camera, which means it doesn't sit sit very well on a light weight minipod, as it tends to try and tip it over. Quite why the mount couldn't be closer to the centre I don't know.

(2) The zoom control is not very smooth. Despite the control being a lever, a bit like a camcorder, it is not graduated, it is still just a switch, so smooth zooms cannot be done. This is not such a problem with photos, but when taking movie clips, it produces jerky results.

(3) Why do such expensive bits of kit come without protective cases? OK we saved a good chunk of money, but even still, would a little pouch be too much to include in the box?

(4) The flimsyness of the battery hatch lock worries me somewhat, especially as the battery must be taken out for charging. There are no charging contacts on the bottom of this camera.

(5) The tiny flash creates very sharp shadows around subjects in an enclosed space. Say for instance taking pictures of somebody a few metres away from the camera with a wall a further few metres behind them. The subject will be surrounded by a strong shadow. This is not something I've noticed with the Xt, so I can only assume that despite the smaller size, the TZ3's flash is actually considerably more powerful.

(6) The worst problem I have encountered whilst using the camera was when the Kingston 1GB SD-card was full. After the final shot had been taken, and the camera reported the card as full, it was not possible to even review pictures. The problem manifested itself by displaying random pictures in the picture review grid blacked out. I was looking for frames to delete to create a few spaces for more pictures, and started deleting some pictures that I thought had been taken in the dark and showed nothing useful. I then realised I had deleted several of these, and started to realise there were more dark pictures than there should be, especially those that were in between daylight pictures taken on the same day. Although deleting the pictures had created some space, the picture review function didn't start working properly after a few pictures had been removed. So I shut the camera down, and waited until I could use a computer to investigate the card. On putting the card into a card reader on an Apple PowerBook, the card behaved perfectly normally, and apart from the pictures I had deleted, I was able to import all other pictures without a problem. I returned the card to the camera and executed a "Delete-All" and it returned to normal. The important thing here is to highlight a potentially useful tip... "Do not allow the card to become full, always leave say 5 pictures empty, so that you will be able to review the pictures properly and remove some if necessary."

Added 5th October 2007
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I discovered another annoyance with the TZ3 last weekend I thought I'd share. I had the pleasure to go ballooning, and as well as pictures, I thought I'd take a few video clips as well. Guess what? When you're filming a video, the zoom controls stop working! So I couldn't take a video that started with me and my wife in the balloon, and then pan over the side of the basket and down, and then zoom into my parents watching us from the ground. How annoying is that? You have to choose the zoom you want first, and then start the recording. If you need to change the zoom, you have to stop the recording, change it and start again. Hardly a good way to create smooth videos!