Panasonic Lumix® DMC-LZ5 Digital Camera

I received this camera for free as part of a credit card offer, so I hopefully approached it without bias. (I did, however, read a few reviews before I started using it).

I'll start with what I like about the camera. The 6x optical zoom is just fantastic. The camera is pretty much pocket-size (it's no Exilim but it does just squeeze into a shirt pocket). It's FAST. Once you turn on the power switch, you're ready for action in a couple of seconds. Pictures are clear and autofocus is fast. There's a red autofocus helper LED. Macro mode works fairly well (however, as with most other digital cameras I own, I find I get better results by standing off from the subject and using the optical zoom to get "virtually" closer). Movie mode is very nice indeed; I get no artifacting in VGA-resolution movies.

There are a bunch of more or less useless features like sepia tone and b&w - don't bother with them. You'll get better results by taking all the pictures in plain vanilla color and resampling them later.

Now to what I dislike. First, this camera will show up redeye anywhere it can. Apart from this, in standard point-n-shoot, use-the-defaults mode, results are pretty good, _except_ when you look in close at an individual pixel level. Sometimes the camera goes into some kind of weird mode where the picture looks like a paint-by-numbers scene. That's not a very good explanation, perhaps - a better explanation is that it looks as if color resolution has been lost. If you take a 24bpp picture and downsample it to 15bpp without dithering, you'll see exactly what I mean. It's a very strange phenomenon, and I've never seen it on any other camera.

This effect doesn't occur on all shots; it seems to happen mostly on shots that have a wide variety of contrast in them (the occasion where I noticed this first was photographing a snow-white dog sleeping on dark carpet under a desk). You probably won't notice it in an inkjet print of an unprocessed picture from the camera, but if you're cropping and zooming, you'll see what I mean immediately.

Autofocus is also a bit problematic, with a rather unpredictable depth of field. For example, taking flash shots (in fairly strong incandescent light) of myself holding a Cheese Doodle in my mouth and the aforementioned white dog grabbing the other end of it [yes, this is how I while away the long hours when I'm off from work], my face and the dog's face were in excellent focus, but everything past the dog's shoulders was fuzzy; we're talking a foot, at most, of depth. However, in all the outdoor and longer-distance scenes I've shot, autofocus has been fine.

Now to what I ABSOLUTELY HATE and what I consider to be a show-stoppper. I'm sorry to all the reviewers here and elsewhere who are gushing about the ability to use standard AA cells, but this is not a feature to be praised - it's a horrible design flaw. I would never have paid actual money for this camera and that's entirely because of this design "feature".

You see, the problem with this particular camera is that it can ONLY use standard AA cells. This means your choices are limited to:

* Alkaline AAs - nonrechargeable, and don't last long
* Panasonic's proprietary "Oxyride" AAs - nonrechargeable, terribly expensive, hard to find and last somewhat longer than regular alkalines
* lithium AAs - nonrechargeable, also quite expensive, and again have a limited lifespan.
* NiMH rechargeables - okay, they're rechargeable, but they're relatively heavy and they self-discharge REALLY REALLY QUICKLY.

It's just expensive and plain silly to use an energy-hungry appliance like this with disposable batteries of any sort, so as far as I'm concerned this camera is designed for use only with NiMH rechargeables.

The fatal problem with this is that NiMH batteries are always dead when you need them. You can't just charge them up, throw them in your camera bag and expect them to be ready when you need them - you need to care for and nurture them with regular cycles and recharges.

If you're the kind of person who carries a camera around in your bag or pocket for that once-in-a-lifetime random shot of a UFO landing, then this isn't the camera for you - because when the aliens land and you whip out the camera, you'll find the darn NiMH's have self-discharged to nothing.

If you need to have the camera always ready for action then you have to either carry truckloads of disposable, expensive batteries (did someone say environmentally toxic waste?) or you have to remember to cycle and recharge your NiMHs regularly.

Other cameras I own (e.g. Olympus D-540 Zoom) can also operate off two AA cells if that's all you can find locally. But they have the battery compartment design and electronics support for lithium CR-V3 batteries as well, and the rechargeable equivalent versions. You can charge up one of those CR-V3 substitutes and it will still be good for taking pictures after a month of sitting in your pocket.

As far as I'm concerned, a digital camera that cannot use li-ion rechargeables is useless; it puts you in the position of choosing either ongoing expense for batteries, or ongoing time-wasting maintenance headaches dealing with low-tech rechargeable battery chemistries.

Forget this camera (unless it's free) - buy something else.