12 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
Delighted with my purchase!
Date of Review: Nov 22, 2006
The Bottom Line: Pocket size, great fun and easy to use yet has adjustments if desired. Optical Zoom is absolutely excellent. High Quality Pictures.
I purchased this camera about two months ago to replace a Nikon D50 Digital SLR. Although a beautiful camera, I found the Nikon was too big for my needs and I wanted a camera with great optical zoom without the need to change lenses. I also own a Olympus C-5060 which is in storage suffering from the dreaded mode-dial problem.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1 comes with 10x optical zoom in a small package which really is so convenient. I find I am taking a lot more photos and have a lot more interest in photography. The layout of the controls are perfect. It has lots of features, feels great to hold, strong and has a real quality feel to it.
The 10x zoom is absolutely fantastic and one of the main reasons I saw for purchasing this camera. On the mode-dial, it has the movie mode, macro mode, normal picture mode, review mode, simple mode then two other modes which the user can preset to a variety of different circumstances such as underwater (marine case needed) baby, snow, aerial photo, beach, starry sky, fireworks, candle light, party, food, self portrait, night scenery, night portrait, sports, scenery, soft skin, and portrait. If you are interested in making adjustments to white balance, shutter speed, af modes etc etc, you can do so via the software menu.
The movie mode is brilliant. I had read that slow sd cards gave a jittery playback with this camera so I selected a Sandisk Extreme III 1 Gb sd card and find the read/write is very fast and behaves flawlessly when creating and playing back movies.
The camera has a large 2.5 inch display which is very clear. The camera does not have a view finder and that takes a bit of getting used to. The battery seems to last for a long long time before needing a recharge. The recharger is light and compact and plugs directly into the wall. The camera is obviously designed for the traveller as there are software settings specifically for making a record of your holiday.
The software that comes with the camera is the Lumix Simple Viewer which has the less experienced user in mind and enables the user to store, view and print photos from the camera, computer or memory card. In addition to the Lumix Simple Viewer Software is the Panasonic Photofun Studio which is also very limited and aimed at the less experienced user enabling the user to resize, convert, rotate images, categorize images etc. I find the software a little inadequate for me and prefer to use Photoshop Elements or more advanced software that can adjust brightness, contrast, colour etc.
I am very happy with the quality of the photos I have taken and highly recommend this camera.
