HWM Gold Award - LUMIX DMC-FZ30

October 2005 (HWM) by NG CHONG SENG - The latest flagship of Panasonic's digital cameras is the DMC-FZ30. Megapixel-count has been bumped up to eight (five in the FZ20); and a new, higher capacity (730mAh) battery claims an improved performance of 280 images (up from 240) according to the CIPA standard. Other physical redesigns include a slightly bigger body and deeper handgrip, a larger mode dial, separate command dials for shutter speed and aperture (ala SLR style), the addition of an AE Lock button, the relocation of the macro mode switch to the focus mode switch on the lens barrel, a dedicated one-shot focus button, as well as more logical tripod mount and card door placements, among others. The number of scene modes has also been upped from nine to 14, and users now have the ability to record in the RAW file format (a fast card really helps here).

One of the major improvements of the FZ30 is the inclusion of a mechanically-linked, manual zoom ring. Optical zoom remains at 12x (equivalent to 35 - 420mm on a 35mm film camera) but maximum aperture range is now f/2.8 - f/3.7 instead of f/2.8 throughout as in the FZ20. However, the non-extending zoom lens design contributes significantly to the camera's sub-one second startup time. The 55mm lens thread also means that you can attach filters directly onto the lens. At the rear of the camera, we found an improved LCD monitor. At 2.0 inches, it has a much higher resolution of 235K pixels, and its twistable design gives you more flexibility during picture framing at awkward positions. Other features include an enhanced electronic viewfinder, 9 selectable AF points, a single-point high-speed AF mode, and VGA-size movie shooting at 30FPS using a 9-pixel mixed readout. If you need more magnification and are willing to sacrifice image size, you can get ‘extra optical zoom’ simply by switching to a smaller 5MP or 3MP image resolution. This extra zoom is achieved by using a smaller area of the sensor. At 5MP, you will get up to 15.3x optical zoom (535.5mm); while at 3MP, you will get up to 19.1x (668.5mm). In essence, this ‘extra optical zoom’ is similar to cropping the center portion of the 8MP image. It just saves you an extra step by doing it in-camera. Interestingly, the FZ30 will gradually revert to a larger CCD area towards the wide-angle end in order to still give you a 35mm focal length. But in order to achieve the smaller resolution that you have chosen, there will be file compression. As expected, Panasonic's MEGA O.I.S is featured here as well.

We were pleased with the extremely fast AF response of the camera and the pleasing colors it reproduced. Low light focusing was snappy, shutter lag was negligible, and purple fringing was minimal. Slight barrel distortion was observed though. The only real gripe we had was the high noise level, especially from ISO 200 onwards. If you like to print your photos big, we suggest running them through some noise reduction programs first. If you can live with this extra step of post-processing work, then the FZ30 is a near perfect, long zoom camera to own.

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