Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ20

We suspect that Panasonic's Lumix DMC-FZ20 -- clad in either cool black (FZ20K) or shiny silver (FZ20S) -- will soon replace the DMC-FZ10 as a bit of a cult favourite among megazoom aficionados. The new model offers a stunning, optically-stabilised 12X Leica zoom lens that reaches out to 432mm (35mm equivalent), 5-megapixel resolution, and some worthwhile performance improvements. If you love supertelephoto photography, this Panasonic looks like the camera to beat.

Design
With its bulbous, oversize lens, the Panasonic Lumix FZ20 looks like a can of beef stew with a camera welded onto one end. It's also front-heavy; since the right-hand grip is thin and short, the camera feels somewhat awkward to handle. The black-painted, plastic body, which weighs 1.73 kg with its battery and SD card installed, seems adequately constructed with a tolerable heft for a megazoom model.

Although we generally like the placement of the controls, the all-important shutter release is about 1cm too far back, making it moderately uncomfortable to reach. You access most of the camera's features via the Menu button. The menus are easy to understand and quick to navigate with the four-way controller, but there's one bit of control logic that we found annoying: in Aperture- and Shutter-priority modes, you must use the button labeled Exp to switch between modes for setting exposure compensation (the default) and changing the aperture or the shutter speed. It adds an unnecessary button-click to important settings that you should be able to access quickly and directly.

Features
Though the Panasonic FZ20's lens makes the camera look and feel awkward, it is the most remarkable fixed-lens optical system in the digital camera world. It incorporates an optically-stabilised 12X Leica DC Vario-Elmarit zoom, which covers the range from 36mm to 432mm (35mm equivalent). A 12X zoom lens that only goes as wide as 36mm -- especially a Leica -- seems almost a tragedy, but telephoto junkies will rejoice. The optical stabilisation makes the extreme telephoto focal lengths feasible in a digital camera that most people will normally shoot handheld.

The lens opens up to f/2.8 throughout its zoom range, a truly impressive feat. Equally nice, it has a firm but smooth manual-focus ring and a prominent, lens-mounted switch for selecting between auto or manual focus. The autofocus system offers the choice of four different AF-area modes: 9-area, 3-area, single area, and spot. Finally, the lens accepts an accessory .8X wide-angle (DMW-LWZ10) converter and, for those who think 432mm is wimpy, a 1.5X telephoto (DMW-LTZ10) converter.

The FZ20 covers all the exposure bases. In addition to all four standard exposure modes, you can select from nine scene modes. There are three light-metering modes -- Multiple, Center-Weighted, and Spot -- and you can set exposure compensation to plus or minus 2EV or use the 3-shot exposure bracketing function. For white balance, your options are auto, manual, or any of four presets. Light-sensitivity settings include ISO 80, ISO 100, ISO 200, and ISO 400.

The FZ20 stores images on SD/MMC cards, and it can capture JPEGs or TIFFs at six different resolutions and two JPEG compression settings. As with many cameras, you can adjust the contrast, the colour saturation, and the sharpness of your images, but the FZ20 also gives you three levels of adjustment for the amount of noise reduction processing the camera applies, an unusual and potentially useful feature.

In movie mode, the camera can record 30fps, 320 x 240-pixel M-JPEG video with sound. The length of your video clips is limited only by your card's capacity.

Performance
Panasonic touts the performance benefits of the FZ20's Venus II image-processing chip, and our performance testing largely bears out the company's claims. The camera's 4.4-second start-up time is a bit long, but its shot-to-shot time is relatively quick: typically 1.2 seconds with decent light and as little as 1.8 seconds with flash. Even TIFF shots were surprisingly zippy: it took just under 4 seconds from one shot to the next. The fastest burst shooting mode snapped 3.6 frames per second, for 4 shots, but if you're willing to slow down to about 2fps, the camera can shoot without pausing until your card fills. Shutter delay with autofocus isn't quite so impressive -- 0.9 seconds in all light -- but we measured it at less than 0.1 second using manual focus.

Panasonic also promotes improvements in its Mega Optical Image Stabilisation system, and it does indeed work remarkably well. It delivered sharp, handheld photos with shutter speeds as much as three stops slower than would be possible without the system.

We also consider the FZ20's manual-focus system to be one of the best among consumer digital cameras. The focus ring feels responsive and precise, and the camera magnifies the center portion of the image to help you judge sharpness. The zoom works relatively quickly and quietly, with reasonably precise control. The autofocus is moderately fast, and is fairly decisive in low light.

Though not the best of its kind, the FZ20's electronic viewfinder looks crisper and smoother than the norm. The 2-inch LCD is also fairly sharp and works adequately in all light conditions. Both show approximately 100 per cent of the actual scene.

The maximum range of the flash is approximately 3.5m at ISO 100. If you set the ISO for Auto and activate the flash, the camera can set a sensitivity as high as ISO 400, which could easily produce disappointingly noisy results. There is a standard, non-dedicated hotshoe for external flashes.

In our formal battery tests, we obtained 520 shots (50 per cent with flash) from a single charge of the camera's 680mAh lithium-ion battery. Our experience in the field, however, indicates that the zoom and image-stabilisation operations of the lens can cut battery life substantially.

Image Quality
The FZ20 produces very good images -- with a caveat or two. Our test photos looked as sharp and detailed as those produced by the best 5-megapixel models. It renders colours quite accurately, and as such, less vividly than many other consumer digicams produce at their default settings. Exposures were generally good.

At default settings, there is a hint of electronic noise in images shot at ISO 80 and ISO 100, but it's of little consequence. Noise is about average at ISO 200, which is to say, easily visible at high magnification, and it's somewhat uglier than average in shadows at ISO 400. At ISO 80 and ISO 100, the high setting on the adjustable noise reduction slightly reduced the already modest noise without any discernable damage to sharpness. At ISO 200 and ISO 400, the three noise reduction levels produced increasingly visible differences in our photos, with higher settings reducing both noise and sharpness.

The Leica lens produces remarkably little barrel distortion at its widest setting and essentially no distortion at more telephoto settings; another very impressive feat. Plus, the lens displays extremely good edge-to-edge sharpness across the frame, and photos show almost no purple fringing. It does, however, produce moderate red/blue chromatic aberration at telephoto settings, and we noted a similar red colour fringing around highlights in many of our shots.

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