PANASONIC LUMIX DMC-FZ50





With Sony's new DSLR camera offered in the Singapore market already at three different price ranges, Panasonic just announced a good digicam to give the 10.1 megapixel market a good fight. Although this is not a DSLR, the features are great enough to give you a second consideration.

Sony's First Digital SLR (body only) DSLR-A100/B S$1,499.00

with 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 LENS DSLR-A100K/B S$1,799.00

with 18-70mm F3.5-5.6 & 75-300mm F4.5-5.6 DSLR-A100W/B S$2,099.00

I saw the preproduction photos and they are extremely normal digicam standard. I don't know whether the final production ones will prove me wrong otherwise but they have to improve if they want any interest from the photography lovers.

Well, back to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50, it can take the photos at 3 different ratios! 4:3, 3:2 and 16:9. Interesting! It also has a special movie clip at 848X480 (16:9) in 30 or 10fps. This will probably be the first camera to give my 17 inch wide screen Dell laptop a 100% full screen shot!

Then, as always the famous f/2.8 Leica DC VARIO-ELMARIT lens at 12X optical zoom (equivalent to 35mm to 420mm with a 35mm film camera) is impressive enough to get me drooling whole day long. Leica, forever famous to be the chosen len maker used for the earliest space missions of Apollo, including the first moon landing.

The MEGA OIS image stabilizing system and the ISO sensitivity range from 80-3200 will be most welcomed. Still, no images to see how impressive the photos will be like and the noise factor involved. There is no reason to be cheated by incredible high ISO sensitivity value if the noise is extremely high. The Venus Engine III is a noise reduction system to remove noise at processing stages. I heard many good things about the MEGA OIS though to combat blurred images from handshake.

I can't wait for a review and the price to be introduced into the market from September 2006. I may consider this. Still, I wonder what happened to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-L1, their very own first DSLR? The news of release is end of this year for the 7.5 megapixel DSLR camera.

Then, there was this announcement of Nikon for a new 10.2 megapixel DSLR in about 2 weeks for more details as the successor to D70/D70s. The keywords are integrating quality and affordability to meet the demands of passionate photo enthusiasts.