Treated myself

It’s been a while, so today a trip into town as prefer when spending a few bob to buy from a shop, and fortunately John Lewis in town had one in stock and it was only £8 more than online, factor in postage and near as darn it identical in price terms.

So, what have I brought? A Panosonic Lumix FZ-38. First impressions trying out all the different modes and options, for a ‘bridge’ camera it really does seem to do the job, and with the bonus of HD video as well to boot. I’m enjoy the face recognition thing, with automatic ‘rating’ on the ones you store so that in a large group of people the camera will focus on the ones it knows about - if you tell it to, really spooky stuff !!

There’s a fair amount of noise at certain settings, although when it’s taking images at 4000x3000 or therabouts depending on chosen aspect ratio, it’s really not going to be noticable on your standard home photo printer.

It’s intuitive, the real test was place it in the hands of Michael in the shop and see if he can figure out the settings. He’s kind of techie minded enough to understand the options and was setting up manual focus within minutes :smiley:

Came with a standard 1year warranty, Panasonic site has an offer for the 2year extended for free at the moment, they didn’t have the forms in the shop but a quick call should sort that tomorrow.

I’ve been hanging on for ages, wanting to replace properly the Dimage that I sold on and I think I’ve finally found a camera that I consider to be a decent replacement/upgrade. The punch will come when I throw more challenging shots at it, mainly muddy ones :smiley:

DT.

Good choice.
I bought a Panasonic/Lumix FZ-50 a couple of years ago and never regretted it.

Yes I have taken quite a few really bad photos with it but even with a camera costing five times as much I would wager the fat finger on the button would still take a poor picture.

Post up some pictures

Lucky you, would you mind sending it to me so I can determine if I would want one too!
Promise to send it back after a thorough review.

Very nice bit of kit, no crossover design is going to give you noiseless images - the CCD is small compared to a DSLR. Best answer if you need high quality is to shoot RAW at ISO 100, F5.6-F8 - as you rightly say for normal images the noise won’t be an issue. This tends to be the “sweet spot” for mid-range digital cameras, was also the spot for mid-range 35mm cameras. I guess because for a standard focal length, well lit scene and subject at “normal” distance this is the setting that most auto modes would pick.

If you want to shoot raw (which I recommend) , have a look at the free download of Lightroom3.0 Beta2.
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs_lightroom3

Apart from the library, rather cool slide show and web features it has good exposure manipulation software with clarity, sharpening, crop, grad filters, a few healing brushes etc. It appends a ‘recipie’ file to each photo rather than modifying the raw file so you can always go back. When you are happy, export the best as jpgs or to web.

One of the set of rather good tutorials here which show some of its capability. Or you can simply adjust the overall photo.
Best to shoot underexposed in raw, underexposed can be recovered but blown highlights can’t.

Whilst sorting the photos to post in DT’s Productive Day thread in the cantina I thought I might show what can be done with a raw file that you can’t do so easily with a jpg

Here’s the as shot photo. I wanted to take without flash and knew the outside looking through the window would blow out so I exposed for the outside light leaving the room underexposed by about 2 stops. Yes, the sky is blown away but that would have been a step too far.

Add some fill light and a touch of recovery - which has left it a bit washed out.

So chuck in a bit of vibrance and clarity to bring it back to how I remember it. Export as a jpg and there we have it. 60 sec work, no masking, no brushes, no colour balancing - Simples.:slight_smile:

In Lightroom, the raw file isn’t changed, just a recipe overlay added so if I don’t like it I can always reset and start again or just tweak what I have. All without losing any quality.

cool - I’ve got the standard program that came with the camera and tbh it’s a bit on the clunky side. I’ll give lightroom a shot :slight_smile:

DT.

Could that be Balrogs handiwork :smiley:

Could be. It has the hallmark of not being finished off :chuckle:

Know what you mean. I treated myself to a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ7, and I’m well impressed.