The popular Panasonic Lumix FZ50 gets reviewed today by Photopurity. Although the FZ50 has been out on the market for quite some time, (released back in 2006), it remains an attractive option in the ultra zoom market. Its 12x Optical zoom may be a bit antiquated by the more modern standards of 18x or even Olympus’ new 26x Optical monster, the SP-590 UZ, but the FZ50 is still a sharp performer and commands a respectable price on the various retailer’s sites out there. The 10 megapixels is plenty of resolution for almost any application, we’ve printed some lovely 20×30 prints from the FZ50 without a noticeable degradation in print quality.
Zoom
The now weak point of the FZ50 is still one of its strongest points, the FZ50 has a great optical zoom that can be manually adjusted by twisting the barrel. This is no electronic motorized “fly by wire” gimmick, you are actually adjusting the zoom by hand. This allows for a much much faster response time than any Point and Shoot camera, some of which have motorized lens that take forever and a day to extend out to their full range. This means you can frame and get your zoom just right in a very short amount of time thus giving extra time to the focusing and getting your picture just right.
Image Quality
A lot of factors go into making up image quality. Sharpness, noise (or lack thereof rather), color reproduction, etc. The FZ50 does a fine job here of producing a very usual picture here. The sharpness is admirable albeit not as sharp as a DSLR with a quality lens, still we’re comparing apples to oranges there. Sufficient to say, the FZ50 job does as good as any Point and Shoot camera we’ve tested. The Panasonic FZ50 won’t win any awards for its low noise levels however. Its recommended you keep it set below ISO 400 as anything above that begins to noticeably degrade the quality. You can experiment and try to find what works for you but to keep that sharpness in your pictures you’re going to want to tone down the ISO whenever possible. The Panasonic engine to reduce the noise in the picture is classic example of taking a sledge hammer to the problem, it smears details considerably and you lose a lot in your picture. Other than that, the FZ50 produces consistent reliable images with good overall appeal.
Ergonomics
The FZ50 looks like a DSLR. It’s not, but it looks and feels like one. As such, we found the camera to sit very comfortably in the hand and not feel excessively heavy. It is heavy for a point and shoot camera but compared to an actual DSLR its quite manageable. There are two dials for setting you exposure (shutter speed and another for aperture) when in manual or program mode. The inclusion of two dials as opposed to just one was markedly a more comfortable setup to use than the Fujifilm s100fs for example.
Battery Life
Battery life was good but not exceptional. Several hundred pictures without using flash, much less if you turn on the on camera flash. We always recommend that you purchase an extra battery to have a backup for your FZ50 in case you forget to charge or it runs down faster than you expect. We recommend the same for your SD card as you never know when you might lose your primary and need a backup. Just makes sense.
Verdict
The FZ50 is an excellent camera for the money. If you’re not ready to plunk down the cash for a DSLR this is about as close as you can come in a point and shoot model. To achieve the 12x optical zoom the FZ50 offers in a DSLR Lens would probably cost as much as the FZ50 by itself, not to mention the camera body. As long as you are aware of the ISO limitations and can live with that then we strongly recommend buying.
Editor’s Note: This review is much more brief than our coming reviews will be, however, in our efforts to “catch” our records up to date we wanted to at least get this information out on the site until we can take the time to be more thorough and exact in our practical reviews.
