eliaszuniga
Active member
FZ7 Review:
While certainly not a camera for professionals, Panasonic’s new FZ7 can be a wonderful addition to the birder on a budget. I recently (March 21, 2006) purchased one new from www.beachcamera.com for $346.00 I’ve bought equipment from them before, and had another pleasant experience. Anyway, on to the equipment itself…
Like I said earlier, the FZ7 will not provide professional grade photos of birds – only an SLR can do that. It is a 6 megapixel “ultra zoom” with 35 mm equivalent of 36-432 mm in an increasingly crowded market segment. (Competitors include Canon’s S2 (and upcoming S3) and Sony’s H1 (and upcoming H2 and H3), and even Kodak’s P850.) While all three are image-stabilized 12X zooms, what really sets the camera apart from the others (at least for birders’ sake) is the EZ zoom feature. This is essentially in-camera cropping of the image to provide more “optical zoom,” much as one would crop an unwanted section of a photo in Photoshop or something similar. This enables the camera to go from 12X zoom at 6 megapixels to 16.5X at 2.5 megapixels. (35 mm equivalent of 590 mm!) Even at this reduced resolution, the pictures are certainly good enough for on screen viewing, or for 4X6 photos. NOTE: EZ Zoom is not the much maligned (and justifiably maligned, IMO) digital zoom, which greatly degrades the image quality when used. While many may favor the cropping that can be done in post processing on a computer at home, EZ Zoom may be preferable because it helps you better frame the bird and lets the camera’s auto settings (white balance, focus, etc.) adjust to the zoomed in bird. (There are conversion lenses available that can increase the zoom even more, (and degrade picture quality somewhat) but I’ve not tried them.) Even when fully extended, (at almost 600 mm), the built in optical image stabilization (better than digital stabilization) works very well and makes it easy to have blurry pictures nearly non-existant. Other features of considerable interest to birders are that the startup time is quite fast, and that it has many manual and automatic/scene mode settings. Since I’ve only had it for 10 days, I’ve not yet begun to use anything but the automatic settings. The focus works very well even at the telephoto end, whereas I had trouble with the autofocus of Canon’s S2 when I tried it at a store. It also has a great battery life – I took it on a three hour birdwalk today, took over a 150 photos, and the battery still showed “full.” Another possible benefit (though much more subjective) of the FZ7 is its size; although it is an ultrazoom, it is still relatively small, but just a little larger than its predecessor, the FZ5, and much smaller than its more expensive sibling, the slr-sized FZ30, the FZ7 is certainly small enough to take on a three hour birdwalk along with your full size binos. (The FZ30, by the way, has the EZ Zoom up to 19X!)
In general, this camera has received generally mixed reviews, the main criticism being its noise. I have found the noise to be perfectly acceptable, especially in the morning light which is when I use it the most. Unless the bird sits up for you from a few feet away, in perfect light and in a perfect pose, you probably won’t get a Wildbird cover with it. What it will do, however, is provide an excellent log of the birds you see throughout your birding day, and help you record those you don’t know for easy later identification. Considering its price, its potential, and the equivalent cost of similar equipment in the SLR market, the FZ7 is a wonderful value. I score it an 8. For great reviews on it, check www.dcresource.com and www.dpreview.com. I'll include here some photos of a hawk at 1x and 16.5x to give you an idea of the zoom, as well as a nice one of a Western Bluebird, all taken today all without retouching. (Unfortunately, the hawk has bad backlighting, but you can at least get an idea of the zoom.)
While certainly not a camera for professionals, Panasonic’s new FZ7 can be a wonderful addition to the birder on a budget. I recently (March 21, 2006) purchased one new from www.beachcamera.com for $346.00 I’ve bought equipment from them before, and had another pleasant experience. Anyway, on to the equipment itself…
Like I said earlier, the FZ7 will not provide professional grade photos of birds – only an SLR can do that. It is a 6 megapixel “ultra zoom” with 35 mm equivalent of 36-432 mm in an increasingly crowded market segment. (Competitors include Canon’s S2 (and upcoming S3) and Sony’s H1 (and upcoming H2 and H3), and even Kodak’s P850.) While all three are image-stabilized 12X zooms, what really sets the camera apart from the others (at least for birders’ sake) is the EZ zoom feature. This is essentially in-camera cropping of the image to provide more “optical zoom,” much as one would crop an unwanted section of a photo in Photoshop or something similar. This enables the camera to go from 12X zoom at 6 megapixels to 16.5X at 2.5 megapixels. (35 mm equivalent of 590 mm!) Even at this reduced resolution, the pictures are certainly good enough for on screen viewing, or for 4X6 photos. NOTE: EZ Zoom is not the much maligned (and justifiably maligned, IMO) digital zoom, which greatly degrades the image quality when used. While many may favor the cropping that can be done in post processing on a computer at home, EZ Zoom may be preferable because it helps you better frame the bird and lets the camera’s auto settings (white balance, focus, etc.) adjust to the zoomed in bird. (There are conversion lenses available that can increase the zoom even more, (and degrade picture quality somewhat) but I’ve not tried them.) Even when fully extended, (at almost 600 mm), the built in optical image stabilization (better than digital stabilization) works very well and makes it easy to have blurry pictures nearly non-existant. Other features of considerable interest to birders are that the startup time is quite fast, and that it has many manual and automatic/scene mode settings. Since I’ve only had it for 10 days, I’ve not yet begun to use anything but the automatic settings. The focus works very well even at the telephoto end, whereas I had trouble with the autofocus of Canon’s S2 when I tried it at a store. It also has a great battery life – I took it on a three hour birdwalk today, took over a 150 photos, and the battery still showed “full.” Another possible benefit (though much more subjective) of the FZ7 is its size; although it is an ultrazoom, it is still relatively small, but just a little larger than its predecessor, the FZ5, and much smaller than its more expensive sibling, the slr-sized FZ30, the FZ7 is certainly small enough to take on a three hour birdwalk along with your full size binos. (The FZ30, by the way, has the EZ Zoom up to 19X!)
In general, this camera has received generally mixed reviews, the main criticism being its noise. I have found the noise to be perfectly acceptable, especially in the morning light which is when I use it the most. Unless the bird sits up for you from a few feet away, in perfect light and in a perfect pose, you probably won’t get a Wildbird cover with it. What it will do, however, is provide an excellent log of the birds you see throughout your birding day, and help you record those you don’t know for easy later identification. Considering its price, its potential, and the equivalent cost of similar equipment in the SLR market, the FZ7 is a wonderful value. I score it an 8. For great reviews on it, check www.dcresource.com and www.dpreview.com. I'll include here some photos of a hawk at 1x and 16.5x to give you an idea of the zoom, as well as a nice one of a Western Bluebird, all taken today all without retouching. (Unfortunately, the hawk has bad backlighting, but you can at least get an idea of the zoom.)