Very good choice for a little extra money
Written: Sep 23 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Wide angle lens, stabilization works great
Cons: Delicate lens cover means a camera case is a necessity
The Bottom Line: As long as you treat this camera well, you will not be sorry.
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| kanling's Full Review: Cobra MR-HH400X VP Marine VHF Value Pack |
I have had the Lumix TZ3 for about a month now and have given it a decent workout, taking a wide range of pictures... outdoor & indoor, different lighting and scenes, etc.
I bought the camera for its wide angle lens (28 mm equiv). I have never liked standard cameras (35mm equiv) because they don't have a wide enough field of view for indoor pictures. The lens on this camera gives just a little bit of extra field of view so that more of the room can be visible in the photo or so that you can fit a larger group of people in the photo.
My requirement for a wide angle lens substantially limited my options for cameras. I only noted some older Lumix, a Samsung, and one or two Canon cameras having the capability. Nevertheless, this camera is a good choice even if it had a lot of competitors.
I like this camera because:
-Wide angle to 10X zoom means it will work for almost everything
-has a rechargable battery and comes with an international charger
-photo quality is quite good
-electronic menus are reasonably easy to navigate and understand without referring to the manual (I am not anything more than an amateur)
-battery life is reasonable and the battery doesn't go down too much when the camera is off
- The stabilization works great! Even holding the camera freehand at maximum zoom (which is zoomed in quite a bit) the pictures turn out sharp. Last spring, I used a friend's camera with a lower power zoom, rested the camera on a fence, and I still got blurry pictures just because of my slight hand motion as I tried to balance the cam on the fence. So, I am delighted with the performance of the Lumix stabilization.
- The camera comes with a software CD, but I am happy that I didn't need to use it. When you plug the camera into a PC with the USB cable, it shows up as a removable disk drive and you can drag and drop the picture files easily. My mother got a Kodak camera a couple of years ago as a gift and it required proprietary software to download pictures to the PC and the proprietary software was difficult to use, tended to take over the computer, and frequently crashed. I didn't even look at the software supplied with the Lumix... I think it is photo editing software in case you don't have something else already.
Bad things... The automatic lens cover is very delicate and I suspect would get broken if the camera were allowed to be carried without protection. I bought a decent camera case and I think it will be fine. But, it would be nicer if I could just toss the cam in my backpack unprotected and not have to worry about it. Also, the manual is not very well written. The cam has a lot of good features that I think I could use, but the manual does a poor job of explaining when those features are appropriate to use and exactly how they work (I'm talking about things like shutter and exposure control, white balance and stuff like that.) I think I could find out more by searching the internet.
Some tips I have: Use a high speed SD card with the camera, not just a standard speed one if you want to use the camera for videos at 30 frames/sec. The manual makes this recommendation. I used the SanDisk Ultra II and it works fine. Note also that the zoom feature doesn't work during video recording. You have to set the zoom to what you want prior to recording.
The camera is available in Silver, Black, and Blue (each with a different model suffix). The black and blue versions have kind of a matte finish that feels slightly grippy.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 320.00
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Epinions.com ID:
kanling
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Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 1 member
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