Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55 reviewed

Panasonic first took the wraps off its Lumix DMC-FX55 camera back in July, but reviews of it have been fairly slow in coming, with the folks PhotographyBLOG seemingly among the first to offer their take. On the whole, they seem to have been mightily impressed with the camera, and especially its better than usual 28mm wide-angle lens, quick focusing, and its "Intelligent Auto" mode, which they say provided "great results in most situations." They also found the overall image quality to be improved over previous generation Lumix models, with the camera's new image stabilization system a welcome addition. On the downside, the camera apparently proved to be less adept at higher ISO settings, with the ISO 800 and 1600 settings virtually useless due to noise. The seems to have been an acceptable compromise, however, as PhotographyBLOG goes as far as to call it a "fantastic" point-and-shoot camera, and giving it an impressive 4.5 out of 5 rating.

[LordAdmiral @ Sep 14th 2007 4:49PM]

Pfft. There's no compromise between sensor noise and quality of the wide angle lens. These are two mutually exclusive concepts in photography.

Sensor noise (which results in unuseable ISO800/1600) is a result of using CCD chips that are too small. Small chips have denser and smaller pixels, which means the surface area for light gathering is reduced per pixel, which means higher snr. That's what happens when you try to cram 8MP into a 1/2.5" CCD for marketing purposes. The (discontinued) fuji f30/f31fd uses a 1/1.7" CCD and is only 6MP. Its ISO1600 is comparable to that of entry-level DSLR's.

A good lens is a good lens, which is great.

But there's no reason why Panasonic couldn't put in a 6MP/7MP 1/1.6"/1/1.7" CCD instead of the ridiculous 8MP 1/2.5" CCD to actually produce decent high ISO images. Except for marketing purposes. A high MP sounds so much better, and if they actually increased the CCD size and reduced the MP, they'd be cannibalizing their own entry-level DSLR sales. Note it's the same for every other company, including Canon, Nikon, and Olympus. Put the good wide-angle lens on top of a good sensor, and it'd be an amazing camera.

So no, the drawbacks are not a compromise. It's a business decision and has nothing to do with limitations in technology.

[theycallmetak @ Sep 14th 2007 6:21PM]

"...less adept at higher ISO settings, with the ISO 800 and 1600 settings virtually useless due to noise"

What Point and Shoot compact handles anything close to ISO 800 without noise? Right. Any high ISO mode is more or less a gimmick on a P&S compact as the pixel density on the tiny sensors are so so high, noise is inevitable. Are the results really unusable though? I've seen "unusable" results as 100% blow ups. They look like crap on your monitor. Printed they look like super high ISO images which they're not i.e. 800 looks like 3200! Expecting low noise at high ISO with a pixel dense sensor on a compact camera is a bit unreasonable.

[endless @ Sep 14th 2007 7:06PM]

Lord Admiral:

I mostly agree with you, probably about 95%.

The thing about using a bigger sensor, i think it means you have to use a bigger lens, which is going to compromise size and cost.

But yeah, my dream small digital camera would be a current gen canon G series (the one found in the 7/9 models) with its large 1.8" sensor somewhere around 4-6 megapixels, with a 4-5x wide angle zoom and RAW. that would be an amazing camera.

cheers

[David Chin @ Sep 19th 2007 1:56AM]

It's really too bad that we can't have everything in one compact, perfect digital camera. Anyway, I believe that "Bob" is one of the first FX55 owners to have posted his thoughts and pictures from the camera, which I've summarized at http://www.dpnotes.com/panasonic-fx55-reviews-and-samples/#bob