Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX30 review

Started Sep 4, 2009 | User reviews
Senior MemberPosts: 1,339
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX30 review
Sep 4, 2009

This camera has all (or most of) the buttons in the right place and it's easy to get to everything. Exposure compensation, white balance adjustment (even fine tuning), flash settings, display settings, timer settings... all this stuff is just a few clicks away.

Image quality is good, not great. ISO 400 is usable but nothing special. The lens seems sharp enough from corner to corner, and the image stabilization helps at the telephoto setting. The continuous shooting mode is very good. You can take shots at 2.5fps in a burst of 5 or 7 (depending on your quality setting). In low light I take a burst of shots then pick out the sharpest among them.


My biggest complaint would be about playback. First, it's on the main control dial where it's kinda awkward to access (there's a review button, but you're limited when you use it). Second, scrolling around a zoomed image takes foreeeeever, and third, it lacks a feature to easily compare sharpness between images, something other camera brands provide.

The bottom right Func button has a design flaw where you need to hold it down to get the menu, but that menu is pointless and unused anyway since all the important functions in there have dedicated buttons (or very nearly so, like white balance).

There's low-frequency chroma noise in nearly every image you take (easy to ignore for most people). The overall noise patterns are also pretty ugly when you use the Vivid setting (if you use Natural it turns down the sharpness and makes the noise tougher to see). The flash doesn't expose very well... it's often a trial and error thing where you take a flash shot, see that the subject is overexposed, then turn down exposure compensation and try again.

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