Initial thoughts/pictures with my new camera 56K Warn

Nytmair · Oct 26, 2004

Well a few months ago I dropped my Canon PowerShot S45 on the stairs (i'm still kicking myself for it...) and periodically (and comletely randomly) it would stop working at times, and it seemed to mainly be when I really needed it!!

So this past week I sent the camera back to canon to get checked and fixed if it's cheap enough. I knew I wanted a new camera but wasn't sure what...I wanted something that was more flexible than that thing. My first choice was the rebel, but it was out of my price range. So after tons of research, I narrowed it down to a few choices. One of which my brother recommended, The Panasonic DMC-FZ20.

Here are a handful of pics I just took with my mom's trusty old 1.2MB digi so you can see what it looks like:

After a few visits to the store to play around with it and reading countless positive reviews and random information on the FZ20, last night I bought it, and this morning I bought a 512MB card to go along with it.

So after about a day of having it, and playing with it for a good hour or two outside I can say I'm really happy with this thing

. The zoom (12x optical zoom, and 48x digital zoom) is just amazing. Obviously the digital zoom pixilates the image, but every digital zoom does that...

Here are two sets of pics I put together just to show the zoom. I used 3x becuase that is the optical zoom my Canon had.

The only real complaint that I've come up with so far is the LCD screen. During the day it's awesome, but after dark (i.e. REALLY dark rooms, etc.) it doesn't seem to pic up much lighting, so it is hard to focus and frame the image. Obvioulsy I'm not going to be shooting in pitch black places very often, so that probably won't turn out being a very big issue.

Now some of the things I like about it.... as I mentioned, the zoom is just great compared to my canon. The lens is made by the German company Leica, which is a very high grade photo lens. (The focal lenght for this lens for you 35mm folks is 36mm-432mm) Also, regarding lenses... as of now I can attack 72mm thread filters/lenses to this camera... but I've read many recommendations to buy an adaptor bringing it to a 62mm thread for a couple reasons...including smaller filters are cheaper.

The manual focus is something I really wanted, and this isn't like my own camera where I moved a box around on the screen to focus on a certain object. There is a focus ring on the lens (much like the sony 707/717/828 cameras) where I can manually focus much like an SLR camera.

In my mind this pretty much is a digital SLR, just a little cheaper, with a few minor restrictions compared to the real SLRs.

So to end this long drawn out thing.... here are a few of my first pictures taken with it today: