Review of new digital camera (Panasonic DMC-TZ5)

[ASU2003]

I bought a new camera (Panasonic DMC-TZ5) a few days ago and kind of knew going in that there would be noise in the pictures. I just didn't expect so much and it is in every picture, including ones taken in the middle of a bright sunny day outside. It is obvious that they were cheap with the sensor and tried to make it too small and didn't have a good enough f-stop (3.3 vs 2.8 or 2.0), although I didn't test the lower end of the f-stop yet. And I hope it is operator error causing some pictures to come out with a blue tint. I think I had it set for indoor lights and forgot to switch it back for some pictures, but I can't explain why it happened a few times.

I can use the GIMP to despeckle each image, but that takes a while. And it loses some of the detail. I think I have found a good setting to use though.

There are good things about this camera, The zoom is great for a camera this small. It has more detail than my old 5MP camera (the noise was there in my old camera, it was just blurred already or you had to be looking for it). The HD video may be useful, but since my computer isn't powerful enough to play it it doesn't do me much good. It may work on my future Macbook though and I would like not having to carry around a camcorder as well if it will do the job. I would need to buy a few 16 GB SD cards and a new hard drive if I got into that. And there are some good settings that were missing from my previous camera.

Well, I just looked at some sample images from the other camera, and it has the same issue. It may not be quite as pronounced, but with my post-processing, I can get my pictures to turn out better than the other cameras. I guess the big test will be what happens Halloween night. Night-time pictures will be hard I think. But, I guess I will be ok with it. Hopefully, image quality will be the next thing camera makers focus on instead of how many megapixels can they cram into a small sensor.

Actually, they will probably come out with a new camera a few days from now that fixes all of these problems knowing my luck.

(It is a nice picture considering how far away I am, but that is the only place I have used this camera at. Besides some other pictures that would give away where I lived or who I am... This picture is cropped down to that size, I wish the zoom was that good But I didn't do any corrections in the first image. )