Panasonic has just unveiled the Lumix DMC-FZ28 digital still camera. Panasonic has coupled a 27mm to 486mm telephoto, wide-angle, and image stabilized Leica DC VARIO-ELMARIT lens with 18x optical zoom. FZ28 has a sensor resolution of 10.1, effective megapixels from a 1/2.33″ RGB CCD image sensor. This digital still image monster features a Venus Engine IV which is capable of taking images at a whopping rate of 13 frames per second. FZ28 has great power efficiency as we were able to snap off 450 images in a single battery charge. When we tested FZ28 in extreme dark conditions, the image quality was not hampered as FZ28 is capable of capturing images up to extreme sensitivity of ISO 6400. Other great feature is that there is an option for using either an electronic viewfinder or a LCD display, so we can select whatever we are more comfortable with while capturing the images. Panasonic has 0.20” Electronic View Finder with over 200 thousand pixels and yields a 100% field of view. LCD is 2.7” diagonally with 230 thousand pixels and it also yields 100% field of view.
The aperture of FZ28 can be made to vary from f/2.8 to f/4.4. The minimum view distance can be as low as 1cm. The high speed single point autofocus feature is complimented by multi-area focus system. FX28 also has a face detection capability of 15 faces per image. There are also many features available after detecting the face of a person like its possible to make the FZ28 autofocus on a single person even when he is moving around the scene.
ISO sensitivity ranges from 100 to whopping 6400 in high sensitivity mode. Shutter speed can also be controlled manually. There are also many preset white balancing modes along with the manual mode. FZ28 also has an intelligent exposure system which adjusts itself according to the scene and thus captures natural-looking images and also suppresses blocked shadows and blown highlights. There are 37 screen modes available. Thus, there is one screen mode for every situation that you can imagine, so even you don’t know the correct manual settings you can just select an appropriate screen mode according to the scene.
Like every good camera, FZ28 also has a red eye reduction feature. The most interesting feature of this camera is that there is an image leveling function which detects whether the camera was tilted at the time of image capture and FZ28 crops and enlarges the image if the camera was tilted. Further, there is an intelligent option available for all novice users. You can just select the intelligent option and camera would automatically adjust the aperture, ISO settings and all other things. Images captured using the intelligent option are as good as those captured by professional photographers.
FZ28 uses secure multi media cards for storing images and it also supports the latest SDHC types. FZ28 has 50MB in-built memory. Connectivity can be established through USB 2.0, NTSC video output, and HD component video output. It has a 710mAh, 7 volt battery. Bundled software includes everything free that you could find from adobe and other image processing companies. Panasonic does not want to increase the cost of the unit on this ground.
