Reviews for Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ5 5 Megapixel Bridge Camera - Black

...also put it in evaluative mode and use the 9-point AF. That solved the questionable focus problems that I had with the single-point metering, and even better it will switch back to single-point automatically in low light.

this camera is really nice, fast and light, small for the lens and sensor quality that it gives you...the images are not quite as sharp as the ones off my s2, and the images are not quite as photogenic as the sp-500, but it focuses much better in overcast conditions and the lens is much faster than the sp-500, and the burst is much faster and it is much lighter and has a better viewfinder than the s2 though the s2 has a way-faster zoom motor.

It's a good compromise, overall.

If I had a big, bulky DSLR this would be my backup camera, short of getting a pocket point and shoot. You don't give up much in terms of zoom, features, or image quality. With the S2, you might as well just go ahead and get a DSLR. Undoubtedly the lens cap will stay on better :)

...just a little bit less sharp than an s2.

but overall a very good camera.

you have to try not to be too a*nal about these things.

...I got tired of the color noise that gets added when the camera is put in "vivid" mode, it can look blotchy in certain shots and it adds too much distortion to high-zoom shots...I figure that I can always sharpen up an image if I want/need to do that. This results in a slightly "soft" yet accurately-colored shot under wide-angle which becomes pretty crisp under zoom.

This camera, I like it...I have a soft spot for it...even if it's not the best in terms of image quality, the shots are a little too soft for that and the image-customization options are very limited (this was fixed on the fz7)...it definitely requires shooting burst mode as the camera is so light, routinely the first shot is shaky...it definitely likes to be shot at 1/300 or faster, under zoom...

...but it's got a great lens, the 9-point autofocus, a really clean sensor, and it's very fast and takes shots reliably. I have yet to have a problem with the lens. It shoots so nice and fast, even at dusk...almost to dark. It is very user-friendly except for one problem, that exposure button needs to go much lower on the camera, but the solution is to just shoot program. Which works except at night and then shooting manual or shutter-priority is required.

One other minor problem. The viewfinder will put your eye out if you are not careful.

I give this camera an 8.75 out of 10. Just about tied with an s2, better in some ways, not as good in others, nothing serious or major.

s2, fz5 and sp-500 at full zoom, program, iso100, highest resolution mode.

cropped to 640x480 to fit this system :)

...handheld, no IS.

for what it's worth, here's an s4 shot at the same settings.

after a trip to Manhattan with an fz5 and an s4, I can say with good confidence that this is a *great* utility camera.

Not as sharp as I'd like. But I can sharpen the images and get good results.

The big thing in Manhattan is that you have to maximize the depth of field which means shooting f7-f8 with IS on and cranking up the ISO. This camera handles that very well.

Plus it is small, light and easy to handle, nothing shakes or rattles on it, and has 9-zone matrix AF and evaluative exposure that works really well.

It's one "big" weakness is that it is only a 1400 line per inch camera, so when shooting out over the Hudson, say, you'll wish for a little more resolution and sharpness. But 99% of the time it is sharp enough for the job, and you can always put a filter on in post-processing if you really need to.

...I took *both* my s2 and my fz5 up to Manhattan today :) Part 2 of a two-parter, one to compare an a700 to an s4, the other to compare the s2 to the fz5, shooting in and around Manhattan. I knew the s2 would be sharper but I wanted to see how much of a factor the 9-point multi-area focus plus the lighter speed and handling of the fz5 was compared to the limited area adjustment of the focus point plus the heavier weight and bulk of the s2 plus the goofy lenscap was in terms of shooting in and around Manhattan. I knew that both were reasonably competent when shooting around DC or up at the Inner Harbor.

I would have to say that all the weaknesses of the fz5, image-wise, came out today. Not high-resolution in terms of color at the pixel level, certainly that came out when shooting across the Hudson at high zoom, even on wide-angle street shots there was the usual fz5 blotchiness...and it, surprisingly, had more than a little trouble handling high-contrast shots, routinely underexposing them (the fz5 tries to correct the exposure as well as adjust the shooting parameters, and that's a bad thing to do when shooting high-contrast shots). It did reasonably well with shots with a limited contrast, where pixel-level color accuracy was not required. Still, overall, the s2 put the wood to it. When both were pushed hard, even given the limitations of the focus point, the s2 simply gave good shots while fz5 fell down many times in many ways. The s2 is simply sharper, the colors are cleaner at the pixel level, and it has better metering. The fz5 is still good for shooting *down* or away from the sun (so there is not a lot of sunny sky, the buildings are brighter and therefore there is not so much contrast)...keep the sun out of the shot and don't expect too much color accuracy at the pixel level.

...no doubt the fz5 is easier to handle than the s2, and definitely shoots faster, but it's really handicapped by its inability to handle high contrast as well as the s2 does. At least shooting program or Aperture-priority mode.

....please take that last comment with a grain of salt as the per-pixel color accuracy depends a LOT on the Q setting used for the jpeg file.

The fz5 is not a lot worse than the s2 in terms of pixel-level resolution. It's definitely blotchier/more watercolory than the s2. But basically they have the same resolution. The big difference is that the images on the s2 are sharper, and can be sharpened in-camera without adding color noise as the fz5 is very limited in terms of image adjustment and to sharpen the images with vivid instead of standard, that also increases color noise...and that any color noise in the fz5 is obvious compared to the s2, which really does not have any noticable color noise as far as I can tell, while the fz5 is definitely "watercolory". But its biggest problem is that the exposure will "dance". If you shoot at night, the fz5 will try to brighten things up by changing the exposure, if you shoot in bright daylight or high-contrast shots it will darken the shot for you by changing the exposure. It should just change the shutter speed and aperture like the s2 does (assuming that you are using a program mode). But, no...plus, the s2 has more light types for light-matching, the fz5 could use a few more. Shoot the fz5 within its limits and it will give you good shots that you can sharpen if you like. Shoot the s2 within its wider limits and it will give you great shots.

...one more grain of salt :)

Today I was looking for the shots that, last night, were giving me so much worry about the fz5 in terms of its ability to handle high-contrast shots, and gee, half of them were a700 shots.

I was very tired and probably dehydrated too when I wrote those comments last night :)

Anyway, first of all, shooting in the concrete canyons of Manhattan is a tough test for a camera, especially in terms of exposure, and handling high contrast. Some sineh filtering is required to lighten the shots no matter which camera I used, especially shooting towards the sun in really narrow streets, under trees, wherever there was a lot of shade and a bright sky. However still the fz5 has a little more color noise and less sharpness than the s2. The fz5 is just not as flexible as the s2 in terms of setup, but it is a light, fast and easy camera to use, with a good fast lens. It will not give you the sharpest, best-looking shots (hey, after all it is a 5MP 1/2.5" CCD camera) but it will give decent shots that you can work with, with fairly low noise for a non SuperCCD sensor and decent color accuracy and image resolution. Not as good as the s2, but not bad.

...for sure, I am running a sineh filter, to lighten the exposure and bring out dark detail without crunching the highlights, as well as an edge filter to sharpen, on just about all the wide-angle shots that I took in Manhattan in the mid to late afternoon when the sun was hidden by the buildings but the sky was still bright. For the a700, the fz5, and the s2 too.
I just somehow got confused about that when I got back and lost track of which files were from which camera :)
But still, the fz5 is slightly more watercolory and less sharp than either the a700 or s2, especially when the sharpness is up and the saturation down on the two Canons. You can diddle with the Q setting, the jpeg resolution setting, and try to reduce the color noise. But it isn't going to go away entirely, in the fz5. It is not a huge big hairy deal. But you will notice it if you look for it. So I suppose there really is not all that much difference, photographically, between the three cameras, given the slight sharpness advantage of the Canons...but there certainly is a difference in terms of ease of use, speed, weight, and features. The fz5 has the low weight advantage and even more user-friendliness than the a700, with the big zoom and good noise and low-light performance of the s2. The Canons' main advantage is having slightly less color noise than the fz5, and slightly cleaner, crisper shots. The a700s advantage is really the lightweight and small size which leads to easy handling. Again I would say that unless you really need a 12x zoom camera, or something with a flip-and twist LCD, the a700 is the way to go. When choosing directly between the fz5 and s2 you really have to choose between the user-friendliness and light weight of the fz5 and the "gold standard" of crisp shots from the s2. 99% of the time the image will look pretty-much the same and the fz5 would be the better carry due to its much faster shooting speed and lighter weight, multipoint AF and secure lenscap. There'll be that 1% where the s2 will clearly beat the fz5, usually at high zoom where there is a lot of color range and fine detail in the shot and pixel-level color accuracy counts for a lot, plus the true manual control allowing you to change the camera settings much more quickly on the s2 instead of resorting to leaving the fz5 in a program mode (or setting up a shutter speed in S mode and an aperture in A mode and switching between the two when P is not good enough). And that is why I would carry the a700 *and* either the fz5 or s2, depending on what you care about most.

One other thing, in night shooting under streetlighs or lamps, the s2 will give you a nice bluish color, the fz5 will shoot with a brownish "halogen" tint.

...been learning a lot about these things, lately...my latest trick is to shoot them at maximum resolution (I may have said this here already) and then look closely at the images for flaws...the flaws that keep them from looking like photos...

I'm sort of ambivalent, now, on the fz5. I think it's fine for most shots, but it requires some post-processing, definitely some sharpening. I've set the image options on mine to "natural" to try to control the color-blooming in bright light, this gives me images that have the color intensity of a watercolor painting in normal light...but they are not "watercolory" or "pastel". Just very soft. There's unquestionably a lot of noise-reduction in this camera, but you can only see it when you look for fine detail in dark parts of the photos.

But if you are not looking for fine detail, this is a decent camera, it will give you a good, well-controlled shot with no overt, obvious, uncorrectable image flaws (following the theory that when using something that is really overkill for what you are using it for, it will give you quite good results most of the time, like using a scalpel to cut a sausage). Just...a bit big and bulky for the shots that it is good at, compared to other cameras that can take the same shot, while generally-speaking it still won't give you great shots in the situations where a smaller point and shoot won't give a good shot. The IS is still very good and the lens is still very fast and it's still a good, fast light high-zoom camera in a reasonably small package and easy to shoot, and if it wasn't for the IS I'd be thinking of getting a v610 or sp500 instead. Certainly an S2 is a little cleaner with less color-blooming, though they both suffer from excessive noise-reduction.

This one is an f7.1 1/500 ISO100 shot. It came out as soft as butter, one of the few that I had to use a sharpen 32 on to get it to look decent and have any depth. That's a *lot* of sharpening.

the next one...the big red and black thing is supposed to be a boat...shoot it with an sp500 and volia' you have a boat! This is what too much noise-reduction does. It sucks all the life out of your shot. Everything looks "monochromatic". And in certain cases, where there is too much detail both in terms of pixel and color, the effect is just too much to bear. It literally ruins the photo. The orange things are iron supports for a building frame, at full-size they look like they are drawn in with a crayon. Same on the s2. The boat has no depth, no texture, and sharpening won't fix it.

"Monochromatic" is obviously the wrong word...I think the images are better at describing what they look like than I am :)

ok here we go...after shooting around in Greenwich Village Sunday, on a cloudy day, with the sp500, s2 and fz5...I'm pretty convinced of what I said about too much noise-reduction in the s2, and it is especially true in the fz5. The sp500 has moderate noise-reduction and that preserves a lot of detail, it seems to behave like the others at ISO400, boosting signal and luminace noise with a loss of textures and low-level color resolution. But at ISO200 or lower it is the only one of the three that preserves fine detail and texture. Even at ISO50 the s2 has crushing NR, the fz5 even worse, it is almost noise-free at ISO400 and the noise is undetectable to my eyes at ISO80-200, you can imagine how much NR is there at ISO80-200, and that is why the sp500 makes better-looking photos. Then the color is a little more "vibrant" than the s2 and more true to life than the fz5, so under night lights you get great-looking shots too. The downside is that the sp500 flares a little under extreme bright lights reflecting off white or metallic surfaces, not as much as the fz5 but still some. The s2 controls color extremes best in these situations while the fz5 is "brassy" and the sp500 is a little "peachy". But in almost all other light, shooting ISO80-200, the sp500 is clearly the most photo-realistic of the bunch. As it gets too dark, as the shot darkens, the textures get dark and the fine detail too dark to see, that advantage goes away, you are left to survive shooting by lights and here the fz5 and s2 can compete effectively. But still, if the light is good, or you shoot from a rest, the sp500 wins again. And again, I am speaking of the difference between leather seats and cloth seats. Sometimes cloth is better. But leather always looks good even when it is not practical. The fz5 is much more of a "throw it in your bag with an extra battery and/or the charger, hit the highway, whip it out and take shots" camera, it even has a great little screen, not too big or too small and with great resolution and brightness giving you a good view of what you shoot (frankly the shots will look better on the camera LCD than on your computer monitor), and I found that it will even fit in my pants pocket, even with that big 12x F3.3 zoom lens. It is by far the fastest of the three in burst mode, even with standard SD and shooting 5MP high-res it will click off 4 shots in no time. At night, shoot it ISO200 in S mode with the IS on and at something around 1/20 and it will do a good job of documenting your travels for you. I fully admit that there are times and there are shots that you will have the fz5 and know that you will need the s2 at least to get a good-looking shot, mainly shooting faraway, reflective subjects in bright light. The s2 is a lot more labor-intensive, bulky and heavy, due the larger size and weight, the flip-out screen and the cheesy lens cap and no guidelines on the viewfinder. Its real benefit is in the flexibility and the fact that it will give you "a decent looking shot under a wide range of conditions". Sort of a "techno"-looking shot, if you can deal with that, but well-controlled. It's high-speed burst is slow enough so that you can click off two-shot bursts with ease. The sp500 is for taking photographs. It has a burst mode but between the slow burst speed and the small cache and slow write to XD you can stall the camera easily just by taking a few bursts in close succession. It is not a "sport camera", even worse ISO400 halves the shot speed (this is one thing that is different about this new sp500 I have, the older ones are not like this). Remember you can buy SD almost anywhere, and only now is a 2GB XD card coming on the market.

Last example fz5 photos :)

Note no close-in crops as there is no point in it with this camera, the detail is not there. Try not to worry about what is not there :)

...downsampled 1/50 ISO100 f2.8 from my car on greenwich avenue, I guess it is...another one from the street, downsampled after sharpening...and some guy I passed on my way to New Jersey.

final comment:)

Ok with this camera the biggest thing is that you have to take the image colors with a grain of salt. At night they're a bit brown; during the day, in bright light, they're a bit orange. In moderate light it's fine.

I have said enough about the loss of fine detail due to excessive NR, but, I think this camera has less detail loss than the s2. Maybe it's just the color thing.

Other than that this is a great little camera. Small, fast, light, very powerful lens, great IS, shoots SD, fast burst. The zoom is a little faster on the s2 but that's it. A very good design.

Not the best camera!

But a good design.

I'm quite happy with it for what it is, and when it breaks and I can't find another one, I won't be happy.

Would I recommend that you buy one?

Probably not. It's just that I have one and I know it well, and had a few extra bucks to keep it.

And...I honestly would have a very hard time recommending any digital camera on the market, right now, to anyone.

As, maybe, you can tell :)

Save your money and get the cheapest camera that you can be happy with, for a start. It's going to be just about as good as one of these $300-$500 cameras. There are some cameras to avoid, I personally would steer well clear of the Panasonic DMC series of cameras (the FZ5 being one of the better ones, with the TZ1 being a disaster) and probably the corresponding Nikons too (S4, CP4800, L1, etc). Same reason: the colors just get funky as the ISO goes up. You really have to go "high-end" with these lines to get good images across the ISO range (for example, try a Nikon coolpix 990, 8400, 8700). I've never tried Sony but I've heard they are pretty good, and I know that Olympus and Fuji generally have good graphics engines in their cameras. Canons I have found to be overprocessed but certainly functional. And, no matter what, you're going to have to practice with it to know how it shoots in various conditions.

The best way to avoid being disappointed in a camera, is to shoot it in a wide range of shots, light conditions and camera settings, and know what you are likely to get when you take the shot. But, you're going to be disappointed because it's not your eye, and it will not give you what you see.

That is the pleasure of shooting a nice high-resolution camera at high zoom. You see things that you did not see when you took the shot. ...but...you will not see much more if it has heavy NR. And with a slow lens you cannot shoot at high zoom with just a handhold, except in very bright light or high ISO...which somewhat defeats the purpose. High ISO means high noise, noise, one way or another, obliterates fine detail.

This camera does not have most of those problems. The only real problems it has is that it is a little bit "fruity" in the colors, it's overfiltered, and it needs extra sharpening because the images are too soft. Other than that it is just great.

The s2 by comparison is just overfiltered but certainly you can kick up the sharpening in the camera. You ought to be able to, because the camera weighs almost twice as much as the fz5. And the colors are more accurate than with the fz5. No question about that. It is just such an awkward camera to carry and to use. Then, the sp500 is lighter and easier to use than the s2, and takes better pictures than either of them.

...trust me....

I finally figured this all out, after 9 months of trying to sort this out. I ended up right where I started. The sp500 was the 2nd camera I bought after I got to the point where I was ready to upgrade from my $150 fuji a345...and I had that camera for 6 months, beforehand.

And I returned an sp500 once, then bought and sold another one, before I bought the one I have now. I have bought and returned an fz5 and then I got another one and kept it. The s2, I bought mine off ebay, and I have regretted that since the day I first looked at the shots from it. I was just never really happy with it...and, it took a long, long time before I figured out why. Aside from the obvious things like the weight.

Please do not do this to yourself :)

...sadly the tiff mode does a great job of maintaining color accuracy to the Nth degree, but it saves images that are the output of the graphics engine.

a major waste of file space.

Get a much better camera if you want images that are that accurate. It's not nearly good enough of a camera to be worth the 10x or even 5x increase in file size that tiff mode will cost you. Both of the jpeg modes match the graphics engine well, in fact, I would recommend the lower size, just so you don't begin to expect too much from the camera. Then if the compression artifacts are too much, go to the medium size. That is what I shoot in, because to me the 30% file size that I save is not worth the loss of peace of mind. But trust me, with this camera, that's really splitting hairs.

But it is only 30% and it is better to have it in the camera than to leave it in the field. It is easier to downsample or crop, than to go back and shoot it again.

Ok and it is not threaded for a lens, I am pretty sure of this.
So no "dust filters" on that gorgeous lens.

...shooting the fz5, i was finally FINALLY able to get these shots...ISO80 sticking to as low an ISO as possible now, in natural mode all the time...IS on all the time...this plus a little fiddling around in lview pro with a log filter and sharpening, I was finally able to get some respectable results from this camera in both daylight and at night...the good thing about this camera is that it is very clean, so that a log filter can be used and used strongly, to lighten the shots. One of these shots, the skyline shot, is a handheld 1/4s iso80 shot, in program mode, that I lighteded up with a log filter, the other is slightly lightened. Both came out pretty damm well and I've been trying to do these shots for months. Take my word on it: stick to as low an ISO as possible, even if that means that you have to underexpose some, and do your lightening in post-processing. If you have enough light to focus (if not directly then on something at the same distance) and you can get a steady hold and you actually get some pixels lightened, then you can fix the shot with a log filter. It is really hard to fix a noisy, fluttery out of focus shot. If you get a good starting point you will still get a nice warm and toasty brownish tint from this camera, as it does not have a large enough range of lights in its white-balance set. See for yourself.

The good thing is that when shooting wide-angle with this camera at 5MP, the close in crops have the same sharpeness as wide-angle. I was very happy with that...with my sp500 they are not...they are with the s2 but the s2 is not as effective at night as the fz5. It is definitely slower. Partially because the fz5 will adjust the exposure for you, but still. Notice the lights on behind the lighthouse. This shot is unlightened, just sharpened. It was *dark* (not quite night, but almost) when I took this shot (I put in an sp500 shot at the same time, for comparison, which was lightened significantly with a log filter, 1/30 exposure iso200). The fz5 put 3 steps of exposure on it (it will adjust +/- 3 steps if required). If you don't want this, you have to go into a manual mode (if those 3 steps are not enough to lighten the shot significantly, no problem :).

The good thing about this camera is that it does a fairly decent job of doing your work for you. Point it, press the shutter halfway, take the shot. Be ready to do some postprocessing and it will give you good results. But you will *have* to postprocess to get good photos from it, unless you shoot tight in good light. There is no control over the contrast, so if you are creating shadows with your shot, get ready to use a log filter. And unless you want to see some really bright colors and heavy coloration, you have to use natural color mode which means sharpening up in post processing.

But overall this is quite a decent camera. A good tool for taking photos. Not an "artiste" camera...just a good basic camera with a fast 12x lens and solid IS.

and a wide angle shot iso80 1/400? IS on...5MP natural mode downsampled to 640x480 to fit here, plus a 640x480 crop from it. Both sharpened. You can see from the crop that the camera has strong NR. What you can't see is how smooth and flat it is, out of the camera. I had to develop a nice sharpening filter for this in lview pro, something that doesn't have quite the "bite" of a normal edge filter, but still has a decent degree of sharpness.

...post-processing is definitely addictive :) I find myself fiddling with just about all my photos, now. Lightening and sharpening...wishing the contrast wasn't so heavy, or I hadn't used so much ISO.

If you shoot this camera in standard or even whatever the other color mode is, the saturation and sharpness are raised a notch or two...the extra sharpness is nice, but it comes at a cost of too much saturation for me. This camera is really heavy on the green, and with all the NR it loses a lot of texture. I prefer for it to color sparingly and then I will sharpnen later if I want to. And the only way to deal with excessive contrast is by post-processing. But this comes in handy for reasons other than excessive contrast :) most shots taken towards the sun or in partial shadow need to be lightened anyway.

I can work with what I get out of this camera and it is very flexible and fast, in terms of the lens, the focus, and the shot-speed. The photos, however, are not going to put a good Nikon to shame, in terms of image quality. They are good for a Panasonic. Decent, overall. Sometimes better than what comes out of my S2, even. But not great.

ps the lighter lighthouse shot above is 1/2.5s iso200 with the fz5, sharpened but unlightened; the other shot is 1/30s iso200 with the sp500 slightly log-lightened and sharpened.

The fz5 is really, really *REALLY* good at shooting handheld in low light. Much better than the s2 and the sp500 isn't able to come close. They are not useless in low light, of course, but not nearly as convenient and useful as the fz5. The s2 is too noisy and slow to beat the fz5 as it gets dark, and the sp500 is too slow and lacks IS. Its saving grace is that it will not shoot under 1/30 in program mode without the flash up, and it is so clean that you can boost the brightness with a log filter without losing the shot in noise. But the white balance on the s2 is much better than on the fz5, so you trade there, too.

A log filter is really handy for lightening shots :)

For reading all this crap here's a free ISO200 1/160 IS on F3.3 12x shot...and one good one out of a burst at ISO80, that actually looks ok, sharpened :) at 1/50s 12x.

I always shoot this camera in burst, it's too light to shoot steady in single-shot.

ps a mild YCbCr adjustment works wonders for this camera, try a +3b/-3r to take some of the grayish haze out of the shots and give them a more natural bluish tint.

ISO80 6mm shots in broad daylight, standard mode, high quality, evaluative metering 1/500 iso 5 or so.

Again I am forced to say that this camera is carrying a big fat honkin' load of NR, but it's clean. No luminance noise to speak of, and the only time color noise is is even visible is at ISO400. But this just kills the fine detail.

Funnily enough a lot can be restored with some edge-filtering. It still isn't going to be sharp, though. Looks like a soft Nikon shot.

I like to look at the lines of brick, you can tell a lot about a camera by seeing the way that bricks come out, as well as fine detail, bushes, leaves, flowers...are they blurry? Look funny? Hazy? "blobby"? Not with this camera. Just not sharp.

It's a picture, not a photograph.

As long as you are ok with that, this camera is just fine. Though I can't believe that it is still $300 even on here. The s2 is down to $240!

more of the same...

and away we go again...

now, all in all, would I buy this camera again, or recommend it?

Yes and no.

In a lot of ways yes, in one or two ways no.

It has probably the best image quality of any Panasonic that I've seen. I have not checked the noise of the fz7 at ISO200 and I hear that it is a very noisy camera but I would not shoot it at ISO200 unless I had to. That's the point, with all this NR you want to stay at ISO80 if at all possible, only using the higher ISOs for "sport photography". The bonus with the fz7 is that you can set the contrast, sharpness and saturation individually, you can't do that with this camera. I think that function-wise this is a very good camera (except maybe the eyepiece is too small, I swear it will rip my eyeball one day) and the fz7 is even better all around.

I think that if you want a light, small, very fast camera with a 12x zoom that takes good pictures, this camera is really hard to beat. It definitely does that job well. If you want to take PHOTOS you can't do that with this camera without some severe sharpening, at least, and maybe some other post-processing. Its strength is that it is very flexible and capable and also gives decent-looking shots under a very wide variety of light conditions. Its weakness, and this is relative, is the image resolution. Soft, fluffy photos with a 5MP limit is the worst that I would say. But that's saying a lot.

But the question is, what is better? The s2 is not much better. It is sharper and the colors and WB (definitely, the fz5 shots will always come out with a brownish tint while the s2 is more natural) are better, in this way it is better yes, so ok slightly better at low ISO. The sp500 is not "better". It has more fine detail, better WB but amazingly, less image-resolution than the fz5, it just cannot match the fz5 for depth of field. Very sharp in its focus plane, though. Neither the sp500 or s2 can match the fz5 in terms of shooting speed (the fz5 is butt-f'ing fast), and the sp500 doesn't have IS and the s2s' IS isn't as good as the fz5s'. Plus it's not as convenient to carry and use as the fz5.

If you get an s2 the feature and performance tradeoff is substantially larger than the image-sharpness and WB benefit.

The s3, I have found, has a lot more color noise than the s2. A better body and better controls but not as good image-quality wise as the s2, at ISO200 and up where you can see the color noise. It might have lower NR at low ISO, I don't know. Haven't had one for long enough to tell.

But the main thing is that I would not compare any of these mid-range 10-12x zooms to a DSLR in terms of image quality.

They just have too much NR to compete with a DSLR on wide-angle shots. They will all blow away any point and shoot in terms of image quality, the lenses are just too good. But their sensors are just too small and inherently noisy compared to a DSLR, and the cameras have too much NR to allow them to compete shooting wide-angle except on small shots, maybe 2MP or less.

Unless you can be happy with a 3 or 4x zoom, or you have no intention of doing much more than sniping, these cameras are just too much for say a Tz1 or an s4 to match for general-purpose shooting. Enough said.

the middle photo in reply #22(? !) is the same photo with a little sinh filtering on it, to lighten the dark areas. one of the others has mild log filtering, I forget which. Sinh can be used moderately as it tends to lighten more evenly thus not altering the tone of midrange parts like buildings but it tends to overlighten the sky; Log can be used much more heavily, but it tends to turn buildings beige. It's very good to use in well-underexposed shots which are hopefuly shot at low ISO.

So I put one of each in there plus an edge-sharpened one to show the effects on fz5 shots. Hard to tell at 640x480, but, the point is that you can work with the photos coming out of this camera and get shots that are, overall, pretty decent-looking.

They are still going to be soft and "pastel" compared to what you would get from an s2. The fz5s best work is done in low light, in spite of the lack of an adequate range of white-balance settings. When you switch to ISO200 you will want the fz5 not the s2. Only in the narrowest sense is the s2 better. But there is that small range where it is better...entirely due to better color balance.


Ok maybe the flip-screen will come in handy at times, too. But that is as much of a complication as a blessing.

...you can see how easy it is to make image-quality excuses for a camera that has a lot of great features.


The thing is, for most shots, the FZ5 image-quality is fine.

The thing is, for most shots, the image-quality of most cameras is fine. It is only when you expect a "virtuoso" performance, that you begin to see their flaws. For example, if you shoot at 2MP or 1MP all the time in broad daylight, you will say, "so what's the big deal with these more-expensive cameras? My frigging 4MP a345 takes pictures that are just as good."

And that's true. Most of the time. When you shoot under those conditions, at 1MP or 2MP. If you don't look at them too closely, you can hardly tell the difference.

But that is the level of performance that they are engineered to.

And until you see shots from a better camera at 3MP and up, you will not know what to expect. You will not know what you are missing, as they say.

Ok I will have to say that it doesn't control color as well as the s2 and it has a lot more NR and less fine detail than the sp500 but as far as image sharpness goes, you can hit the images pretty hard with sharpening because they are so clean out of the camera, and that does restore most if not all of the fine detail to the scene.

I really have to sharpen the photos from the fz5, especially because the s2 has me jaded.

What saves this camera is the low-light performance, fast lens and high sensitivity coupled with the clean images. There really is no noise to speak of. Everything else, the ultrafast burst, the light weight and relatively small size...the lens cap that actually stays on...these are just bonuses. I would rate the images "acceptable" and the camera style, fit and function a 9 out of 10, otherwise. It's an excellent "utility" camera. Not the best photos, but they are decent, and clean, and the camera itself is light, small, reliable, and very easy to use. Plus the 12x zoom. Yes the s2 photos are more "photographic" (certainly they are sharper and you never see lens flare or color flaring on the s2 shots like you will occasionally see with the fz5). But it is not like the s2 can take DSLR-level photos. And it is a much heavier, bulkier pain in the butt to carry and shoot.

I guess this will be it...some of the earlier shots with a lot more sharpening. The camera doesn't seem to lose fine detail, it just isn't brought out by the jpegs produced by the camera. Crank up the sharpening and you'll get an almost natural-looking photo. I'll let the images do the talking.

I'm shooting in standard mode now. I still think that in very bright light the S2 has better color balance. In moderate to dark light the Fz5 is better. Faster. Hell, I shot in the Inner Harbor the other night, landscape, in the dark, hand-held, ISO200, IS on 1/4s f2.8, lightened the shots with a log filter and they looked just fine.
The s2 would be a full step slower and the IS is not as good...the sp500..well, there is a tripod in my car, I haven't used it in almost 6 months. Enough talk, let's show some photos.

These are sharpened with a base 24 filter in lviewpro. 640x480 crops and downsampled versions of 5MP shots, fine res, standard color, all ISO80.

again, heavily sharpened versions shot fine res, standard mode, 5MP, these are downsampled full shots to 640x480

again, heavily sharpened versions shot fine res, standard mode, 5MP, these are crops and full shots downsampled to 640x480

if you look in the blue area above the head, in the previous photo, you can see where the contrast and I guess a steep tone curve in this camera tends to bite it. The contrast is a little too high, and there's no way to turn it down. So in really bright light it tends to blow out the whites and the blues get whitish-blue. You can see that everything there is a little overexposed. The camera seems to actively shift the exposure more than usual...in general I would say that this camera is tweaked towards user-friendliness and the photographic range and accuracy of a Canon or even an Olympus is not quite there. Panasonic is maybe a little too new to the game (certainly in their lower-end point and shoots, which simply get smoked by Canon and Olympus). Anyway here's another set in a darker environment, the moire on the bricks is from the downsampling from 5MP. ISO80 multipoint focusing. The standard-mode shot is highly sharpened.

I saw a note earlier where someone said that this camera is real easy to use at full zoom without disturbing the subject. That's because from the front it looks like a cheap old 35mm with like a 28-50mm lens. You wouldn't be able to tell that it has a 12x zoom with a 420mm equivalent unless you knew, even if you looked from the side (where, of course, it says "12x" in big letters). It's not real big (about half as high as a DSLR) and you can get away with a lot without people noticing, simply because it looks cheap, even like a single-use camera. The technology has gotten that far out there. But it is not a true 420mm lens on a 35mm film camera. It's a 60mm lens on a small format 5MP sensor. There's no mistaking the difference.

if you look reeeeeal close at the 5MP images from this camera, at least on an LCD monitor, you can see sort of a "matte" effect...they certainly are not ultra-sharp jpegs...no question the compression ratio needs to be lower for a photograph-quality image. I personally think that overall quality-wise, the images from this camera are just "ok". Not too bad, not great. Just ok. You have a photo. You're not trying to make a living shooting landscapes with it. Like any digital camera on the market, the real true test is to shoot wide-angle landscapes at the highest resolution. Any old digicam can take decent shots of near subjects in a close crop.

but...I took this shot handheld ISO200, one quarter second exposure, with the IS on, f2.8. Part of a burst, of course, but again that is this cameras' strongpoint. Plus you can see the slight brown tint resulting from a lack of a good light range in the white-balance settings. It is what is actually there, just a little overly brown. If that bothers you, just color it a little blue with less red with a YBR color adjustment. The thing is, the colors on this camera are so "lively" that sometimes you get interesting effects...it really is fun to shoot, in a lot of ways. Don't expect to see "photographs" come out of it. But you will get good, interesting, decent pictures across a wide range of light conditions.

that was from a 2MP shot, though, not a 5MP as before.

anyway. Good luck.

I guess that I s*ck at these reviews :)

I have a hard time saying what I want to say in a few words...

Last word. FZ5. Very flexible, light, compact, powerful and fast, a good 12x zoom carry camera. Not the best images, though not so bad. Won't ever really impress you...will rarely if ever let you down completely.

And in low light not to mention at night, it will save your butt where most other cameras will ask you "what do you think that you are doing".

ok I could live with this. Requires, of all things, a little more contrast, then some heavy-duty sharpening.

Taken in standard mode iso80 then up contrast 4 and a 24base sharpening filter, in LviewPro. Not bad at all. Still a little grainy on close inspection, and maybe could use a little more saturation. But definitely livable.

Panasonic has apparently been very conservative on the in-camera settings with this camera. Including noise. But it does not have as much NR as the S2, and there is clearly more fine detail at ISO80 with the FZ5. But I like the S2s color balance and white balance better.

I have given up on shooting anything but the lowest ISO except for action shots.

I see now why they backed off on the sharpening so much...for one, a little sharpening goes a long way if there are a lot of edges in the shot. Say, there are rocks, a lot of leaves on the ground to catch and reflect sunlight...it is easy to oversharpen these shots. Second if a shot is sharpened optimally at 5MP, then downsampled, it's going to look way oversharpened. The image processing is optimized for prints and small photos, for displaying the photo on the little 1.8" LCD. Not for looking at 5MP shots on a 2MP monitor.

It can be "fixed" but it requires a little work.

On the other hand I've seen some 8MP landscape shots from a Nikon P3 and I was really impressed by them.

http://www.canon.com/

hm, I was going to post one thing that I don't like about the images from this camera, and I went to my Inner Harbor shots to find it...it tends to make the water color look like one of those old comic book drawings of water, metallic blue and black, just an unappealing look to it...especially in bright light. Then I found this and I would have to say this is a definite example of why I would not recommend this camera for anything more than close up work or tight zoom work.

I mean, in general...again, almost any camera can take a good shot of something that is either close to the camera, or if you zoom in tight on it. The problem is shooting wide-angle, shooting landscape. Where the camera has a lot of image detail to deal with. It seems that Panasonic has clearly clamped down on the image detail (probably using a very restrictive anti-alias filter and 16-bit color image processing) and in this shot it just crashes and burns horribly. The shot looks bad downsampled? It looks just as bad at 5MP. And there's no excuse for it...it's a 31mm, 6x zoom shot ISO80 1-500 f4.5 fine mode shot...middle of the day, well-lit...everything in the shot is 100 yards and out, this is, really, just about the best possible shot for the camera, for this type of shot...and you can see that there is just no fine-detail in the shot, the image resolution is well below-average. Again, not the problem if you sit back 6 feet from your monitor. Not a huge deal if you look at it at 2MP. But compared to a Canon or even an Olympus shot, at full-res? It's just crap.

It does not take much to make a camera just an average performer. A simple loss of resolution will do it, every time. Ok so the colors are ok the exposure is ok...so what, there's no fine detail! It's that same old Panasonic crap. It's fine if you look at it casually from 6 feet away. Look at it close and you'll go "ewww....".

It's already been sharpened, strongly sharpened, the contrast boosted, saturation boosted. I would not be happy with shots like this. At all.

Well, plus you can see what it does to the water ;)

This camera really is what you'd buy a friend who wants a decent, flexible, easy to use all-around digital camera with a big zoom and IS. It has all the features you'd ever really need. The image quality is not good enough for general photography. And it is definitely one of the better-looking Panasonics that I've seen.

another one, 1-800 f4.5 iso80 natural mode so I boosted the saturation, contrast and sharpness...I look at it on my monitor a 5MP file at 2MP, and I just said, "aaak!" :)

Then I realized it was a full-zoom shot, and probably a little shaky :) not a good idea to track the boat in the foreground, or shoot it with IS off.

Oh well.

ok I'm going to try to say this as my "last word". The shots that you will get off this camera are ok, as long as you shoot "intelligently"...I'd shoot it with the IS on all the time, in standard mode, fine resolution, 9-point AF, evaluative metering and ISO80 as much as possible, then ISO200 at most.

The shots will range from "good" to "ok" with the occasional "hm..." shots where the linear resolution just isn't all that impressive. And you will take some good shots because it is easy to carry, focus and shot, and fast too.

But they're not going to look as good as the shots coming off an S2 or even an A700. It's that simple.

And they are not going to have the fine texture of the shots from an Olympus sp500, sp310 or 320. Probably not the sp350 either. And certainly not the quality white-balance of any of these cameras.

But, having said all that, it's really not a bad camera and it has a lot going for it. It just asks for a fair amount of forgiveness for the images that it produces, and some post-processing for the ones that you really want to look good. The thing is...it *will* take that shot for you in probably the widest range of conditions that you can ask. Where the sp500 definitely won't and the s2 won't either. The tilt and swivel lens on the s2 comes in handy, but it just is not as good in low light as the fz5. And the a700 is not even close in low light, it will cost you an ISO or two or three f-stops over the s2 not to mention the fz5. All in all this camera is like the difference between a painting and a photograph. You can paint from memory. It'll never look as sharp as a photograph. But, you know, you'll pretty-much see what you remember, which basically is the purpose of a digital camera. That is why I like it. But I would never say that the pictures coming off it are really great. They're not bad. And they are not close to great, much less close enough to make you say, "gee, if there had been a little more fine-detail in this shot or a little less optical distortion, this would have been a great shot". No, with this camera you know you need a better camera to take great-looking photos. But, you *have* a picture of what you saw when a lot of cameras would have given you "crap". Including every camera that I mentioned above. For $300 this camera is a great deal. For $700+, you can get a DSLR that you can then sweat every photo to make sure that you are getting your moneys' worth, and also worry about breaking it or scratching a lens. If this camera breaks I will not shed a tear. If I break my s2 or scratch the lens on my sp500 I will be pissed. With this one it will almost be a relief. Yet another reason to carry it. I'd much rather that something bad happen to this camera than any of my other ones or a much more expensive one. But, until it does break or get damaged, I'll be happy to use it with moderate expectations. Can you tell that in spite of the images coming off it, that I've posted here, some of which I like and some of which I don't, I like this camera? I'd give it a solid C+ for image quality and a B+ for handling and ergonomics.

I swear, I shoot this camera and I like it more and more even though I realize that it has image problems. Though it is clearly not giving shots that are as "good looking" overall, not as sharp, or with color balance that is as good, or with a tone curve that is as nice, as my s2, in a lot of ways it is better...it is definitely easier to shoot. The viewfinder is much better. The optics seem to perform better under zoom, with no washouts, smudging, or roundoffs, or pastel colors, which the s2 has a little under zoom, and the entire image is in focus, with the s2 the extreme left side seems to be out of focus, consistently. There's a little funk in the s2 under zoom. The fz5 is definitely not as sharp overall, the image sharpness setting is way off from the s2 and there is no doubt that the s2 has more "realism" in the colors, with better color gradation. No doubt I have to play with a lot of the fz5 shots, in Lview, my image-processing program. There's a little more color noise in the fz5 than in the s2, which keeps me from lightening the shots too much at ISO200, but it has noticably less luminance noise at ISO200 than the S2 at ISO200. It's critical at ISO200 (due to this higher noise) to get the exposure as close to correct as possible, definitely kick the exposure up at least half an EV and do not underexpose or you will lose all the low-intensity areas of the shot and if you try to fix them in post-processing all you will do is boost the noise there. The fz5 definitely does not handle bright light as well as the s2 but neither one has a lot of fine detail so it is only slightly worse, overall, mainly due to the color and tone accuracy advantage that the s2 has. But under medium-light conditions, shooting evaluative, keeping as much of the sky out of the shot as possible to keep the lighting under control, they are about even, and as it gets dark the fz5 just kicks the s2s butt and has it for lunch. And this is the thing. Just about any camera can take good shots of a low-contrast scene in good light. The problem is high-contrast or as it gets dark, that's where you seperate the performers from the pretenders. The s2 just cannot hang with the fz5 as it gets dark, and I mean "dark" speaking relatively as there is plenty of light to *see* by, just not much to *shoot* by. Once the sun drops below the horizon you will want the fz5. I am not entirely sure about the noise issue at ISO200 and technically at wide-angle the max lens F# is the same, but the fz5 has much better IS, it consistently will take clean shots at lower shutter speeds with better exposure with much less light than the s2 will. One minor problem is that the fz5 won't expose over 8 seconds in manual mode, so it needs some streetlight, you're not going to be able to shoot under moonlight with it. Here are a few more shots...the darker trail shot is iso200 1-8th second IS on handheld. Forget about taking this shot with an s2.

this is a 10x zoom, 52mm shot ISO80 1-80th sec f3.3. Unretouched standard mode.

I'm kicking myself for not standing up higher so the brush didn't get in the shot. But this is where it beats the s2, definitely, none of the colors are pastel and there is nothing funky going on with the plane profiles or lettering. With the s2 there is visible distortion under zoom.

I mean really this camera is not a bad camera at all. It just clearly has its image quirks but it does also give you some real rewards. Imagine shooting 1-80th sec handheld at 315mm and getting a decent-looking shot! And this is just before dark. With good light I could have easily taken this at...1-160th or even 1-250th sec...

Admittedly the ISO200 shots have visible color noise in the dark areas, but then again, so do the ISO80 shots. There is color noise in this camera. If you look for it. You have to look pretty hard at ISO80 to find it, and it's easier to see at ISO200. Not like it dominates the shot, though. And I think that the camera tends to overexpose to keep that noise out of sight. It seems that knocking the gamma down a touch gives the day shots a better exposure. But this same tendency to overexpose really saves the photos when shooting in low light.

So I'm experimenting with the auto-bracketing, which gives me another reason to shoot burst. Anyway it's more fun.

Here's the same shot, iso80 1-100 f3.2 standard mode, unretouched, downsampled to 640x480, plus two both with gamma reduced and one with stiff sharpening.

You probably can't tell much difference between them, right?

You can at 5MP. That's the thing. You are not going to see much difference between cameras when looking at 1MP shots, especially not when looking at prints. The differences will beat you over the head if you look at 3MP+ shots on a 2MP monitor. Stuff you won't see when standing 6 feet away from the monitor, will leap out at you when you get close. Then there will be no doubt which is the better camera...or...at least which one has the better in-camera image processing :) and from there, the Real Fun begins.

That is why I would not recommend to anyone that they spend any real amount of money to buy a digital camera until they have owned and shot one for a while. You need a lot of experience looking at photos to even begin to tell what is good and what isn't, not to mention what you can and cannot reasonably expect one to do. What looks good to a neophyte is obvious bandaging to an experienced eye.

I would say that the third example photo in response #39 of my own is a good example of what to watch out for. That's an example of a low-resolution camera.

Now I think that I took this shot with IS off and it might be a little shaky but that part of the shot doesn't look shaky. You can see the colors are not very high resolution. I think that is the big difference...it is like the difference between 22kHz audio and 16kHz audio. You can really only tell when listening to high-fidelity music. The difference between a good camera and a great camera really only comes out when shooting wide-angle at high-detail subjects, shooting at the full camera resolution at the highest image quality settings. That is why often a camera can make up for average image processing by boosting MP. But at the same MP under the same lighting conditions, shooting wide-angle, it is hard to cover up bad image processing.

I think this is a good camera. The 2MP version of that photograph will look fine. The 5MP version will look fine as long as you don't look at it closely. And certainly you will only see the whole 5MP shot if you print it. I have a 2MP 15" monitor on my laptop, to see that 5MP shot at the same real resolution I would need a monitor with 2.5x the surface area, or about a 40" diagonal. I know for a fact that if I had taken this same shot with my sp500 you would not see those blotchy colors in the close ups, and indeed, I will take that same shot again with all 3 of my cameras just to check this out. And that was really great light in that shot, too. Early afternoon not a cloud in the sky.

so, ok I have identified 3 definite issues with this camera. One, 640x480 crops of 5MP shots don't look so hot, even if the 5MP shot looks ok when looking at the full shot. One cause is a fair amount of color noise which causes Panasonic to have a high black cutoff and a loss of fine detail. Also a lack of sharpness combined with significant NR contributes to that lack of sharpness problem. And last but not least, there is significant overexposure on outdoor shots during the day. Probably a good +1EV during daytime shots. It also overexposes at night, the automatic exposure does a good job of compensating for a lack of light. But this should go the other way during the day. It seems to always want to overexpose unless there is extreme contrast, such as a lot of bright sky and a dark foreground, like getting too much sky from a Manhattan city street. Then it generally underexposes. But just about any camera will underexpose in these conditions. That is a real problem with any camera that has a lot of ISO noise because it is difficult to correct the exposure without introducing a lot of noise in the same dark areas that you are trying to lighten.

In such situations it is mandatory that the ISO be kept to a minimum, and the IS used to get a steady shot. Also the auto-bracket should be used. In a high-contrast or dark scene, you want to make every reasonable effort to get a good exposure.

If you can fix the exposure and sharpen the image in post-processing, you can get some very good looking shots out of the FZ5. It does have a great lens so there is not much noticable optical distortion, though there is a little lens flare when shooting towards the sun. Then you have all the other benefits like the fast burst and light weight and small package. It is not a bad camera. It is not a DSLR, and you will want to try some post-processing. But, basically, under a very wide range of conditions, it will take a good shot for you.

yes, even with the exposure reduced, and the image sharpened...the shots are still a little hard. Harsh, the colors unsubtle, the details are edgy...there is a lite black "grain", over the entire image when viewed at full resolution, sort of a matte finish, indicating a loss of low-level detail...it will take pictures for you, certainly there is no obvious image distortion, distortion of lines, curves, etc, due to borderline-bad optics, like with the s2...but it isn't really "photographic". It's just "ok". For low to medium resolution stuff, small prints or displays, shots at low to medium distances or tight zoom shots, this camera is fine. For high-resolution "photographs", especially wide-angle, you will want more. But I would probably say that about any 5-6MP 12x zoom camera. Even so it is very true about this one.

Try one last one f5.6 1-500 iso80, slightly underexposed in post-processing through gamma-reduction and sharpened. This is a medium-range shot in Providence, RI. For this kind of shot it is not bad at all, lots of solid colors and straight lines, no real subtlety required. The FZ5 can take this nice "hot" shot, no problem. It's a shame that it doesn't really have the image-slash-color resolution to match the lens. The lens is really good. Just for completeness an ISO200 1-60 f4.5 shot at Chelsea Piers that I could easily have taken at 1-30 ISO80...but it came out ok even with a little luminance noise after a mild overexpose. You can't see the noise at 640x480 :)
And a shot at the Inner Harbor that I would have paid good money to be able to shoot...it just totally blew this shot. It's slightly overexposed, but why is everything so grainy? 1-400 f5.6 iso80 with the IS off...it did not quite catch a focus, and it did not quite get the exposure right, and it is a little shaky. A shame, this would have been a good shot. But let's see how much better the S2 was, taking the same shots, hm?

forgot the shots.

these are fz5 shots...

s2 shots. 640x480 crop and downsampled superfine 5MP image. I have some other shots of the same thing with an fz5, taken later in the day when the sun isn't so intense and they probably have IS on and they look a little better...I think that part of the lack of sharpness earlier in these Inner Harbor FZ5 photos was due to having the IS off.

But clearly the s2 is much more sharp than the fz5. Not saying that all the s2 shots came out looking this good, I had the same problem with not using IS on the s2, as well. But this one looks really good. The A700 shot that I took of this isn't this good either. S2 1-200 f4.0 ISO50 24mm shot. Sharpness+1, saturation -1.

Oops, the same shot 5MP fz5 shot iso80 crop...

These have been gamma-reduced (to reduce exposure) about 1 eV, and edge-sharped with a weight of 30. Again, "now they don't look so bad". Still not as sharp as an s2, but not so bad. Just "ok". I have a broad daylight shot of the same scene, with the fz5, that I just cannot fix so that it looks ok at 2MP. I think it is because I did not use IS. But I am not sure. I'll post it after this.

These are 640x480 crops from 2MP shots with the s2 in superfine and the fz5 in "fine" (the image quality with 2 bars instead of 1). They were both taken at 28.4mm.

fz5 1-640 f4.5 ISO80 30mm focal length, fine mode, 5MP shot 640x480 crop and downsample.

The use of 5MP vs 2MP would explain why I am having trouble getting it to "look good" at 5MP on my 2MP monitor. It takes a really good shot from a good camera to do this. The FZ5 is not that good of a camera. Shooting it at its highest image quality, highest image resolution really unmasks its flaws.

ok enough shots, really (I have seen enough of the fz5 ;)

It's a decent camera, but it does not have the resolution of an s2, it is slightly below an sp500 and it is about on par with an a700 given the zoom and IS it is probably a better camera than an a700 too. But image-quality about the same.

The thing is, if this camera is worth $300 then the S2 is worth at least $400 maybe $500, and if you can get an S2 for $250 and this camera is $300 you would be making a major mistake to buy this camera instead of the s2.

Honestly.

The s2 is at least twice as sharp as the fz5, when shot in superfine mode at iso50. Above ISO50 the difference is less noticable but the s2 will still have more accurate colors than the fz5.

No doubt about it. The FZ5 has a great lens, for high-zoom shots, close cropped stuff, shots that don't require really high resolution, it is very good, "why try anything else" good. Wide-angle, a distant subject, any shot where you really want high resolution? The s2 is the camera to use. I have to admit it. I've seen too many samples, that I've shot myself, of the same scene with each camera, to say otherwise. Certainly I will say that you will generally be happy with what you see from the s2, but with the FZ5 be prepared to be disappointed. Still, I think, if I was going on a trip and I wanted to take a camera that would take ok shots but I would not mind losing, that it wouldn't kill me if I lost it, this would be the camera that I'd take. The problem is the shots from the s2 can look a whole lot better than the shots from the Fz5, in the wrong conditions for the FZ5. But if you take an s2 on a trip, you have to be prepared to break it or lose it or when the lens cover falls off and the lens gets scratched. Even then, an A700 would be a better carry. The s2 is just not a practical camera to carry on trips if for no other reason than the lens cover.


But it's not practical to take the fz5 and then come back and half of your shots look like crap, either. The thing is, they won't look like crap, unless the subject is far enough away yet detailed enough for the limited resolution of the FZ5 to be a problem. The thing is, shots like that are generally the most interesting shots to take. But this is just the DSLR problem in a lower gear. There will be a handful of shots, which you really want to take, where only a DSLR will take a good shot. And a handful more where you need something that is at least "really good", like an s2. Then maybe a few more where you will want at least an SP500. For everything else the FZ5 will be fine.

Well, at least today I figured out that the A700 really isn't any better, not much different at all, than the Fz5. But I knew that, really, from the shots I took in Manhattan, where both performed well. Now I know it from the shots I took over the Baltimore Inner Harbor, where both kind of stank. So I guess that the practical limit of both the A700 and the FZ5, shooting wide-angle, is somewhere inside the 100 yard range, while the practical limit of the s2 is easily 200 yards. Enough said.

Yet, still, this does give me an interesting idea :) more fun, more often :)

well this last one and that's it.

I stumbled onto these two they are almost the same shot, taken with an FZ5 and an s2, in superfine 2MP both. the FZ5 shot is 38mm and the s2 shot is 28 mm so I first cropped the FZ5 shot to look the same as the s2 shot. Then I corrected the exposure on both and backed off the saturation and contrast on the fz5 shot as it was shot in vivid mode. And then downsampled the FZ5 shot slightly to the same dimensions as the s2 shot and then downsampled them both to 640x480 so they are now almost exactly the same shot at the same size and the same zoom, effectively. And as I was doing this it became apparent that the difference between the two shots was REAL hard to see. But there are differences that can be seen. It is easier to see them at 2MP of course, but you can still see differences even at 640x480. For one this is hard to see at 6x4 but the S2 shot is a little more crisp and clean than the FZ5 shot. But, laying them one on top of the other one can see that the s2 shot is not all that crisp and the fz5 shot is not all that "muddy". It is more like the difference in the compression factors, more than anything else. But that is not all. If you look at the edges of the buildings, in the FZ5 shot you can see a distinct nonlinearity to the slope, that is not there in the s2 shot. Look at the side of the building with the P on it, to the left of the P. There you can see distinct lines in the fz5 shot, that are not there in the s2 shot. You can also see that the 3 stripes are not even in the fz5 shot. The shape of the lavender awnings isn't consistent, the colors are not consistent...the trees are slightly smudgy, the grass under the trees is smudgy, the lamppost at the right corner of the grassy area is smudgy, the safety rails aren't as crisp and clear, to the right...the texture of the wood on the dock isn't as clear and crisp...the FZ5 is taking the shot and just distorting it more than the s2 is, and that is the difference. And you can even see that here, it is quite easy to see at 2MP, not to mention 5MP, where there's no downsample effect to deal with. At 2MP you can easily see that the McCormick and Schmidt text over the restaurant, at the lower left, is much cleaner on the s2 shot. It's not "clean"...but it's a lot cleaner and less fuzzy. It's just a better looking shot, period. I look at the s2 shot and I see nothing obviously wrong with it (except some faint fine detail), I look at the fz5 shot and I can see optical distortion all over it. True, a close look at each and they don't look so much different, but, overall, the s2 shot just looks "normal" and the fz5 shot doesn't. I should mention the fz5 shot is 38mm at 1-400 f4.0 iso80 fine-mode (4:1 compression) and the s2 is 28mm at 1-200 f4.0 superfine mode (5:1 compression). The shots are taken 20 minutes apart, with the fz5 shot 20 minutes earlier at 7pm. And you may ask, "if the fz5 is zooming in more, how can it be taken at almost twice the shutter speed of the s2?" Well, clearly the s2 is iso50 and the Fz5 is iso80 but one is closer to ISO50 and the other is closer to ISO100. For the icing on the cake I have put a "comparison crop" where I overlaid the s2 shot on the fz5 shot so you can see the same fine detail part of each shot, but at 2MP, then cropped that to 640x480. There's no doubt that the s2 shot is cleaner and more crisp. Yet the shot isn't "shaky". It's just that everything is more "pastel" in the fz5 shot. Smudgy, smeary, less crisp. Not hugely, obviously, s4-type pastel. But still pastel. Enough so that the eye is just not happy with it...but nothing that you can really put your finger on without looking right up close at a 2MP shot. Both can be made more "intense" by decreasing the exposure, decreasing the gamma. But how to fix the pastelization in the FZ5 shot? I don't know.

duh, I posted the same crop twice.

...last word: the fz5 cannot match the s2 in terms of all-around image quality, and in fact for the occasional wide-angle shot I do wish that it was better. But even then it is not all that bad, and for most other shots it is fine, they are about the same. It is more a matter of getting the exposure right than any fundamental flaw in the FZ5, though it does have fundamental image flaws, it simply is not as sharp, crisp and clean as the S2 when shooting wide-angle. It really, really really needs a lower compression setting, wtih a mere 4:1 compression it is impossible to take really good, high-resolution "photographs" with the FZ5. But the FZ5 is a lot more fun to carry and shoot than the s2. Half because of the bulk, and half because of the lens cap. It is just really nice to not have to worry about the lens cap falling off because it is so loose, or worry about dropping the camera itself because it is so big and heavy, when you pull the camera out of the bag, and you have to carry the s2 in a bag, it is too big for a pocket...especially with that cheesy lens cap, you can't carry it in your pocket. So *using* the S2 becomes this big production. I get to the point where I don't even want to deal with it.

...so, while I know that the S2 will take better-looking shots...I would much rather take my FZ5 with me. Certainly as long as I'm not shooting anything "serious", that I'm just shooting for fun. On a scale from 1 to 10, in terms of image quality, the FZ5 is about a 7.5, maybe an 8. The s2 is a 8.5 to 9. The s2 is not perfect, either. Aside from image-quality the FZ5 is a better carry. Not to mention that in burst mode it is twice as fast as the S2. So, don't think too much of the FZ5...but don't take it too lightly, either. And if you buy one, be prepared for the occasional shots that you are not happy wtih, even if you shoot it in fine mode. Still it is much better than a TZ1 and an S4 cannot even compare with it. The s2 is obviously better than either of those but they are both half the size and weight of the s2, with a much better screen.

I'll have to post a long-exposure night shot later (if you need to see it now look at my s2 review) but of the sp500, the s2 and the FZ5 I found the sp500 to be the best, by a significant amount. Image sharpness was almost as good as daylight shooting, focus excellent on any subject with a decent amount of light. Again, it came out looking like a photograph. White balance almost exact, shaprness very good, clean...I couldn't ask for more of it. The FZ5 I would have to say was second best because the s2's night focus combined with the high-level long-exposure NR is just not good enough to give a good crisp clean image. The FZ5 turns the shot a little brown (I've said this 5 times already :) but otherwise the shot is good, clean and in focus. At night the loss of low-level detail that this camera costs is not so apparent even in close-up, and the low noise level really pays off.It's just not quite as crisp as the sp500 at night. Shots to follow. I still take away with this camera that it is just a little less than I am happy with, image-wise. Just a little lower resolution than I'd like to see, and the colors are just a little off, a little "fake", the fine-detail a little muddy, the images not quite "sharp" when shooting wide-angle. But overall it is a good camera, and under zoom it is excellent. With none of that warbly look that the S2 has, and with a great IS system, it can shoot at high zoom hand-held under conditions that the sp500 can't handle. It definitely has its strong and weak points. What you lose in image accuracy (precision?) when shooting wide-angle during the day, you gain in spades in burst mode, under high zoom and at night. And the portability is excellent for a 12x zoom midbody.

So if I told you that the JPEG Q for this camera is about 95 in fine mode, vs 98 for the Canon S2 and even teh lowly A510, would you be surprised? It definitely makes the images smaller for a given MP, but at what cost to fine detail and image sharpness and fidelity? I really don't know. But this camera is definitely not as sharp as my S2. A close look at any of the 5MP images will show this. The optics and IS are unquestionably better, so under zoom and/or in low-light, the FZ5 wins. Without a doubt, "overall", this is a very good camera, with about 90% of the image quality that a photographer would really want. I wonder what Leica firmware would do to that.

I had to revert to "natural" image adjustment as I just couldn't handle the color adjustment that is added in "standard" mode not to mention "vivid". I just suddenly got very sensitive to the color shift that this camera adds to the scene. Too much time with an s2, I guess. Even my sp500 has less of a color shift. So now it is ok but then the remaining problem is the auto-bracketing will go back to off if the camera is turned off. Every time I turn it on I have to manually set up the auto-bracketing. This is not so much of a problem as it is a pain. And imagewise otherwise the important thing to say is that they are definitely less sharp (and sharpened) than the s2 and there is a *touch* more noise-reduction and a touch more contrast (and you can't adjust the contrast in this camera) which, combined, means a little more fine-detail is lost with the FZ5 than with the S2. It really only wins on the lens quality, size, weight and shooting speed. Without a doubt the s2 gives better-looking photos though it does have noticably more distortion and lens softness under zoom. And it does not have the flip-out LCD which is very useful at times. But, if you sharpen the FZ5 shots, and shoot at ISO80 if at all possible, at fine compression and in normal color mode with IS continuous, and use the auto-bracketing and evaluative exposure, just about 1 or 2 out of the three shots will come out looking quite nice. Sharpening helps a lot, auto-bracketing helps a lot, and the s2 is really over-sharpened anyway.

...so much for anti-redundancy :) but I hope that is concise, at least.

here is an example of where the s2 is "easy lovin" and the fz5 is "tough lovin". These are 640x480 crops of 5MP wide angle shots at full 12x optical zoom, two shots of the same subject (with some small changes due to the different days) but both at the lowest ISO and both at EV0. FZ5 iso80 1-400 f5 standard mode fine res, s2 iso50 1-125 f5 superfine with the contrast down a notch (and in standard mode the fz5 has the sharpness and saturation down a notch). IS on with both. IS is very, very very useful :) saved my bacon right here with the s2. And the fz5 of course very sensitive to camera shake at full zoom. Also I sharpened both shots manually, the same amount. Anyway you can see right here what the game is between the two. The s2 at almost half the ISO and about a third of the speed gives a brighter, punchier shot which clearly has better image processing and in fact looks less fuzzy (plus you can clearly see the price that you pay with the fz5 in terms of loss of fine detail even at ISO80). But look at the line edges and coloring of the fz5 shot. The overall optical quality is better with the fz5 shot, even if there are specific *image* qualities that are better with the s2. Now, one more thing. These are 100% crops of 5MP shots. If you look at the full 5MP shot what you see with the Fz5 shot is a darker shot with more "severe" coloring but very clean lines, and the s2 shot is lighter and more colorful but it looks like it's been soaked in water for 5 minutes. How much of that is due to the low shutter-speed? I doubt any of it. I would say that without a doubt, given some gamma enhancement or some sort of lightening and a little noise-scrubbing, the FZ5 shot looks better than the S2 shot. It is only at high res when pixel-peeping that you can see the extra fine-detail in the s2 shot and you can see the noise and graininess of the FZ5 shot (and the same goes for the Canon A700, the two are quite similar in terms of image quality). I mean, really. The less detail in the shot (or the closer you are to the subject) and the better the lighting, the more the FZ5 looks better compared to the s2. Cut the light or increase the overall detail and the s2 wins hands-down. But, again, only if you shoot at the lowest ISO! Once you raise the ISO all bets are off. I would bet that you pay a much higher price for shooting at high ISO than you do for shooting normal or fine instead of superfine. And THAT is where these f2.8-f3.6 12x IS stabilized cameras kick butt over the smaller point and shoots with their f2.8-f4.1 3x or even f3-f5 3x lenses, without IS even, and you can imagine what a 35mm full-frame sensor will do compared to the itty-bitty sensor in the s2 and fz5. What is killing them is the low signal to noise ratio and the higher NR. In exchange you get a slightly smaller and much cheaper camera than a DSLR. But, really, the FZ5 is a much better image-quality vs size tradeoff than the s2. Even though the s2 certainly has at least as good and usually better image quality than the FZ5. You just have to remember not to ask too much from the FZ5. For most shots its just fine. For a few shots, wide-angle long-range landscape shots, you really will want an s2. At least. If not a DSLR. And for a few others, because of the superior lens optical quality and geometric fidelity, you will want the FZ5 *instead* of the s2.

I know you'll want to see the full shots...the darker one is the fz5 shot.

I think that I have it slightly backwards. You want the s2 over the fz5 when low-level fine-detail is really important, as in when you are shooting in really tight on a finely-detailed scene (tight enough to see the fine detail). Otherwise, the straight lines, the optical accuracy that you get from the fz5, win the day. The wider the shot and the lower the scene contrast and fine detail, the more discernable lines and curves, the better the fz5 looks compared to the s2. It sure as hell doesn't always look worse than the s2.

Optically the FZ5 is better than the s2, but it has much stronger NR, in exchange. That is not a problem if there is not much "fine detail" to be seen in the first place, then you can't see how badly it is being scrubbed out. Doesn't mean that this is not a problem at all with the s2, though, and, trust me, it is a problem with the s2. The nightmare for the s2 owner is when they take a shot that is wide-angle enough and far enough away from the subject where they can't see any fine detail, really, and there isn't a lot of color in it, but they can see all the optical distortion from the lens. Anything shot near or after dusk, or shooting towards the sun into shade, for example. Anything below "brown", or dark "chalk", all that soft-shaded light detail, the s2 will sort of lightly blend away. Admittedly the FZ5 will totally smudge it out, but at least what is left will be clean and have good lines :)

something else you're not going to do with an A700, not even an A710...
1-6sec f3.3 6x zoom, ISO200 handheld night shot, part of an auto-bracket, this is the slow one, EV0.7...also I'll show the EV-0.7, at 1-15sec...I mean, there's definitely a little noise, but these are still nice shots from an FZ5 I'm holding at arms length above my head...at dusk...you would be pushing to shoot this with an A700 at ISO800. And it would be at f4.1 at full 6x zoom. And full of luminance noise. I doubt that even an A710 could take this hand-held, even with IS. I mean, IS is great but it is not magic...and the main problem is that with anything above the lowest ISO, these cameras show noticable noise. They need to be clean -clean- and let me pick the ISO that I need. It is dark, I don't mind losing fine detail that I can't see anyway. I don't want to see noise! These only look clean because they are downsampled from 5MP to 640x480.

I mean, geez, if you're going to downsample your shots, this camera is almost impossible to beat. Its image flaws really only show up when you start to view its 5MP shots at 100%, or if you don't shoot in natural mode and you are picky about color casts.

As long as you shoot in natural mode and use auto-bracketing, it's just fine for 2MP and below. No doubt about it.

I've been playing a lot with Photoshop CS2 and the HSV settings in Lviewpro...what this camera, the FZ5, seems to do and do often, during the day, is overexpose, significantly. My SP500 overexposes too but not so much, and of course the S2 least of all. The thing is though that the s2 seems to be a bit "fluty" with the images, like its too fancy, just a bit too much image processing...there's a definite reddish-brown shift to the shots from both cameras, but with the s2 it is a lighter "bronze" vs the FZ5s orange-brown, and no doubt the image lines are less "processed" and more subdued and straighter with the FZ5. It has more grit and grain than the s2 but the image lines are cleaner. No doubt on some shots the FZ5 crashes and shows its limits, mainly on shots with a lot of contrast, with really wide dynamic range. Partially because it significantly overexposes, partially because the noise-reduction threshold is a little higher than with the S2. But this happens on maybe 1% of the shots, and a lot less if you auto-bracket. In any case, 9 times out of ten, dropping the value or brightness setting until the lowlights are just above black and you can still see some detail in them, then bumping the contrast up a little and then sharpening turns an average-looking FZ5 shot into a shot that looks pretty nice. There is the occasional FUBAR shot, and no doubt it needs to be kept under control (overexposing means that it shoots slow) but all in all this camera is actually pretty decent. Not great, I would never say that (even if there wasn't any lens flare). But not bad. For example, it has very reliable focus, something that shouldn't be taken for granted. It is very clean even at ISO400. It really struts its stuff in moderate to low light, shots with moderate contrast. Paradoxically. But it does tend to screw around with the exposure a little too much, and almost demands that you use auto-bracketing. The S2 is almost so accurate in its metering that autobracketing really only helps with the occasional high contrast shot. But I think the fundamental image geometry is better with the FZ5. The lines are just crisper, cleaner, more subtle...not overstated. Like the difference between a trumpet and a coronet. Though no doubt it has heavy NR and occasionally you will pay the price for that in terms of smudged fine detail and narrow dynamic range.

Again, this camera has some issues. But it is reliable, fast, easy to use, has a good viewfinder, takes decent pictures that at worst require a little post-processing, and works well in low light. Not to mention light and small with a 12x zoom. In contrast the s2 shots require little if any PP once the exposure is right but you pay the price with a big, heavy bulky camera with a crappy lens cap and a viewfinder that is average at best, under zoom the images begin to look a little flaky and it gets noisy at ISO200 and real noisy at ISO400. They're almost polar opposites. You will get better photos, in the main sense, with the s2, but you will hate it, unless you come from the DSLR world where the S2 is a small light little camera. You're still going to hate the lens cap though. I actually like shooting with my A610 better, and now I want to buy an A710 (with IS)...for this very reason. The quality of the shots that I get from the s2 are just not worth the bulk and that damm lens cap. Even if they *are* good. And...they are pretty good. But my A610 can shoot right with it, image-quality wise, and it would be even better if it had IS. Not to mention a 6x zoom and IS. It does get a little fiddly though as I have to change the exposure manually, and none of the A-series Canons have auto-bracketing anyway. 9 times out of 10 the s2 is too much camera and too much trouble for what it gives you. It is like carrying a 30-06 with a 10x scope to go squirrel-hunting.

ok life goes on we learn and thrive :)
here's a great example of the optical distortion that all of these cameras have at high zoom...the fz5 when shooting in normal mode (and probably vivid too), the s2 and the sp500...you can see "fluttering" in the lines and details. I will post a shot of the fz5 in natural mode and the same shot just freaking HAMMERED with sharpening. I used a 14-weight edge sharpening filter to do this. I was trying to match the sharpening in the s2 shot, and just basically trying to sharpen it as much as possible without bringing out the noise too much. I mean, I was really pushing the limits of sharpening :) and I still could not put in as much "fluttering" as the camera put in itself in normal mode, and the sp500 puts in as well, and definitely the s2 does. I just think that the fz5 is really, really, optically clean across the shot, while the s2 seems to be soft to the left and upper left, especially. The sp500 seems to be ok except for this "fluttering". Which I don't see when shooting in RAW mode (but that's a tale for another day). The problem with RAW is that the images come out so soft that you have to hammer them with sharpening...you have to work a lot to get them to look as good as the jpegs. So I usually shoot RAW+jpeg when I shoot RAW, just in case the jpegs look better than I can get the RAW shots to look. OCCCASIONALLY the RAW shots have more fine detail, but this is a rare occasion. They always have less optical distortion but I only see optical distortion in the jpegs at full zoom. Anyway, photos speak a thousand words. See if you can figure which is which. I won't tell. Ok I took out the sp500 shots to make this 1-1. One fz5 in natural mode, one fz5 in natural mode sharpened, one fz5 in normal mode and one s2 with the sharpening at -1.

again, a different shot, at full zoom.

What I've found is that in the day this camera tends to shoot about an ev high (it seems to get swamped by daylight) and at night it want to shoot high (to brighten the shot) and in the middle it shoots somewhere around 1/2EV high. The auto-bracketing is essential unless you check the first couple of shots and even then I would just use it at +- two thirds of an EV. It has to be set every time you turn the camera on but it is a simple double tap to do it. And it simply won't hurt, you get a free burst mode as well as the exposure bracketing. I will never shoot it in standard mode much less vivid again.
When I saw this (and I've seen it before, under similar conditions) I didn't believe that it was due to the natural/standard setting whatever that is called, but I double-checked and sure enough it went away in normal mode. And that had really really ruined more than a few shots that I had taken at the Inner Harbor, not to mention the overexposure. But now I can see that it can shoot "cleaner" than the s2 even, and with some sharpening and contrast added, the shots come out looking pretty good. I can't say, yet, that I "love" this camera, but, I know what it can and can't do. And it can take some good-looking shots under a wide variety of conditions, which is not bad for a little $285 camera with a 12x zoom and IS. I really can't ask for too much more than what this camera can do, given its size and weight. And its well-designed lens cap :)and its very good focusing. The one thing this camera does not do is blow a focus, even in the dark it will focus well on just about anything. It is a little heavy on the NR, certainly more than the s2 and without a doubt it can't compare to shooting RAW. But, still. For most shots under most conditions it will do a good job. And at night, it will surprise you. You can walk around at night with it and take shots all night long, handheld. Autobracketing is where it's at :)

end of issue. This camera only has so many settings to play with :)

I have to explain this a little better. R#66 (the shots of the boathouse) are an example of how the fz5 can match the s2 in terms of image quality under high zoom, if shot in normal mode. When shooting wide angle or mid-range this is not a concern. When shooting the fz5 in "normal" mode (with the sharpening and contrast up) you get something like what you see in R#67, the second shot. The S2 shots are the first ones in R66 and R67. R68 is the natural mode Fz5 crop from R67, sharpened to within an inch of its life, similar for the third shot in R66. It is hard to make a great example of this from one or two crops, but you would see it if you looked at 100% crops from the whole full-zoom shot, for example. Just go to dpreview.com and look at any of the zoom shots at 100% and you'll see what I mean. The thing is, with the fz5, this nonlinearity really screws up zoom shots. It shoots much better in natural mode and in fact with some solid sharpening can exceed the s2 image quality mainly because it is so consistent across the lens. The s2, at least *my* s2, definitely gets soft to the upper left quadrant under full zoom, it is much more solid when shooting wide-angle (and then I have this big-a*s camera with a 12x zoom that I am using to take wide-angle shots with, when I could use any old pocket point and shoot to take the same shot). So, to me, the s2 is like driving a Dodge Charger with nitrous. I don't want that much weight and bulk just for the occasional 9 second quarter-mile. This camera is far, far far more convenient to use and to carry than the s2. Even though the s2 keeps all my settings (as long as I use auto-bracket and not burst). I do not have to futz with the focus, I do not have to worry about dropping the lens cap when I pull the camera out of the bag, or dropping the camera trying to put it in while keeping hold of the lens cap...it's just much smoother to pull and shoot. No accidental changing the ISO, none of that stuff. Plus I have a grid to shoot on. And the battery has never gone low on me, ever.

I think from looking at the above crops it's pretty clear the fz5 beats the s2 under zoom, when the fz5 is shot in natural mode. Not only does it not have the nonlinearity and oversharpening artifacts, but it also doesn't have the "blotching" due to excessive NR that can be seen in the s2 crops. It's just cleaner, more linear, and more even. And, I dare say, "sharper"...just look at the air-conditioning unit on the roof of the Torpedo Factory, which is the white building with the steamboat in front of it. Look at the blotching in the brown areas. That's the kind of crap that ticked me off about shooting the s2 in the Baltimore Inner Harbor. It was so obvious because it blotches the tannish-brown light parts, not just the darker tones. It would even blotch out the bare branches of a tree if the tree was far enough away. You can take it for granted but still it is pretty obvious. On the other hand with the FZ5 you have to deal with the brown color cast and the camera pushing the EV on you. As it gets dark it will try to boost the EV to lighten the shot. It doesn't want to take shots at ambient lighting conditions, no matter what the conditions are, and it has to manually be set an EV low to get the lighting right It almost always wants to overexpose. And at night you get a brown color cast. But, at least, it's clean and crisp and very sharp at night, with relatively low noise, and the IS is very good. This camera does kind of look like a cheap toy, but inside the body is a decent camera. One that I think takes a decent photographer, someone who is going to be patient with it and experiment with it, to get the most out of it. Unlike the s2 which is tuned for the beginner. Without the ability to shoot RAW or to turn down the NR or even the sharpness to a reasonable level, you're very much stuck with what the S2 gives you, and what it gives you is a decent wide-angle shot and some sort of zoom performance somewhere between "average" and "bad". And it's just too f-ing big and heavy and complicated to use for the crappy zoom performance that you get from it. It is basically a good wide-angle camera with some big zoom performance grafted onto it. The FZ5 has much better balance...if you shoot it in natural mode, with fine image resolution, and use autobracketing. Again all around I'll stick my neck out for the FZ5 before I will stick my neck out for the S2 even if it does have better color balance. It just does not pay me back for the effort that it extracts from me, to carry and shoot it. So, when I do carry it, which is rare, now, as I now have 5 cameras...4 of which I bought after I bought my s2...it is a good temporary experience and a good reminder of why I bought other cameras. The FZ5 I could own alone and be happy with it. Now that I know about the performance tradeoffs of the various shooting modes, and how to set it up to get good shots under a wide variety of conditions. If I had known this 6 months ago I would not have bought another sp500 after I sold my first one but I still probably would have bought an a710 and I got the a610 for a bargain price, for $180 it's worth every penny. And as many nice shots as I have gotten from my s2, I still probably would not have bought it. Not at $375, for sure. ...the thing is, I cannot sell out of these cameras (though I can still return my a710 if I need to, I just bought it) and get anywhere near what I paid for them...but I know one thing for sure. I'm happy with what I have now that I have an a710 and I will not be buying anything in the near future. If I had to return the a710, sell my s2 and sp500 for whatever I could get for them, and be happy with the a610 and FZ5, I could do that, for they compliment each other well. Both are small, light, fast and easy to use, the a610 has good color, high image resolution and low noise plus the flip LCD, the FZ5 has the 12x zoom, IS and auto-bracketing. Between the two of them they are better than the S2 not to mention the SP500, which, really, is a good day camera with RAW capability and a 10x zoom and of course it shoots well from a tripod, but that's it. Without IS it is highly limited. So, I have what I want...and I have more than I need. It will take a lot to get me out of what I have now, and I will shoot them until they break. And I have five cameras to break, like that. The only ones I would be another one of, would be the FZ5 and the A710. The s2, the a610 and the sp500, I will be glad to get any good use out of. Having said all this, if I had to do it all over again, this search for "the perfect camera", I would start with Canon. The other mfgs are really following in Canons' footsteps. The FZ5 and SP500 are anomalies, in the sense that they are good in certain ways that make them worthwhile in spite of the fact that I can get a Canon with a similar feature set. But in general Canon is the way to go. If I had bought the a610 first I would not be having this discussion, but I didn't buy it because it only had 4x zoom. I bought the SP500 first, after returning an SP310 and a Coolpix 4800, but I could not be happy with it due to the inconsistent focusing and the lack of IS. The s2 had better focus, but had obvious NR problems and was too big and has that f-ed up lens cap...the FZ5 was ok even then. And it just got better over time as I learned more about it. The reason I bought the a610 was because the FZ5 was *still* just a little too big, I really wanted something in the Canon A-frame size to carry on trips, and the image distortion that I had seen while shooting at the Baltimore Inner Harbor, which I learned after I bought the a610, comes from shooting it in standard mode instead of natural mode, I mean, I just learned that last week after having the FZ5 for a good 6 months. Still $180 for an a610 isn't a bad deal, it's too good to sell it. And even then I had to get an a710 because the a610 didn't have IS and only had 4x zoom and 5MP, it was just too out of date.

Still a modest man would be happy with any one of the cameras that I have. And certainly I am not getting a DSLR.

I call myself "finished with buying cameras, for at least a year". I really should try for two :) really I can feel already that the a710 I will keep and sell the others. The only thing stopping me is that I know I won't get hardly anything for them. Which is ok. Variety is the spice of life. I will just call this an $1800 learning experience. Yeah, I know, for $1800 I could have bought an X or a Y or a Z...now you tell me what camera I could have gotten for $1800 that would have been worth $1800 to me. I would never have consciously dropped that much on a camera. Nowhere near it. The only reason I did over 5 cameras is because I got progressively closer to what I want, with each one, and with each one I learned more about what I needed. How would anyone buying an $1800 camera know what they are getting, unless they'd already owned or at least shot a bunch of other cameras in that price range? So be glad that you can search for and read my reviews here on this site :) and save yourself a lot of time and money. And frustration. This is a good camera, no matter what Canon S2 owners say. I know. I have both. You will not find a mid-body 10-12x zoom camera on the market today that can match the FZ5 in terms of price, features, image quality, performance, weight, size and ease of use. Not to mention speed. You can go smaller and lose the zoom, or bigger and gain weight and cost. If you want to maintain the image quality. And please don't consider the TZ1 or Nikon S4 as an adequate substitute for the FZ5. They are not. Unless you like shots like this, from an S4. The TZ1 is not much different.

...the FZ5 oversharpening problem goes away in NATURAL mode. Not "normal". There is no "normal" mode on the FZ5.

BTW if it helps, the S2 shots are the ones with a lot of smoothing due to the excess NR. Like there's a blurring film over parts of the shot. Especially light brown parts, if a bush or a tree looks like a light brown blob or smear? It's probably an s2 shot. If an air conditioning unit looks like it is about to turn into a puff of smoke? It's an s2 shot. The s2 shots generally have light and airy colors, light and fluffy, not solid and serious like the fz5. Not so much contrast because I turned the contrast down in the s2 before I took these shots.

So given all these clues you should be able to distinguish between the s2, the fz5 in natural and the fz5 in standard mode, easily :)

ok here's an entry in the "no-noise" vs "noise and detail" argument. Without a doubt these small-sensor cameras lose at high ISO to DSLRs due to their lower signal to noise ratio. But, that is ok, if there is not a lot of noise and you get a good, solid exposure. It is better to have a shot with a lot of fine detail lost to NR, than to not get a shot at all. You simply have to accept that there will not be a lot of fine-detail in the shot...and with a lot of shots, that's ok. There isn't a lot of fine detail. Especially when shooting wide-angle in low light. I took this handheld at ISO200, part of an autobracket burst. Yes, it's a little blurry, but you really can't see that at 2MP. A shot does not have to be perfect to be good. Again, this camera packs a lot of punch into its small size and weight, and in the hands of someone who knows what they are doing with it, it will give some very nice results. I could have shot this at ISO400 and you would have seen a small additional loss of fine detail, but no significant increase in noise. Not so with my S2, there would have been chroma noise all over it at ISO400. Canon plays a very dangerous game by leaving so much noise in, in an attempt to preserve detail. If the detail size is on the order of the noise size, you can't see that detail without seeing the noise. I can see the logic behind the approach that Panasonic takes. If you need the detail, use a tripod and shoot at low ISO or get a better camera. If you just want the shot and you are willing to sacrifice the detail, the FZ5 will give the shot to you 9 times out of 10 if you just use ISO200 or 400. And if that's not fast enough then get your tripod or a better camera. The s2, and Canons in general, on the other hand, is already sacrificing detail to NR and then leaves in more noise as you increase ISO. I am not sure that approach really works. It mainly works because their image quality is so good and most of the time you don't need to shoot at high ISO to get a shot. You can find a rest, a tripod, or a better Canon. The Fz5 is clearly not quite as photogenic as a Canon, the color balance and accuracy, the image dynamic range, are clearly not as good as with a Canon. But it definitely shoots clean at high ISO and at high zoom in natural mode. And with certain shots, that makes up the difference. I could have taken this shot handheld with my s2 but it would have had more chroma noise, which may or may not have been noticeable at at 640x480 or 1MP but certainly at 2MP and up, you would notice it. I say again, the problem with this forum is that 640x480 hides a LOT of image flaws. Addendum: my thought is that with a Canon Rebel XT, 350 or 400D, this would have been an easy ISO400-800 handheld shot with less NR. Not to mention a 28mm lens, or 35-50mm with IS. But the camera and lens would be twice as big and 4x as expensive. At least. Why not just park your butt a little farther away, or closer, even...find some sort of decent rest in the area, and use a reasonably-priced and sized camera? I can see the logic behind a Rebel or higher-end DSLR, D40 etc. I can also see the logic in NOT getting one. A LOT of logic in not getting one.

One other thing, the focus on this camera is very good. It almost never misses the focus, even at night. And the battery seems to last forever. For a simple, lightweight, relatively compact high-zoom easy to use but powerful point and shoot camera, this camera is excellent. In fact the most user-unfriendly thing about it is that you have to be careful not to poke your eye out with the EVF window, and you have to manually set the autobracketing each time you turn the camera on. Beyond that it is really hard to get a better value, size and performance combination than this camera. It is a very solid 7.5 to 8 on a scale to 10. Ergo...much less comment, more space for example photos :) These two are ISO80 handheld. Frankly, just looking at the whole shots without going to 100%, I couldn't tell the difference between these and the IS0200 shots I took for insurance. Sure, they were shot at twice the speed, but are they twice as good, photographically? No. With IS you have to vastly undershoot the lens and sensor, to get enough handshake to be a problem at full-image instead of just "noticable at 100%". You might get a soft shot, sure. But in natural mode the fz5 is already soft. The question is, is the shot usable or not...you're not going to throw away a good shot because of a little camera shake, a little noise or a slight loss of image resolution. You will have to throw it away if the exposure is way off or there is too much noise and or shake, or the focus is off at all. This camera will take care of the focus and the noise, leaving you to take care of the hold and the exposure. Whatever camera you get, you should take enough practice shots to know what it will do in different conditions, before you get out on the road and start shooting for keeps. And out of all the cameras that I have, this is in the top two or three, and I would have no problem recommending it. Funny, 6 months ago I would have said otherwise. Now I have no real problem with it. It just should be shot in normal mode even if the shots look a little soft and the autobracketing should be used if there is any risk of exposure error. You can always sharpen the images on your computer. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to fix an oversharpened, out of focus or severely over or underexposed shot to the point that it is even halfway appealing. It is even hard to fix a shot with too much noise. With the FZ5, if the exposure is at least decent, the shot will not have a noise problem, even at ISO400, and it could in fact use an ISO800 or even 1600 with more noise. Sometimes some noise and or excessive NR is ok, it all depends on the shot. But don't *add* noise to the shot by underexposing at high ISOs, unless, of course, it's the shot of last resort. Ok that's enough general comment on shooting techniques, as well as on the fz5...

I hope these shots show up this time

this system seems to hate seeing the slash mark, so this time I'm using a dash.

even if you do have to manually set up the autobracketing each time on the FZ5, this is offset by the fact that it is easier to change the exposure than with the s2. Just the touch of a button does it, with the s2 you have to pull up the function menu then find the exposure entry to change it. There is no dedicated button for this like on the A series Canons. Even so the s2 is pull it out, turn it on, and shoot. The autobracketing is a setup entry, it stays the same through power cycles, and the turn on and lens-extension speeds are much faster than the FZ5. Plus the buttons are better-placed (they fixed this in the FZ7) This gives the s2 a light-footedness and ease of use that is hidden by its size and weight, like Clark Kent hides Superman. Still he needs that phone booth. The S2 is still big and heavy, and its lens cap does have a mind of its own. But...what they both need, really, is a 28-320mm zoom, not a 35-420mm zoom. There simply is hardly any need for a 12x zoom on a 35mm camera, and a lot of times I am walking around with these cameras and simply pining for a 28mm lens. With a 35mm lens, you really can only shoot half, maybe a third, of the normal human FOV. That means that I see a shot, and I have to either walk back another 20yards or more, or I have to not zoom in so that I can get the whole shot. It's easy to have to compromise between getting good detail and getting a large enough FOV. Very easy to overzoom with these cameras, not to mention the 4:3 without a 16:9 or even a 3:2 mode. But, I mean, this is really splitting ant-hairs. Still, if you want a shot and the reason you have a camera is to take shots of scenes that you want to preserve, why would you want a camera that doesn't see things the same way that you do? The camera should at least *start* with around 80% of the normal human FOV then zoom in from there. And frankly I'm tired of shooting 4:3. It just doesn't look natural, there is either too much sky and foreground and the image detail is too small, or there is no FOV. It only works well under high zoom or with a large DOF shot, or, I have to shoot wide and at high res all the time, then crop later. The trend then is to shoot 10MP superfine 35mm all the time just to get the FOV then go in and cut out the sky and foreground and part of the FOV, to make a 16:9 shot at 2MP. No wonder in-camera cropping is such a big deal nowadays. The thing I have to say about the FZ7 and the S3 is that they have more of the features that I want in the FZ5 and S2, but I hate the viewfinder location in the FZ7 (plus it has even more noise and NR than the FZ5) and the S3 just isn't that much better than the s2 that I'd want to buy an S3, plus it has more chroma noise and the ISO speeds are overrated. The problem is that the sensors aren't getting any better, in terms of signal to noise, they're just getting more pixels. But the image quality itself is decreasing. It's like the difference between Britney Spears at 16 with no kids and a first recording contract, and Britney Spears at 25 with two kids and millions in the bank. Neither one is what you want and the second is hardly going to make you happy, even if it has some good features. I want Britney at 30 with no kids and the millions in the bank :)
I want a larger sensor with about the same number of MP and a much better signal to noise ratio but with the same-size body and lens, even if I have to compromise on the long-end of the zoom. Make it 28-200, even. With IS and a sensor with 10x the SNR. And with autobracketing, 16:9 (skip 3:2, who needs it) and a good burst mode. What I want, basically, is an a610 or even G6 with autobracketing, a 28-200mm IS lens and a 16:9 mode. I can take the 4x zoom but I can't take the lack of IS. It's like giving up night sights on a pistol. You can still shoot it at night but it is much harder to get a good shot. Instead Canon gives us the A710 and G7 with 35-200mm lenses and more pixels, the S3 with more pixels, and Panasonic does the same with the FZ7 and FZ8. The problem is that there are only a handful of companies that make the SENSORS. Everyone else is left to differentiate on *features*. I want a better, bigger sensor, better lens and slightly more features than my FZ5 has. Not a worse sensor, smaller, worse lens and a lot more features. I don't want to take pictures with a cameraphone...but that is the way the market is heading. And that is another reason that I am hanging onto the cameras that I have right now. They will get worse, not better. Though I might break down and buy an EOS 350 before it is all said and done. I'm not going to buy a D40 without autobracketing, and I'm not going to buy anything any bigger than it needs to be. The Sony A-DSLR looks interesting because it raises the possibility of buying a bunch of old Minolta lenses without IS but the Canon CMOS sensor is the best. If you go with a D40 or D40x you might as well just use an FZ5 or S2. Sure, it has better high ISO performance, but the camera is 3 times bigger! The D40 is huge compared to even my S2. How are you going to carry a D40 (or any DSLR) around and keep it from being broken or stolen? I can't even imagine that. I'm in the middle of a crowd of people in DC, the other day, holding my s2 in my hands, and a guy tried to snatch it right out of my hands and run off with it. Why? Because it was so big and shiny, he thought that it would be worth some real money even if stolen, and he thought that because it was so big, he could just grab it and run. He actually tried. He walked in front of me from behind, then quickly tried to turn around, grab it and turn back and run. I didn't even realize what he was trying to do until hours later, it never occurred to me that someone would try to snatch it out of my hands in broad daylight on a DC city street, especially not in the part of DC that I was in, with people all around us. In Manhattan, yes; in DC, no, and the same thing happened in Manhattan on 18th street in the Village with a smaller camera, I'm walking down the street holding an A700 in my hand and two guys tried to follow me unawares and snatch it from behind. Yes, these guys are dumb-asses who think they are slick, but they were bold dumb-asses and that is what you would have to deal with all the time, not to mention the idiots who bump into you or your camera or act as if it is a playtoy, and the guys who actually are good thieves. Go buy a big new $600 camera that any moron can sell for $150 in a pawnshop anywhere across the country, that would break in half if you drop it or it gets bumped, and see how long you can carry it around, keep it in one piece and stay sane. You carry it, you're a walking target. Gonna have great high ISO performance, though. Ironic that high ISO performance is most useful in the dark, making it much easier for someone to surprise you and steal it. And if a kid will kill you for your iPod, imagine what they would do for your $600 camera. Especially if they thought that it was worth a lot more, as DSLRs usually are. The problem with a very nice camera is that you can't just freely walk around with it, so you are not likely to have it when you see that shot for which you want to carry it. The bigger and more expensive it is, the less likely you are to have it on you, and the more likely it is to get stolen or broken when you do carry it.
Still it would be nice to have a 350D. Even if I rarely carry it around with me. I would like to have one just for that odd shot of the sunset, night sky, etc that I want to take with a really good camera and lens. On a tripod, etc. I'd never carry it while walking around in the city, but it could stay in my car.

The problem, of course, is that my S2 or FZ5 could take most of the same shots just fine. Not to mention my A710 or A610. I'll leave the sp500 out of this discussion for now. I would have to "rent" a 350D for a couple of weeks just to see the difference. But for now I am happy with my FZ5. The rest are superfluous.

Some shots from Renditions golf course in Md, in normal mode, ISO80 using autobracketing. Generally the exposure was right but a few times the off EV shots were better. My coworkers, each searching for their inner Greg Norman...and finding him a few seconds later :). No futzing around with exposure points required, the FZ5 got these long depth of field shots just fine.

Here's a good autobracket series which shows the good and bad of this camera. It really is quite a decent camera. I shot this in natural mode which means the saturation and sharpening are "down" and the contrast is whatever it is, normally. First the bad. Aside from the lens flare (and this camera definitely flares if you shoot towards the sun) you can see that the colors really aren't "bright and lively", much less "natural", and to get that out of the camera you have to shoot in normal mode which bumps up the saturation and sharpness and undoes the very high lens fidelity (it's not good for small features under high zoom). This does on the other hand have the benefit of reducing the "gamma", I guess, of the camera, allowing for a larger intensity dynamic range...which means that this +0.7EV shot is not too overexposed and the -0.7EV shot is not too underexposed...they're both usable...it means the FZ5 will give good results over a larger range of EV. Which is very good because very often 0EV is not what you really want to use. Some cameras (notably my A710) overexpose very easily at 0EV, not to mention at +EV, and some cameras (again, notably my A710) underexpose very easily as the EV is lowered, with a lot of "blackout" where really all you want to do is control the highlights. Cameras with too much contrast have a real problem with EV adjustments. The FZ5 seems to have a light touch...this just makes it easier to shoot on sunny days when shooting in or out of the shade. Ideally you want to shoot with no contrast at all, to maximize dynamic range, allowing the proper exposure to be more easily found and used, but that means that you have to touch-up all your shots to make them look natural. And that may be fine if you can deal with it, but if you take a lot of shots, that can get to be a pain in the butt. I like what the FZ5 does, just adds a *little* bit of contrast. My Canon A610 which I love, has a "low sharpening" mode and a "neutral" mode which reduces contrast but I can't lower both the contrast and sharpening at the same time, and in low-sharpening mode it is more EV-sensitive, but it is not nearly as EV sensitive as my A710 which *does* have full independent adjustment of contrast, sharpness and saturation. And it needs that *badly* :), Anyway between the 3, the A610 has the best color (no question), but the FZ5 is much more flexible. The A710 is really a sad, pathetic excuse for a camera compared to the other two. Comparing the FZ5 to my S2, the S2 has much more realistic color but it doesn't have the image sharpness, light weight, small size and useful lenscap of the FZ5. The S2 is like a one-trick pony with a big zoom sort of grafted on. It's ok for wide-angle prints, that's about it. Even looking at the wide-angle performance, my A610 beats it easily, it's just so much sharper, with so much more fine-detail. That fine detail is in the FZ5 output, in natural mode, but you have to sharpen it up pretty-good, in post-processing, to get it....but you can only get it because of the superb lens quality. That's pretty much it for the bad parts of the FZ5 now for the good parts...you can see fairly well how "clean' the lines are in this image, with very little if any distortion or "chromatic aberration" (softness around the edges and to the sides of lines). It just is clean and sharp. Also the focus is very good, this camera almost never misses a focus if there is anything resembling decent light. It has to be pretty damm dark before it starts to miss focus and at that point it just generally will not focus. Unlike...my A710, which focuses right about 75% of the time, it's almost as bad as my SP500, it just needs a clean line, good contrast to get a focus. And a patient finger. It is not just a "point and shoot camera", for that reason (in spite of its small size). And this is with low sharpness, speaking of the FZ5...if you can deal with the flat color (and this is not a problem with full-frame shots), if you don't mind doing a little image processing, doing a color and sharpening boost, on the shots that you really want to show, if you don't mind a little brownish-red tint at night (it's very sensitive to the type of lighting in the shot, at night), this camera is a steal for its price, size, zoom and speed. It's the prototypical "put a 350hemi in a Dodge Dart". Or something. Say, "put the 1.6L DOHC 4valve/cylinder Integra engine in the Honda Del Sol". It packs a hell of a punch in a small package. Nevertheless, in terms of color, it can't compete with my A610 or S2, even. It's much more on a par with the A710. Like, comparing a Porsche with a Corvette...the Corvette may be faster and better-handling, but the ladies will always see the Porsche first. There's just something about the 'vette that says "fat old American man" and likewise there's something about the color of the FZ5s shots that says "not a good camera". But that's hardly true. It's an acquired taste, that responds well in knowledgable hands. I think the main thing is the exposure metering...the S2 is very good at getting the exposure right, and almost never "burns" a shot with too much EV. The FZ5 really demands that you use autobracketing in bright light. It isn't going to "burn" the shot but it definitely can miss the exposure. And it is critical to stay away from the "normal" much less "vivid" modes in bright light. The two together can be a disaster. It's an interesting trade...the s2 is more like a shapely, pretty woman without much on her mind, while the FZ5 is an average-looking girl with a bright mind and interesting personality. You wouldn't know by taking a casual look at the shots, which is the better camera, and indeed I think the S2s popularity is due to the interest of the casual photographer and the exceptionally-good color balance (though it has something of a reddish, clay-red tint which I find annoying on sunlit shots). I mean frankly if it was a good camera, with a good, clean lens, who would want to buy a low-end Canon DSLR? The s2 will give you a much more "realistic" looking shot than the FZ5 in terms of color, the FZ5 is far more "realistic" in terms of linear fidelity. Without a doubt you will notice one more on close inspection, and the other more, on a casual glance. Guess which one. All 3 of these shots can use a little color retouching (which I will do in the next reply), and here are the shots straight out of the camera...ISO80, a 3 shot auto-bracket 0.7EV...

the shots in #76 are in natural mode, not "normal" (there is standard and vivid and natural)

...the same 3 shots with "one touch photo fix" in paint shop pro, which obviously boosted the saturation and contrast, but not so obviously boosted the sharpening. Don't worry, it's not going to give you the color "photo-realism" of the S2. But the S2 is not all that realistic, either. What you get in terms of color "realism", you lose in terms of fine-detail fidelity and line fidelity. The s2 can be very rewarding to shoot...it can also be a major letdown, because the image fidelity doesn't match the color fidelity, and in some scenes it is obvious. The FZ5 isn't really going to disappoint you because you won't expect too much of it up-front, anyway. And it is very consistent at what it does. It will not ruin a shot if shot in natural mode with autobracketing. You won't think of the FZ5 as a DSLR, just a small, fast, light camera with a great 12x lens and good resolution, that takes decent "amateur" level photos. It is not an "Ektachrome" camera. A solid 8+ in terms of performance and image quality, not a 7+ camera with pretentions of 9+ image quality.

...you can't see the lens flare in those 3 shots, can you? not at 640x480 :) it's pretty obvious at 2MP. Lower right-hand corner.

a good ISO80 shot...this camera has so little noise (and the NR is so consistent) that shooting ISO80-200 is not all that distinguishable...it can easily be shot ISO400 in a pinch, with just a little discernable noise. But, if shot in natural mode, the images will almost *have* to be sharpened. That's fine, they sharpen up nice. When you pull the images off the camera and look at them, you will be slightly disappointed because they will look soft, flat, lacking in fine detail. Sharpen them first, before you begin to worry. Then you might want to punch up the saturation a little. But generally my eyes appreciate the absence of "vivid color" that this camera has. I would not say that the shots look great. But they look pretty good, once sharpened.

ISO200 and ISO400 handheld shots.
Note the brownish cast, I barely got this at ISO200 as part of an autoexposure bracket burst, and the ISO400 AEB showed a lot more noise and a lot more smearing of the colors. Overall this test favored the S2 for color accuracy and the FZ5 for noise. I would have tried to get more ISO200 shots if I had any idea that this one was shaky, but I didn't look closely enough, didn't care that much about it...it was just a "test shot". It seems that this camera reaches a point of maximum instability around 1-2 sec and then from there down to 1 s actually gets *more* stable. I get a lot of 1s shots with this camera that come out great, all things considered, here's one.

ok the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away...

Anyway, let me put it this way. After a trip to the Jersey shore this weekend, shooting boats long-range with my s2 and new Rebel XTi, I came home, put my s2 back on eBay, and the next morning, realized that the A610 that I carried out there and never shot because of its anemic 4x zoom and the fact that I did not want to buy another set of NiMH batteries to shoot it with (I have 6, I needed 2 more as they both require 4), was no longer working. Then the 17-85 F4-5.6 IS USM lens that I ordered before I left, finally arrived on my doorstep. With the sharpness down 1 and the contrast down 2 and a good IS lens on the Rebel, I think that I'm set. I am officially now down to 3 cameras. I sold my A710, I'm selling my S2, and the A610, well, it seems to have broken itself, sitting in my car, for 3 days, at the hot Jersey shore. Which is a shame because I liked that camera and I was planning on keeping it. Now I have to decide whether to buy another one or try to get one out of Canon, since it was 6 months old, officially. But what do I do if it fails again? My FZ5 has never given me any problems....same for my SP500...and the Rebel is still on its return period! How can I lose? How ironic is this? It is like the Camera Gods are, somehow, smiling on me...well, really, the FZ5 just is a better camera than the s2. Ultimately, high image fidelity wins over punchy colors, an understated ISO rating and hyper-sharpening, and the fine-detail distortion, optical distortion and noise that comes from them. The FZ5 may look and feel like a cheap piece of crap but that lens is worth its weight in gold, and the sensor, IS system and image processing are not too bad, either.

One more just to get a better idea of what the s2, FZ5 and the Rebel XTi with a $900 F2.8 IS lens will do...these are ISO200 1-3.2s for the FZ5, "ISO400" 1-10s for the S2, and ISO800 1-6s for the Rebel, all at F2.8, handheld, with IS enabled. It is much easier to get this clean with the Rebel...but you have to get a good focus, and it is hardest to get a good focus with the Rebel, even with the F2.8 lens. The s2 will get it fairly easily but it will be noisy as hell. The FZ5 has a hard time shooting clean and fast with enough exposure, but it seems to focus ok. This is because the FZ5s' ISO rating is accurate but the S2 is way underrated in terms of ISO, it is half what it should be and twice as noisy as the FZ5.

The stabilization is electronic (not optical).......is it as effective as an optical stabilizer?

It is optical. I think some people are confusing electronic with digital. This camera actually makes adjustments to a lens element to compensate for camera shake.

If it's supposed to be EIS then why do Panasonic and PC Review say it's OIS. I think I'll believe them before I believe you.

I own this camera too and the image stabilization is actually optical - not electronic. It works very well. Also I think the Panasonic has less purple fringing than the Canon in the same price range if you're comparing the two. The Canon has a better movie mode if you are interested in that feature.

I may need to correct a statement I made above. The image stabilization is optical - not digital if that's what you are referring to as electronic. Digital stabilization is what is used in some lower price camcorders and doesn't usually work as well as optical stabilization. There may be some but I've never seen a still camera with digital stabilization. Here is the explanation from Panasonic:

" The DMC-FZ5 has a built-in gyrosensor that detects any hand movement and relays a signal to a tiny microcomputer inside the camera, which instantly calculates the compensation needed. A linear motor then shifts the Optical Image Stabilizer lens as necessary to guide incoming light from the image straight to the CCD."

could u explain how you "nailed down the settings"? i have this camera and i got it because of the hype, LEICA lens, 12x opt zoom, strong body etc etc..but almost all pix i take are blurry unless i'm outside on a bright sunny day..basically all my indoor and low-light are blurry that i have to delete them, not worth the storage space...

hmmmm ...

after reading reviews here and on Cnet and Yahoo, I think perhaps the problem is not the camera...

I don't blame you for thinking that BUt believe me, the Online shop would NOT have taken the first one back if Panasonic had not agreee there was a problem. The 2nd one literally, you could not see any image..it was like the lens cap was on but it was not. Obviously we called Panasonic first and they agred it had to be sent back in. I finally got the camera back and now it works. I have had 3 other digital cameras and never one problem. I was just trying to relate what happened to me....I bought the camera based on the same reviews you were seeing.

If you want a camera that takes good movies, go get yourself a camcorder! You are buying an excellent digital camera with, perhaps, a non-standard video function. YOU ARE NOT BUYING A VIDEO CAM SO DON'T COMPLAIN ABOUT THE MOVIE FILES!

well...one would imagine that a person buys a digital camera for shooting pictures and a camcorder for shooting videos.....trying to find features of a camcorder in a digicam and vice versa is a waste of time....this is a camera which boasts of a 12X optical zoom from leica and good camera features...so lets focus on them and not what it can't do as a camcorder.