Table of Contents
amazon Panasonic FZ200 reviews
Design style
Not that at $600 the FZ200 looks bad. It is light weight (590g battery) and has a small size. Based on typical DSLR design styles, Panasonic makes the FZ200 looking stylish, professional, powerful, and comfortable. They have very cleverly imprinted the letter L on the front (which is short for Luxury) without coming right out and declaring the super zoom cameras it is superior to. Yet like everything that Panasonic does, they also get a little bit of a drawback in terms of using the plastic cover for the FZ200, but still render quite comfortable and secure feeling to users.
Number of physical keys is not too much; only some basic buttons almost resemble high-end digital cameras. Operation keys are reasoned out and quite responsive. FZ200 features a dual fixed setting mode, C1, C2 (on aperture, speed, ISO, etc.) on a customizable shooting loop, which is useful for some situations where the speed of the reaction needs to be very fast. C1 mode may then be optimally set up for the fast moving subject being photographed. Its approximately integrated “ready” shooting modes for portraits and landscapes have been combined under one heading, simply known as iA (Intelligent Auto).
The upgrade on its LCD monitor as well as the EVF electronic viewfinder over its predecessor FZ150 brought many praises in the FZ200. A 3inch LCD with a resolution of about 921K pixels (twice that of the former generation) is applied here, while a glare-proofer also coats the surface. The result would be more detailed images viewed through the screen, but much brighter when viewed through the computer or printed. It will work fairly well with bright sunlight, without an accessory covering or the benefit of 360 degrees rotating the screen to lessen the fierce sunlight affecting the angle of view.
Though it has only 1.3-inches, EVF viewfinder has been upgraded to 201.6K pixels. Its quite a great change from the old version, which had only 1312 pixels. But, as we have observed with actual usage, it still manifest slow motion (lag), which is evident during focusing. This is also the inherent disadvantage of the electronic viewfinder compared to the OVF optical viewfinder. Still, we still prefer to use this viewfinder to capture more of the Live View function via the LCD screen because of its sturdier posture, limiting hand shake and battery saving.
Panasonic designed two body zoom keys with a turn beside the shutter button. It’s for movie recording another switch on the lens. For shooting you can leave your hand on the shutter button. Panasonic added a super-optimized autofocus mode to capture macro close-ups on the machine.
Experience
Except for the fixed aperture of F / 2.8 of this integrated lens, the specifications of this camera did not really impress us. The 24-600mm diagonal band is only half the size of the 24-1200mm range offered on the rival Canon SX50 HS. For many this is another disadvantage in favor of the high-end super-zoom: choosing image quality or long focal length.
Aperture helps improve brightness and depth of field (DOF) effects while taking portrait and macro shots. Users will be able to shoot long distances that are sometimes unable to focus with long focal lengths.
The size of the High Sensitivity MOS Sensor is barely 1/2.3 inches, smaller than its sibling LX7, and almost the same as any other mid-range digital camera. It looks like a lot of work has been done by Panasonic in partnership with Leica, developing DC Vario-Elmarit lenses for the machine. This lens is not branded Lumix but Leica, which is known through the legendary lens of the photography village, which made us anxious to test the camera’s ability to take pictures.
The AF system is really impressive at shorter focal lengths (approximately 24-100mm). It usually just takes about 0.3-0.5 seconds to get onto the subject. The lens takes about 1-2 seconds when it is pulled out to maximum focus to bringing an object from the closest distance into infinity. Sure, this system cannot be compared in speed with those phase-based technologies like on the typical DSLR, but it’s not too bad. The accuracy of the AF system is quite good but should be know that sometimes it does fail, such as when there are many similarities between the background and foreground, like when the subject is wearing a white shirt beside a light wall. In Macro AF mode, the object actually comes only 1cm close to the lens, but then this brings the image into even closer to a true 1: 1 ratio, losing just a little speed in doing that.
Continuous focus will release 5.5 images per second on the FZ200. Shooting faster than that is possible only if the camera focuses on the first frame and uses that value for the next picture to be taken. A possible speed boost could take you to 12 frames per second. If this number isn’t sufficient to cover fast-paced scenes (like those with kids, pets, sports, etc.), Burst mode is the answer. This camera has the ability to take 40, if not 60 shots a second, but nearly all at a low resolution, with only the first 3 being taken at the maximum resolution. In normal shooting mode, the memory buffer allows the camera to keep taking shots continuously until 100 images have been taken and reduces this to 12 images in fast shooting modes.
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We also observed that the overall metering system was overly “active.” Default mode for images is bright, we reduced by -0.33EV brightness compensation and it did very well. Under complex lighting conditions, however, the metering system remains stable, without burning. It is not completely perfect as the white balance system. Algorithms of the machine tend to use very opposing colors to compensate for over-steam. For example, if you take a shoot in a green forest, the little image would be slightly purple but without very much clarity as you can see it only when zoomed in to recognize. Still images with JPEG format turned out to be quite brilliant, glare in normal color mode-the case with respect to those who don’t like such style would prefer RAW format-editing it easier at post-production stage.
The single factor accountable for degrading image quality is Dynamic Range because of very small sensor size. The users can make use of this HDR feature – take 3 consecutive shots at 3 different exposures and then automatically reassemble the pictures or allow Intelligent Dynamic Range to be activated for manual selecting the required exposure value for a specific kind of image. The measurements showed that the Dynamic Range is the equivalent of the usual PnS Canon G12 and lower than the Nikon D3100.
Panasonic has even emphasized the high ISO sensitivity virtues when referring to Sensors as being High Sensitivity MOS. Thus, the photo shoot image is a significant advance in the line of super-zoom cameras that, even at ISO 800, does not show much noise and has good detail. The photograph alters color up to ISO 1600 but can be used at a low resolution. Earlier, the superzoom cameras, while at far focal distances, yielded very poor picture quality because of bad-quality lenses and all those anti-shake systems, which didn’t prove effective. We do not have any doubt about the sharpness of the FZ200 due to use of the Leica lens. The picture is very sharp in the center and almost unbound at the edge. The largest focal length of 600 meters, sharpness just slightly reduced, and very good at 24-70mm range. Quality loss is such a big effort of both manufacturers for 24x optical zoom lens in such a compact body. The coating on the lens completes the mission of aberration control. Purple fringing is rare, even in very strong lighting conditions.
The POWER Vibration System O.I.S works relatively well. During tests, we did not engage any default for this test while we realized blurry shots, even though sometimes the shots were low light or low-light shooting. This feature is most beneficial since a zoom lens is quite vibratile at the time it does not have a camera foot attached.
But while perhaps a little, the capacity for shooting movies is good picture quality. The camera records movies in Full HD 1080p at a frame speed of 60 fps in AVCHD format. Panasonic has also arranged stereo recording microphone at the top of the flash to capture sound from the zoom lens tuning in a quiet environment. Unfortunately, it’s effective only about 4-5 meters away.
More plus points include IA and iA Plus image editing. In this mode, the camera’s ability automatically analyzes the scene based on parameters such as light metering, aperture, focal point, scene, facial recognition to customize the rest parameters accordingly. Users need only to view the appropriate frame such as portraiture, landscape, macro, evening shooting, and press the shutter button using the iA Plus technique. After that, the machine will take care of the rest to produce the best picture.
And so have captured some 500 shots on a single charge with considerable image playback time. The charging time exceeds 2 hours. It uses the same battery as the GH2 and G5, so a new battery isn’t too hard to come by. Definitely, this is the FZ200, one of the models of good-quality super-zoom today, but not quite perfect for everyone. While it becomes extremely difficult for photographers to trade off just that bit of image quality at these focal lengths which they would generally not accept when using the FZ200 as a primary camera, there is nothing in the way of complaints when it is used as a secondary camera. The FZ200 is one of the best cameras for photographs, especially with birds and macro flowers. FZ200 also serves the people actively seeking storage space in a compact camera, which will fit well in a daily carry-on, for fun after experiencing the regular travel camera, but not too particular about image quality.