Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7 Digital Camera Review

Manual Control Options
The FZ7 offers manual control of exposure, ISO, white balance (including fine-tuning) and focus. That's a robust selection of controls for the user who wants to experiment. The joystick makes the manual controls quick to access, as well.

Focus
Auto Focus (7.0)
The FZ7 has four focusing patterns, plus the choice of continuous or one-shot focusing. The four patterns are: 1 point, 3 point, 9 point and spot. One point focusing also offers an option for high speed focusing, but we didn't notice a big difference between high speed and normal. "Spot" focuses on a smaller area than the 1 point area.

The FZ7's autofocus was accurate. Though it's no quicker than other super zooms, it "hunts" less when shooting telephoto in low light, probably because of the lens's relatively bright aperture.

Manual Focus (5.0)
The FZ7 improves on the manual focus facility of its predecessor, the FZ5. The FZ7 offers two styles of image magnification, both of which work better than the previous camera. The first shows a magnified spot in a small rectangle at the center of the frame. The outside edge remains un-enlarged, allowing users to compose the image more accurately. The second magnification style uses the whole viewing area to show a larger magnified area. The user loses the indicators for how the whole image is framed, but gains a more flexible focusing area. Either way, the magnified image is of a higher quality than it was on the previous camera – it makes the FZ7 good enough so users can focus carefully, which wasn't true of last year's camera.

The joystick controls focus, and that's an improvement as well. We didn't notice backlash or overshooting in the focus control.

Metering (7.5)
The FZ7 has three metering patterns. Integrative takes several discrete readings in various areas of the frame, and then compares them to establish an exposure setting. Integrative settings tend to identify and deal with backlighting and other tough lighting. While they don't necessarily get the perfect setting, they are reliable in that they consistently produce a usable one. They are often used in automated modes, as integrative is on the FZ7.

Spot mode reads a small area at the center of the frame, and is particularly useful for manual exposures. Center-weighted reads the whole frame at once, but weighs the center of the frame more heavily than the corners. Again, manual shooters sometimes prefer this. The three modes are on nearly every digital camera with manual controls, and they typically work just fine. They work fine on the FZ7 as well, which is good, but it doesn’t equal a particular advantage over other cameras.

Exposure (8.0)
The FZ7 offers full manual control plus aperture priority, in which the user chooses the aperture and the camera sets the shutter speed; and shutter priority, in which the user sets the shutter speed and the camera sets the aperture. There is also a program mode, in which the camera sets both aperture and shutter speed, but the user has the option of biasing the camera in favor of wider or smaller apertures.

The FZ7 also provides exposure compensation, allowing the user to lighten or darken images up to 2 stops in 1/3-stop increments.

White Balance (7.75)
The FZ7 offers 4 white balance presets: Daylight, Cloudy, Halogen and Flash. Interestingly, there are no presets for fluorescent lighting, perhaps a concession to the fact that fluorescent tubes vary wildly and change significantly as they age. The FZ7 can save two custom settings, which can be set conveniently, and it has an Auto mode which we found reliable in mixed lighting around the office.

The most appealing feature of the white balance control is white balance adjustment, a fine-tuning function that can shift the color balance toward red or blue from any setting except auto. That's a feature more common in DSLRs than compacts, and a very useful one in many settings.

ISO (7.25)
The FZ7's ISO range runs from 80 to 100, 200 and 400 in all but one shooting mode. It's quick and easy to set ISO via the joystick. In High Sensitivity mode, the FZ7 adds ISO 800 and 1600. The results we got at 800 and 1600 around the office are very noisy – much less appealing than the high ISO results from some Fujifilm compacts. We don't suggest anyone buy the FZ7 with the plan of shooting extensively at high ISOs.

Shutter Speed (7.5)
The FZ7 has a basic shutter speed range of 8 to 1/2000 seconds for shutter priority, aperture priority and program modes. This is also set with the joystick. In manual mode, the long range extends to 60 seconds. Fireworks mode sets a fixed exposure of several seconds, and Starry Sky allows exposures of 15, 30 or 60 seconds, while most other scene modes keep the exposures to shorter than a second.

Aperture (8.0)
The joystick also controls the FZ7’s aperture. The FZ7's Vario-Elmarit lens has a maximum aperture of f/2.8 at the wide end and f/3.3 at the telephoto extreme. Many 10x and 12x zooms lose more than half a stop over their range, but FZ7 users will have an advantage shooting in low light or with flash at the telephoto setting. The aperture closes down in 1/3 stop increments to a minimum aperture of f/8 throughout the zoom range.