Panasonic DMC-SZ1 Digital Camera First Impressions Review

Lens & Sensor

The lens of the DMC-SZ7 offers a 10X zoom range, with the wide angle starting at a 25mm focal length. That’s a pretty good wide angle that should work well for general shooting. It offers an aperture range of f/3.1 to F5.9 at the wide angle setting, and f/4.5 to f/45 at the telephoto end of the zoom range.

The image sensor is a 1/2.33 inch CCD sensor that has a total resolution of megapixels, and which captures 16.1 megapixel images. That's a fairly large sensor for a camera of this type.

LCD

The 3-inch LCD screen on the back of this camera uses Panasonics Power LCD technology, which adjusts the backlight to compensate for the ambient light conditions. We found that this worked well, but the image did get somewhat washed out in direct sunlight.

Flash

A small flash is located on the front of the camera. We were unable to test this, but the small size likely means that it will not be able to deliver a huge amount of light.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

Two ports are located under a small panel on the left side of the camera body. These ports offer a mini HDMI output, and a combination USB and analog video output. The HDMI port is a standard mini HDMI one, but the USB port is a proprietary one that requires a special lead.

Battery

The battery is a 660 mAh Lithium Ion model. Panasonic did not provide an expected battery life for this, but we would anticipate it being on the short side: the combination of a large LCD screen and a small battery usually works that way. This battery cna be charged through the charger, but also over a USB connection. That’s a good feature to have, as it means you can use the same lead to copy images to a computer and charge the cable.

Memory

A small amount of internal memory is available on this camera, but the main storage space is in the memory card slot, which is just under the battery. This supports SD, SDHC and SDXC cards.