Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH20

Viewfinder

No viewfinder to be found.

 

LCD

The 2.7-inch 230,000-dot LCD looked fine, and the fact that it held its own when we moved in under the bright booth spotlights bodes well for shooting outdoors on sunny days. The LCD will automatically brightness to match the surroundings, in 11 steps, or you can manually set it to maximum output. There is also a special mode that looks washed-out when viewed directly, but allows you to hold the camera overhead and see the screen clearly.
 

When in record mode, the LCD display can be a clean screen with focus indicator, the same screen with a nine-box grid overlaid, or you can have information on image stabilization and burst rate setting, image size, photo number and battery level displayed while shooting.
 

The thumbnail view in playback mode is shown here.

Flash

The flash is a bit close to the lens, but also far from your right-hand fingers, so we'll call it a wash. Supported flash modes include auto, auto with red-eye reduction, fill flash, slow sync (for capturing foreground subject and dark background) and, of course, flash off. Panasonic gives the flash range as approximately 2 to 19 ft. (0.6 to 5.8m) with the lens at its widest setting and 3.3 to 10.5 ft.  (1.0 to 3.2m) at full telephoto, both using ISO Auto. 

Not much distance between flash and lens

Lens

An 8x zoom is a lot of lens for a camera this small and, while it isn't particularly fast (maximum aperture f/3.3), its coverage is attractively wide, with a zoom range equivalent to 28-224mm on a 35mm camera.

This little cameras packs a lot of zoom, a key benefit.

Jacks, Ports & Plugs

Some bad news here. The FH20 has a single I/O proprietary-format port for data and standard-def AV connection. The real hitch, though, is that while the FH20 can shoot high-def video at 720p, there's no way to connect the camera to a high-def TV to watch that video. Yes, you can upload the files to a computer. but the big screen in the living room won't be joining the party. Unless it's a compatible Panasonic model, that is -- Panasonic Viera sets with an SD slot will play video directly from the camera's memory card.
 

HDMI is MIA.

Battery

Panasonic says the small 740mAh Lithium ion rechargeable battery will get 300 shots per charge when using flash for every other shot. That's not bad given the compact form factor.

The battery looms over the SD memory card.

Memory

Soon we expect all cameras that accept SD cards will support the high-capacity SDXC standard, with a theoretical storage limit of 2 terabytes (you may never format a card again). For now, Panasonic and Canon took the lead introducing cameras with SDXC support at CES. As for the cards themselves, Panasonic announced it will ship 64GB and 48GB cards starting this February, priced at $599.95 and $449.95 respectively. Yes, that's a lot of money, but 64GB is more storage than a dual-sided Blu-ray disc on a tiny memory card, and with several manufacturers competing, prices will fall quickly. Particularly if you're going to record a lot of HD video, support for SDXC is an important camera feature in 2010.
 

Of course, if you're running shot on storage, there's also about 40 megabytes of RAM built into the camera.