Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX580

Handling (7.00)

The Lumix FX580 is an extremely boxy camera. It’s all hard edges and right-angles. The chances of you slipping this into a tight pair of pants are pretty slim, though it’s easily small enough to throw into a jacket or small bag. For all its blockiness, the FX580 is pretty easy to handle. It has a good weight, a solid feel, and seems like it could take a bit of a beating without dying. While it lacks grace and finesse, it’s still a decent camera to sling around.

Buttons & Dials (10.00)

The buttons on the FX580 are small, but hardy and well spaced. There’s enough gap between each one that you’re unlikely to hit the wrong button. Since each control is raised rather substantially, you can distinguish each one by touch, another nice feature. One interesting design choice is the use of switches instead of buttons for the power and playback controls. Anyone who has ever had a camera switch on in their bag, and drain the batteries, knows that a switch can stop you from spending a weekend camera-less.

As stated previously, we really like the fact that the touch-screen system augments rather than replaces the traditional controls. The vast majority of settings can be changed using either rather than requiring one input method or the other. Our only complaint is that we wish all of the controls could be used by both, so that exposure compensation, aperture, and shutter speed didn’t require using the touch screen.

Menus (7.50)

With the menu system on the FX580, Panasonic combined traditional and touch-based menu systems in a way that’s easy to distinguish, and simple to browse through. The one addition we would have liked is descriptions or names of the various options for settings, as sometimes their icons aren’t easily intelligible.

Manual & Learning (3.00)

The manual for this camera is a bit of a tome, unsurprising given its breadth of manual controls. The manual has a frankly underwhelming table of contents and index (the latter a mere two pages for 140 pages of content). While it explains concepts well, it doesn’t elaborate how modes and functions operate well enough. If you’re using this manual to learn how to use a rather complicated camera for the first time, expect some swearing. You can grab the manual for the FX580 from here.