Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ5

Auto Mode
The LZ5 and LZ3 offer two auto modes: the Simple mode, which controls everything except the zoom and the shutter release, and the standard shooting mode, which allows setting white balance, ISO, and exposure compensation. The standard mode is basically a Program mode.

The LZ5 and LZ3 choose the best options for ISO and white balance in Simple mode (and when those controls were set to Auto in normal mode). The cameras didn't jump to ISO 400 before it was absolutely required, which is a good thing, considering how image quality dives at that setting due to an abundance of noise. Auto white balance is more problematic. In mixed lighting, white balance did not hit neutral tones, but when it erred, it tended toward a warm balance, which ought to be more flattering for snapshots.

Movie Mode
The LZ5 and LZ3 offer identical movie modes. They can both shoot at either 640 x 480 or 320 x 240 resolution, and at 30 frames per second or 10 frames per second. 640 x 480 at 30 fps is comparable to television specs, and should offer smooth motion and good detail. The smaller resolution and slower frame rate options will make for much smaller video clips, and for an enormous loss of quality. The LZ5 and LZ3 can not zoom while shooting video.

The LZ5 and LZ3 can shoot movies with all the color effects available for still shooting. They appear to record sound in mono mode. Our tests in a noisy environment didn't show much about sound quality – the sound was bad, but anything would have sounded that way on a crowded showroom floor.

Drive / Burst Mode
The LZ5 and LZ3 offer three burst modes: High, Low and "infinite." High mode shoots quickly, but for a short burst, Low shoots a bit slower, but takes more images, and "infinite" shoots very slowly, but for an indefinite number of frames. As we handled the cameras, the LZ5 gave us 5 high-resolution shots in 4 seconds in High, 8 frames in 8 seconds in Low, and about 10 frames in 14 seconds in "infinite." These figures include delays between pressing the shutter release and the first shots. The LZ3 did a little worse, all told, shooting 3 frames in 3 seconds in High, 5 frames in 5 seconds in Low, and 10 frames in 14 seconds in "infinite." Apparently, the LZ5 has a bigger buffer to handle its larger file size. We used a 128MB SanDisk SD card during our evaluation.

The LZ5 and LZ3 also both have self-timers with delays of 2 and 10 seconds.

Playback Mode
The playback mode on the LZ5 and LZ3 offers standard features like thumbnail modes showing 9 or 16 images at a time, and shooting information including exposure, ISO, frame number, and histogram. We didn't see a highlight warning feature.

The slide show option on the LZ5 and LZ3 is bare-bones. It doesn’t offer transitions, for instance. The show will display either all the images in memory, or selected ones, but the selections must be made manually. The playback mode does not sort by date or other criteria. The interval can be set for 1, 2, 3 or 5 seconds, and the show can be looped. There is no option to show movies in the slide show, but the first frame of each movie is shown as a still.

Images can be reduced to any of the cameras' smaller resolutions, and can be cropped to smaller sizes as well. Audio notes can be recorded with images. Images can be deleted one at a time, as a selected group, or all images can be deleted at once. Images can also be copied to the camera's internal memory.

The functions of the playback mode are all compromised by the poor resolution of the LZ5 and LZ3's LCDs. It's hard to judge images on them, and therefore hard to make choices about what to do with them.

Custom Image Presets
The LZ5 and LZ3 have 14 custom presets, and nearly all of them are straightforward. The list includes: Portrait, Soft skin, Scenery, Sports, Night Portrait, Night Scenery, Food, Party, Candle, Fireworks, Starry Sky, Snow, Baby 1, Baby 2 and High Sensitivity. Baby 1 and Baby 2 set the camera identically, but they include the option of showing a baby's age or birthdate. With two baby settings, proud parents can save the birthdays of two children. Larger families will need more cameras. Starry night allows exposures of up to 1 minute, while Fireworks sets exposure time at a few seconds. High Sensitivity boosts ISO to 800 or 1600, with a huge image quality hit.

The custom presets offer a help system – the cameras provide text descriptions of each preset. The cameras can be set to revert to the last preset selected when the mode dial is switched to Scene 1 or Scene 2, or to bring up the preset selection menu every time.