Manual Control Options
There is no manual mode and there are hardly any manual control options. A few can be found within the menu system, but the Panasonic TZ1 is certainly not chock full of manual control.
Focus
Auto Focus
The Panasonic TZ1’s auto focus system has a little bit of lag to it, even with all of its options. In the AF Mode section in the menu, a host of icons appears that translate to the following: 1-point, 1-point high speed, 3-point high speed, 9-point, and spot. Normally, the camera can focus from 1.31 ft. at its 35mm wide focal length and 6.56 ft. in telephoto; that shortens to 0.16 ft. in macro wide and 3.28 ft. in macro telephoto. Users can activate the continuous auto focus or turn it off in the recording menu. Surprisingly, the continuous auto focus seemed to take longer to focus than just pressing the shutter release button down. For dimly lit places, the Panasonic TZ1 shoots out its AF illuminator to assist the system.
Manual Focus
On the automatically oriented Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1, there is no such thing as manual focus.
Exposure
The Panasonic TZ1 keeps things easy with only a small handful of exposure modes on the mode dial: Simple, Normal Picture, Macro, Scene 1, Scene 2 and Movie. Available in most modes is the exposure compensation, which has the standard +/- 2 EV steps in 1/3 increments. The exposure compensation can be found via its very own on-camera button complete with a live view of the selected exposure value. There is also a real time histogram that users can access and use to gauge exposure. In the Simple mode, the exposure compensation button acts as a “backlight compensation” function, somewhat like an automatic exposure compensation.
Metering
The TZ1 has plenty of metering options, but the menu lists them all as icons so a briefing from the user manual may be necessary. Most digital cameras have three metering options of spot, center and multi. This model has them too, but it calls them Spot, Center-weighted, and Intelligent Multiple.
ISO
The Panasonic Lumix TZ1 has a wide range of manual ISO options from 80-800. This is more than many compact digital cameras have, but is quickly becoming the norm. This is a welcome change to digital cameras, as more consumers want to take pictures in less than optimal lighting without the unnatural look of most in-camera flash exposures. There is an automatic ISO option available too. In the scene mode selections, there is a High Sensitivity mode that accesses 800-1600 ISO settings to illuminate subjects in dim lighting. In this mode, the camera also uses its optical image stabilization system to reduce blur. This worked well for snapping shots of the rotating race car track at the Panasonic booth. There is never good lighting at trade shows, so to snap a shot of a moving object and have it not blur is quite good. Unfortunately, the high sensitivity scene mode only operates at a reduced resolution of 3 megapixels. This is an attempt to keep some of the noise out of the picture. Higher ISO settings yield more noise than lower ones. Furthermore, past Panasonic models have yielded more noise in general when compared with other competing models. Let’s hope we’re surprised by the TZ1; stay tuned for the full review.
White Balance
There isn’t a live view of the ISO selections in the menu, but there is one for the white balance modes. The following options are available: Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Halogen, Custom and White Set. To customize the white balance, users must follow onscreen directions that prompt users to frame something white and press the Menu/Set button. In the preset modes, there are white balance adjustments that step +/- 10 toward red or blue (warm or cool), but it is easier to just set the manual white balance. The adjustments aren’t available in the auto mode, which is unfortunate since our preliminary look at the camera’s automatic white balance setting under the challenging sodium vapor bulbs at the convention center yielded extreme inaccuracies and caused black objects to look purple and red objects to appear as muted pink.
Shutter Speed
The Panasonic TZ1 has shutter speeds ranging from 8-1/2000th of a second. This range is automatic, of course, as the speeds generally cannot be chosen by the user. There is an exception to this though; there is a Slow Shutter option in the recording menu that lets users choose 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, or 1-second speeds. This acts like a shutter priority mode but only for longer exposures.
Aperture
The aperture is automatic and cannot be manually selected, but shows up on the screen next to the shutter speed for users’ viewing pleasure. The aperture is either opened or closed in the lens; it’s a two-step system. In the widest focal length, the aperture is f/2.8 or f/5.0. In the telephoto end of the lens, the aperture is either f/4.2 or f/7.1.
