Jeremiah Edwards
I bought this camera as a present for my wife. I tested it and compared it to other digital cameras, and this camera beat out the competition. I compared the Panasonic Lumix DMC FP1, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH1, the Canon Powershot S500 (my 8 year old malfunctioning digital camera), the Canon Powershot SD1300 IS, and my Canon Rebel T1i (my dSLR...an unfair comparison, but I wanted benchmark for these cheaper cameras). I had always liked my old Canon S500, but I read some reviews on Amazon and other websites, and it seemed like the Panasonic cameras were really good cameras at a great price. For me, the number one consideration is picture quality. If you dont have that, you dont have anything. Things that detract from picture quality are poor signal to noise, lack of sharpness, poor color rendering, and various artifacts. Therefore, I tested these 5 cameras under different conditions. I copied the jpegs onto my computer, and I looked at the images at 100% to see how good they really are. The most revealing results were shot under medium light indoors. This is very important if you ever want to take any indoor pictures. The results were as follows (from best to worst): 1) Canon T1i (1 year old, about $700), excellent pictures even without flash 2) Canon SD1300 IS (brand new, about $110), very good photos for a compact digital camera 3) Canon S500 (8 years old, $400 new, not performing as well as it used to) Surprisingly, although this is not shooting as well as it used to 8 years ago, it still outperformed the Panasonic cameras. 4) Panasonic Lumix DMC-FH1 (brand new, about $90), this had very poor signal to noise and moderately poor color rendering. 5) Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP1 (brand new, about $80), this camera performed significantly worse even than the FH1. The non extending lens is nifty but yields poor photos. In addition to this, I found that the Canon was easier to operate and easier to take videos. Nowadays, compact digital cameras are quite inexpensive. Do yourself a favor and buy a high quality camera. More megapixels does NOT necessarily mean better pictures, and having a large optical zoom can sometimes compromise lens quality and thus picture quality. Also, consider sensor size: this can make a big difference in picture quality, though some manufacturers make better sensors even when comparing sensors of the same size. In my experience Canon consistently makes high quality digital cameras.