Digital Home Thoughts: Power in a Small Body - Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ10

"The Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ10 is a compact, easy-to-use camera with a plethora of useful features. They include a wide-angle 5X zoom lens, optical image stabilization, a beautiful 2.5" LCD display, both auto and manual controls, and a widescreen movie mode. Image quality is very good in most situations, with noise reduction being less of a problem then on previous Panasonic cameras (in most situations). All is not perfect, though -- the camera is a bit slow to start up, low light focusing isn't great, and the camera does not support the USB 2.0 High Speed standard. Still, if you're looking for an inexpensive camera with a wide-angle lens with a little extra zoom power, then I'd definitely recommend looking at the DMC-LZ10."

On the one hand, this camera has a lot of features, but then on the other, I just find the photograph quality to be sub-par. Take a look at the two ISO tests, anything beyond a 400 ISO setting produces quite a grainy picture. Plus it doesn't do very well with red-eye, poor low-lighting focus and very few manual controls. I feel that this is one of those instances where Panasonic released a camera to get the high MP, zoom and other features out at the expense of the photo quality. Bad mistake IMHO.