H and B Digital Photography Blog & Review: 09/01/2013

Review on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ70 and its 60x Optical Zoom

The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ70 its so far the Brigde Camera or Super Zoom Compact Camera with the highest zoom surpassing the Canon SX50. As its rival it has Full HD Video, Viewfinder, Live View Mode and an excellent macro mode. However, The FZ70 has more megapixels (for those of you who like to do large enlargement), an a built-in windshield microphone protection, a microphone that claims to zoom with the lens and panoramic mode.

This new camera has everything one expect from a Point and Shoot Camera:

16 Megapixels

1080p Full HD Video

60 fps during 1080p Video

9 fps for Burts Shooting

60X Optical Zoom

120X Digital Zoom

20mm Wide Angle

Great Automatic Macro

Optical Stabilizer

A Built -In Windshield Zoom Microphone

Venues Engine Image Processor

Panoramic Mode and Built in Creative Filters

Additionally, the FZ70's has a lens with an aperture of 2.8-5.9 which allows you to do some creative pictures, specially in low light conditions using the manual mode. It terms of the zoom the quality of the images are pretty good using the 60x optical and the 120x digital zoom. This can be surprising since some of the cameras with that much digital zoom tend to pix-elate at its maximum. In the case of the FZ70 you can still have some good details.

Here are some pictures where we compare color, sensor response, the picture quality using 60x optical zoom and 120x digital zoom.

This camera has fast response

Here using the 20mm wide angle. NO Zoom.

Keep looking the picture above... See the Coca-Cola sign at the end. Now, look the picture below.

This picture was taken using the 60x Optical Zoom

This is the same sign but using the maximum 120x Digital Zoom

Additionally, here are some color samples. The colors are very accurate including those red and bright pinks that in some cameras can get more to the purple side. Just to keep testing the zoom, if you watch far at the back the Hershey's store...

using the 20mm wide angle

Here using 30x Zoom

60x Optical Zoom

60X Optical Zoom

75x digital zoom

120X Optical Zoom

The wide angle and zoom of this camera allow you to take great architecture picture.

Look the W at the top

Here using 60x Optical Zoom

Using 120x Zoom

As you can see the FZ70 allows you to take great zoom pictures. On the other hand, when at use at the full 120x Digital Zoom, even though you have good detail due to the nature of that much zoom its very difficult to focus. The Optical Stabilizer works perfectly fine but at this high zoom its understandable that kind of difficulty.

To finish we did some test using their creative filters.

Panoramic Mode

To get better result from the panoramic mode is better to shoot still objects. As we can see in this picture the objects and the light create some lines on the images.