"Some" noise... I think my eyes are deceiving me. The level of noise (also
at low(er) ISO's!) is in my opinion extremely bad. Especially for a camera
at this pricepoint. The lens itself might be very good, the sensor is
obviously too small for this number of megapixels. Don't get me wrong, not
trying to start a flame here (hey, I just ordered an H1, which can't be
described as a noiseless digicam as well...), just being objective. I also
think that they should have used the 7 megapixel sensor. Okay, you lose some
resolution but you gain a lot in the image quality department. But alas, to
satisfy the market they opted for the worse. Logical, but sad.

The rest of the camera I truly adore though. Very nice lens, manual zoom and
focus, big tiltable screen, great!

P-P.


"David J Taylor"
wrote in
message . uk...
wrote:
On Wed, 20 Jul 2005 14:09:39 GMT, "David J Taylor"

wrote:

Dave Sill wrote:
http://www.dpreview.com/news/0507/05...sonic_fz30.asp
http://www.dpreview.com/articles/panasonicfz30/

Thanks for posting that, Dave. With the manual zoom and manual focus
controls, VGA movies, and swivel viewfinder it looks like a true
photographer's camera!

Cheers,
David

Any idea on noise compared to the FZ20?

Good question. What is the size of the pixel (in absolute units!)? A
bigger sensor would mean a bigger lens and a much bigger and heavier
camera (volume being proportional to linear size cubed). I did notice
that the weight had crept up from the FZ20 and the maximum lens aperture
at full zoom had crept down a little.

I looked at the sample images and there was some noise present in the
darker areas, as you would expect from an 8MP sensor of that physical
size. Whether it would be a problem an 8 x 10 print I don't know, you'd
need to print the samples out for yourself. My guess is not, providing
you stick with the lower ISO settings.

I was impressed with the lens quality on the couple of sample images I
downloaded at full resolution.

Cheers,
David