Jan Böhme wrote:
Daniel Silevitch skrev:

DPReview put up a fairly comprehensive review a couple of days ago:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/panasonicFZ50/

It was pretty positive, and ended with a Highly recommended rating,
though with a notice that this was only just so, and that the one
negative factor was image quality - not noise this time, as much as
indiscriminate noise reduction..

However, something like half of the Panasonic forum at dpreview are up
in arms against this review. It would seem as if The Camera To Worship
in this forum is the FZ30, and lots of people there took it really
personal when that one missed the Highly Recommended rating by a
hair's breadth a year ago. Thus, the more positive rating of the FZ50
now, is widely regarded as a Grossly Unfair Injustice to The Camera
To Worship.

Queer lot, photographers.

Jan Böhme
(FZ20 owner, thus neutral in the conflict)

Interesting - I was recently sent a photo from a Canon S3 IS and whilst it
was less noisy than the FZ5 equivalent (when viewed full-screen) it was
also less sharp. It seems to me that there is a spectrum of choices in
noise-reduction versus sharpness and that Canon, not having as good a lens
as that on the Panasonic FZ5/20 etc., have a less sharp image, and can
therefore use more noise reduction with less effect on the (already less
sharp) image quality. Perhaps Panasonic are now trying to make their
noise reduction nearer to what Canon do?

The FZ50 is much too big and heavy a camera for me as I'm so used to the
easy-to-carry FZ5!

David