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Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP3

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP3

You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck with this camera. For a start, there’s a 3in touchscreen, a 4x zoom (35-140mm), optical image stabilisation and HD recording at 1280 x 720. CIPA battery rating is a pretty impressive 300 frames. Sadly, the touchscreen is not the most responsive one I’ve used and it’s very easy to hit the wrong icon – especially the menu exit. With this 14Mp model you get decent picture quality, with sharp detail and good colour reproduction. Now, if only Panasonic had given this camera a wide-angle lens...

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP3

Click for a full-resolution crop

Panasonic LogoReg Rating 80%
Price £140
More info Panasonic

What you need to know about cloud backup

Big MP

Unfortunately it's consumers and retail in the UK driving for more MP as it's a simple quantative number that people use as a more == better comparison. Other markets do not care so much about it. The vendors are just repsonding to market demand.

Until consumers get educated and demand better image quality then it will stay this way. Image quality is hard to compare though.

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Ah the MP race...

So long as the numbers keep rising the punters keep paying. You whack up the MP but fit these things will shonky pinhole lenses. Everyone whacks up the quality settings and wonders why there is grain and noise and the clarity is not so great. No viewefinders, so a nice bright sunny day when you are most likely to use these and you can see precisely bugger all in the screen while you're shooting!

The other thing is these camera produce huge resolution pictures, so as soon as you offload the pictures, you end up constantly clicking sharpen and denoise filters in your favourite software and reducing the resolution to get something half decent that doesn't make you wince when you see a nice single colour area iike a solid blue sky.

Just like all other industries, numbers make good PR and help shift units, so on the race goes!

Give me a Nikon D2X anyday, might be long in the tooth now but still knocks out pukka shot!

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Wrong priorities!

These 14MP resolutions have gotten ridiculous at the consumer level. It's disappointing that engineers from all brands are focusing so much energy on this non-problem.

For regular use, I don't find it necessary to go above half that, and frequently use lower resolutions just to reduce storage.

All things being equal, it would not be so bad, however engineering is always about striking a balance between competing goals. The high resolution comes at the cost of graininess, higher processor requirements, more battery power, slower shutter speed. At this point, all of those are more important to me than the resolution.

The main flaw I find with all consumer cameras I've tried is terrible graininess at the high ISO settings required to prevent hand held night/indoor shots from blurring. It's a real shame to resort to grainy high ISO modes at museums that, understandably, only permit no-flash photography.

Reducing graininess should be engineering priority #1 for the sensors.

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