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Review of Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ8 Camera

I bought a new camera  for Christmas to replace my old Olympus C-5060 camera which I have owned for several years. With all the advances in cameras in recent years my Olympus was showing its age. After reading several reviews of new cameras I decided on the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ8.

First let me say that I loved my old Olympus but being the geek that I am I yearned for a new camera with all the new features that are now available. The DMC-LZ8 certainly has those new features and with a price tag of only $120 I could not resist. Some of those features include a 5x optical zoom Leica lens (32 – 160mm), optical image stabilization, 8.1 megapixels, intelligent auto mode and face recognition. The 2.5 inch 230,000-dot high-resolution Intelligent LCD automatically detects ambient lighting conditions and adjusts the brightness of the LCD automatically.

The camera also offers manual modes for shutter and aperture settings as well as Scenery, Portrait, Macro, Night Portrait or Night Scenery mode. In fact there are so many features offered by this camera that it includes a 140 page operating instructions booklet. Despite all the features and the large operating instructions booklet the camera is very easy to just pick up and start taking great photos with right out of the box. In fact I have yet to even finish reading the operating manual or use most of the manual features and I am already taking great photos.

Two of the features that I especially like are the Face Recognition and the Intelligent Scene selection features. According to Panasonic Face Detection detects up to 15 faces anywhere in the frame, even if they are moving, and automatically chooses the optimal focus and exposure settings so portraits come out clear and crisp. The scene selection automatically switches between scene modes on your camera based on ambient conditions. I have seen the camera automatically switch to macro mode when I move my camera closer to what I am photographing. The only feature that the camera lacks which I miss is the ability to shoot in RAW mode. But for the price of the camera it was too much to expect it to have this capability.

But what surprised me the most was how well the camera did when shooting video. I have a Panasonic PV –GS320 camcorder and my new DMC-LZ8 takes video that rivals that of my camcorder. Both the audio and video quality were outstanding. The camera shoots video in both 4:3 aspect ratio and 16:9 aspect ratio at 30 fps.

If you are looking for a small, inexpensive camera that is packed with the latest features and takes great pictures as well as video you need look no further than this camera. I have included some photos taken by the camera as well as a link to a short video I took with it. You be the judge.

Video taken with DMC-LZ8

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