Panasonic's Lumix DMC-LZ5 falls near the bottom of the Lumix line, providing an affordable option to snapshot photographers who want a useful selection of automatic settings in a compact camera. Its 6-megapixel resolution and optically stabilized 6x zoom lens will give those photographers lots of shooting flexibility and the ability to make large prints. Quick to start up, focus, and shoot, this Lumix is at its best when you're taking pictures of the people around you. It's less adept at action photography though, and its large LCD viewfinder turns out to be a mixed blessing. But if you're looking for a well-designed snapshot camera to capture social occasions and excursions, the LZ5 won't disappoint you.
The Panasonic LZ5 is in most ways a typical compact snapshot camera, providing a good selection of automatic features and not much in the way of manual control. But it stands out from the crowd by providing a 6x optical zoom range of 6.1-36.6mm (equivalent to a 37-222mm range on a 35mm camera), and by implementing the optical image stabilization that has become standard in newer Lumix cameras. There are two stabilization modes, and while the first produces only a minor difference while stabilizing the LCD preview somewhat, the second mode captures a much more noticeably sharp image than what you'll get without the OIS at slower shutter speeds. Image stabilization is really a very worthwhile feature on a camera, it makes it a lot easier to get sharp photos when shooting under limited lighting. The LZ5 rejoins the compact-camera herd by forgoing an optical viewfinder in favor of making room for a large LCD, a choice that has mixed results.
The Panasonic DMC-LZ5 also implements its zoom function a little differently than most cameras: At all resolutions lower than the 6.0 megapixel maximum (or 5 megapixels at the 3:2 aspect ratio setting, or 4.5 megapixels at the 16:9 aspect ratio), the camera mixes in small amounts of what other manufacturers sometimes call "digital zoom", cropping the image slightly as you zoom to telephoto focal lengths. Since the image is already cropped due to your resolution choice, there's no degradation of the image quality from this, the net result being an overall zoom range of 8.3x, rather than the nominal 6x the lens alone produces. If you're shooting at a lower resolution anyway, this is handy, a very legitimate use of digital zoom that's transparent to the user... [read more]