Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX50 Digital Camera Review
By Richard Baguley
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
November 14, 2006
Retailing for around $330, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX50 is a relatively simple camera that has some distinguishable features like optical image stabilization on the 3.6x zoom lens, a bright 3-inch screen, and the ability to shoot widescreen movies. The digital camera has 7.2 megapixels and keeps its figure slim at just under an inch thick.
The Panasonic FX50 can slide tidily into a pocket. It’s solidly constructed with a chrome finger grip that helps you keep a tight hold on the camera. The back of the camera is dominated by the large 3-inch LCD screen, which has 230,000 pixels, so images look sharp and clear. This LCD is a big upgrade from the 2.5-inch, 207,000-pixel LCD on the Panasonic FX07.
The on-screen menus look great on the FX50's screen, and they are well laid out, making navigation easy. The different sections of the menus are divided into tabs, so it’s easy to jump to the setting that you want. Navigation is done with the small joystick to the right of the screen, and again this is easy to use. This doubles as the control for exposure compensation, Flash mode, the Shooting mode and the Display mode. On the top of the camera is the mode dial and the shutter and zoom ring, which fall naturally under the index finger. The zoom control is a little awkward, though: we found fingers could easily slip from the small nub on the ring around the shutter button. But apart from this issue, we found the FX50 to be a friendly and easy to use camera.
18 Scene modes provide plenty of choice for shooting in different situations, and the list includes the usual suspects (such as Portrait, Sports, Party, etc). There are also a couple of more unusual choices, such as two Baby modes (which saves the children’s ages in the file info) and High Sensitivity, which boosts the ISO rating to 3200 for low light photography without the flash. For the user who wants real point-and-shoot simplicity, there is a fully Automatic all-purpose mode.
We found the images the Panasonic DMC-FX50 took to be less appealing than the camera itself. Although images shot in good lighting had accurate color, they lacked detail and quickly became noisy when the lights dimmed. The noise in the image was extremely noticeable, making some pictures look more like impressionist paintings than photographs.
While the optical image stabilization was effective at compensating for handshake, the auto focus of the FX50 had problems in low light. The camera often took several seconds (or failed completely) to focus in dull lighting conditions, even with the help of the orange assist light. It works well in normal lighting, though, and the camera offers a 9-spot Focusing mode that is useful if you want to focus on off-center subjects.
Shooting movies is also possible with the Panasonic Lumix FX50; they are recorded at 640 x 480-pixel resolution, with mono sound. You can’t use the zoom, and image quality isn’t great, but it’s fine for shooting candid videos. If optical zoom in videos is a priority for you, the $349 Kodak EasyShare V705 has 5x optical zoom available. As per usual with budget cameras, the sound on the Lumix FX50 is a problem: recorded voices are quiet and it only picks up voices from a range of a few feet. It does offer an interesting Widescreen mode, though, which records video at a resolution of 848 x 480 pixels. Its image stabilization system also does a fine job of keeping the picture steady; image stabilization is also included on the Panasonic FX07 and the Canon PowerShot A710 IS, although the latter camera has a generous 6x optical zoom lens to show it off with.
These features aren’t enough to make the Panasonic FX50 a top pick: it’s an average digital camera that produces lackluster images. There are several similarly-priced cameras that take better images and offer many of the same features.
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