Review: Panasonic DMX-FX500
October 2008The FX500 combines a joystick control with a touch-screen operation to round out the screen’s functionality and reduce button clutter. The lens is a 25mm ultra Wide-Angle LEICA DC Vario-Elmarit lens and has a 5X optical zoom. There is an Extra Optical Zoom function that increases the zoom to 8.9X, but resolution drops down to a 3 megapixels, still it’s satisfactory. There are 21 scene modes and the Intelligent Auto Mode has five Auto Functions; Scenery, Portrait, Macro, Night Portrait and Night Scenery. The Optical Image Stabilization (O.I.S.) helps prevent blurring from hand-shake; I.S.O. works on motion blur; and Face Detection makes sure the subjects face is always in focus. There is 50MB of on board memory.
Then there is HD video; the FX-500 has two 16:9 wide screen video modes 1280x720 at 30 fps and 848x480. Another neat feature is the voice recording for annotation of your stills and you can also save video frames to JPEG. The FX can tag photos with titles and in the continuous-shooting mode it can shoot 2.5 fps for 3 images at full resolution or 2 megapixel shots at 6 fps.
First thing I noticed about the FX-500 is the large 3-inch LCD touch-screen. Nice and bright; the touch screen allows you to touch anywhere on the screen and the auto systems will concentrate/focus on that exact spot making this an auto focus function you can direct. The enclosed stylus is helpful for those of us with big fingers.
My first out-of-box experience was taking prom shoots of my girlfriend’s daughter. I was very impressed with 25mm ultra-wide angle allowing for almost double the recording area of a 35 mm lens; this is a much better option than using the zoom. It’s a vast improvement over most digicams when you consider that many group photos are taken in spaces where it’s difficult to fit everyone into the picture. Speaking of the zoom, it’s not bad with the 35mm equivalent of 25mm-125 mm. Even with that I was able to work it more by using the touch screen to crop the picture and when you consider the CCD image sensor is a whopping 10.1 megapixel resolution, it allowed me plenty of leeway for a really nice 8x10 print.
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