Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100 superzoom boasts 'industry's fastest' burst shooting

By | July 21, 2010, 2:59am PDT

Summary: There’s a new member of the Panasonic Lumix FZ family, and that’s the 14.1-megapixel DMC-FZ100 with a 24x zoom lens and full HD video recording ability.

There’s a new member of the Panasonic Lumix FZ family, and that’s the 14.1-megapixel DMC-FZ100 with a 24x optical zoom lens and full HD video recording ability.

Powered by the Venus Engine FHD processor, the FZ100 can record full HD 1,920 x 1,080 resolution video in AVCHD  ”as smooth as 60i (NTSC)/50i (PAL).” Panasonic continues to boast that this megazoom digital camera is the record holder for the “industry’s fastest level of burst shooting” with a 14.1-megapixel resolution at 11fps. All in all, not bad.

But as with any superzoom device, it really comes down to what the lens can do. With Intelligent Zoom mode turned on, a photographer can bump the 24x optical zoom up to the equivalent of 32x. There’s also a new focus switch on the lens barrel for additional manual control.

Here are some of the additional notable specs on the Panasonic FZ100:

  • 3.0-inch free-angle TFT LCD (460K-dot resolution)
  • Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 25 - 600mm (35mm equiv.) lens
  • f2.8 - 5.2 aperture range
  • ISO up to 6,400
  • Uses SD/SDHC/SDXC memory cards
  • Connectivity: USB 2.0, mini-HDMI, DC-in, AV-out

The Lumix FZ100 will drop in August for $499.

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Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.

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Rachel King

Rachel King has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted in this blog.

Biography

Rachel King

Rachel King is a staff writer for CBS Interactive in San Francisco. Before serving as a contributing editor at ZDNet in New York City for two years, she previously worked for The Business Insider, FastCompany.com, CNN's San Francisco bureau and the U.S. Department of State. Rachel has also written for MainStreet.com, Irish America Magazine and the New York Daily News, among others. Rachel has a B.A. in Mass Communications and History from the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. in Journalism from Columbia University, where she served as art director for the student magazine, Plated.

Rachel started playing with her mother's old Brownie camera when she was just a toddler, working her way up from a Hello Kitty point-and-shoot to training on both film and digital SLRs.

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RE:Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100 superzoom boasts 'industry's fastest' burst sh
three-shao 18th Sep
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Only one thing to say...
AttackComputerWhiz 21st Jul 2010
WANTS!!!
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All about the sensor
dglambert 21st Jul 2010
I've owned the DMC-Fz28 for a couple of years now, and I've been very impressed with the reach of the lens on that camera. Obviously, this new lens reaches even further.

One area where I've been disappointed, though, is low-light performance. Anything where I have to change from ISO-100 yields a pretty noisy image, and with a lens with this kind of reach, that happens under all but ideal conditions.

I'm interested to see a real review when one of these becomes available to see if there's been any real improvement in the sensor. If not, it's hard to see this as a real DSLR alternative.
I have an old FZ-20, but even with the current models the image viewing screen (and eye cup viewfinder) is 1. too dark in ambient bright light, and 2. too dark in very low ambient light, when compared to an optical viewfinder. What goood is the zoom if you can't see your subject? Instead of longer zoom ranges they should concentrate on drastically improving the image brightness.
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