Afternoon all.
I've been looking around now for a while and can not work out which camera to get. I've been looking at the Panasonic fz100 and canon sx30 but have since read reviews saying poor images. Im wanting to for general use as well as getting pictures of our dogs and as my girlfriend shows them want to take pictures at the shows which can be out side or inside. Can anyone give any suggestions of what to look at? I know a dslr is best but not in my range, looking at around £300 to £400 max
Thanks
Lee
I don't know about the HS10 (the
HS20 has just been released, which looks quite similar in overall specs to the FZ100). I have recently been following the (very heated) debates at the
dpreview Panasonic forums about the FZ100. It seems to be generally agreed that
if you pixel peep the image quality is less than for previous FZ cameras. However, when you look at FZ100 images posted over there (whole images, and modest crops), some of them look pretty good to me. And the camera has some strong points, which may or may not matter to you - apparently it has pretty good video, it can take bursts of images at 11 frames per second (good for dogs), it has a nice articulated LCD (so does the SX30), it has a big zoom range (the SX30 has even more), it can capture RAW images so you can squeeze a bit more out of the images, as in highlight/shadow recovery (the SX30 doesn't do RAW). It has a hot shoe for an external flash (so does the SX30).
However, like all small-sensor cameras, it is quite noisy, especially at higher ISOs, and so is nothing like as good as a dSLR for indoor work. Compared to a dSLR, I suspect much the same is true of the SX30 (I use an SX10 BTW), although it may be slightly better than the FZ100. That said, presumably dog shows are tolerably well illuminated.
The heated arguments have people on one side saying "It's rubbish, Panasonic should be ashamed of themselves" (mainly it seems because of the poor image quality if you pixel peep), and on the other side people saying "It's great for what I want, it is very flexible, and affordable."
As far as the FZ100 goes, I would strongly recommend looking through the forum linked above, and making your own mind up about the images that have been posted, and maybe look at the Flickr etc sites of some of the people posting those images. Some of them even have full size images you can look at if you want to pixel peep. It might also be a good idea to watch
the Fujifilm forum at dpreview for a while to see how the HS20 is received and what people can produce with it.
Whatever camera you choose, if you are using a camera with a small sensor like the FZ100, HS20 or SX30 then I believe that a small amount of basic post processing may go a long way in making the images look better.
