Panasonic, Nikon and the New Camera Saga

I have been taking photos since the early 70's, starting out with an old Ricoh rangefinder that I purchased used. I still have it. Eventually, I got to purchase a Minolta XG7 SLR and a later on some more lenses. When the cameras with program mode came out I bought a Minolta X700. It later died with the deadly shutter lock. However, I used these cameras for many years taking hundreds of slides and prints of everything you can think of. My first digital camera was a Kodak DC200. I think it was 1.2 megapixels with a fixed lens. It really was not very good and certainly not for creative shooting, but I saw the potential and that led to loosing interest in the SLRs. Of course with the Kodak being so limited, I never really used it much either. Around 2004 my wife got me a Kodak DX7630 for christmas. Wow, 6 megapixels, 3x zoom, and manual modes. I used the 7630 for the next two years mainly taking family snapshots and an occasional flower or macro shot. I noticed you could get some very good pictures out of this camera. The turning point was this summer when we went to Monomy Island for day with my daughter and grandsons. I ended up with several very good shots. But began to notice limitations, especially the lack of a long zoom and better manual control.

So here it begins. I decide on a new camera for christmas 2006 and as usual spend hours upon hours doing research on the internet. Because the major limitation of the DX7630 was the lack of zoom, I began looking at the ultra-zooms or bridge cameras as they are know. The contenders were the Sony H5, Fuji 9100, Panasonic FZ50, and Samsung Pro815. Now as with everything in life, nothings is perfect, all of these had some shortcomings. I ended up going with the FZ50 because of the features and image stabilization. There was some discussion in the reviews and on the internet about excessive digital noise and image quality issues, but hey, I figured how bad could it be. Certainly not worse than a two year old, 6 mp Kodak.

Boy was I ever wrong. I was excited to get the FZ50, it handled great, had all the right features, aperature priority, shutter priority, manual mode, long zoom and the Function button that made the camera a joy to use. It had it all. Except for image quality. Now I have gotten some good pictures out of the FZ50, but only in good light at ISO100 and ISO200. The pictures from Washington DC referenced in this blog were taken with the FZ50. Even ISO200 has too much noise for my taste. I have also found that the autofocus does not work well at the long end of the zoom, it's slow and about 25% of the shots are out of focus. The Panasonic fans will say the noise issue is overstated and can easily be corrected with noise reduction software. I believe the noise issue is understated, and why should you ever have to use noise reduction software on an ISO200 image in the first place.

So it starts all over. I now realize the only way I will be satisfied with the image quality I could get was to buy a DSLR. This is what happens when you try to cheap out. I took a look at the big four and seeing as though I still have Minolta lenses around could have gotten away with a smaller additional investment by buying the Sony A100. But the reviews on that have also complained about noise at high ISOs, 800 and 1600. No compromises this time, I wanted a camera I could live with for many years and had the backing of a solid company. To make a long story short, I bought the Nikon D80. This is a great camera. Someone on an internet forum stated I would not see a big improvement in my photos going from the FZ50 to the D80, bull, the very first set of photos I took with the D80 were at least 300% better than anything that came out of the FZ50.

So what happens to the FZ50? It's a good camera for what it is, bright sun and indoor flash. It will end up being what I stick in my fanny pack when I go cycling. Those are usually sunny days, it'll be great.

Anyway, who would want to chance falling with their D80 in their fanny pack, not me.