I have been playing a bit with my new camera, a Panasonic DMC-FZ50, and while I haven't yet taken any pictures of any quality, the capabilities of the camera are pretty impressive.

Attached is a montage showing four full-frame pictures demonstrating the total possible zoom range of this camera. These pictures are exactly as taken by the camera, except that I resized them to 640x480 to keep the file size reasonable. In other words, they weren't photoshopped or anything like that.

A few things I have found to be interesting about the camera... the image in the viewfinder is light-amplified, so that in very dim light I can see detail not visible to the naked eye. The image stabilization really works -- I can get acceptable hand-held pictures (bracing my elbows against my chest) with one second long exposures, and with a bit of luck even longer than that. (Acceptable = viewable on my computer screen without too much blurriness; I'm not claiming they are razor sharp suitable for printing poster size! )

All in all, a nice toy.

tanstaafl.

Edit: Ooops... I see I messed up the montage -- two of the pictures are the same when one of them was supposed to be an intermediate zoom shot. There... fixed.

db