Customer Reviews

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8K 7.2MP Digital Camera with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Black)

5 star:		(115)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have used quite a variety of point and shoot digital cameras over the years and for not much more money this camera is infinitely better than all of them. I really appreciate the size and quality feel of this camera's construction, the intuitive controls, and all of the included accessories (Leica lens, lens adapter, lens hood, etc). I was able to figure out the controls and start taking great pictures within a half hour of opening the box.

As a novice but "improving" photographer, I love the adaptability of this camera. Many light conditions can be overcome with just a few tweaks to the settings. The shutter speed is also a godsend as compared to the Canon point-and-shoot models. Just hold the button down and the rapid-fire shots pour into this camera. I am also absolutely thrilled with the battery life - hundreds of pics on one charge! This is a crucial improvement over the older cameras that absolutely devoured AA batteries.

On the downside, this camera is bigger than a point and shoot so carrying it can be an issue. Also, the internal memory is a joke, so I recommend that you buy a 2 gig memory card immediately. With that card installed I can store well over 500 high quality shots.

Basically if you are a no-fuss user, set it on simple mode and take a lot of great pics. If you are more advanced and take the time to figure out ISO seetings, you can set up some VERY good shots with this camera. I would never call it the be-all end-all digital camera but you will not find an equally good set of features without spending hundreds more. Highly recommended!

Bottom line - This is an excellent camera. Not just an excellent compact or point and shoot but an excellent camera period. While not a complete replacement for an dSLR, the FZ8 is pretty darn close. Given the current price in the low $200s, it is one of the best values in digital camera available.

Details: This is my 5th digital camera - 2 Nikons, a Minolta, and a Kodak. Of all, the Nikons have the best picture quality but the Panasonic is not far behind. The FZ8, besides being my newest is my new favorite for an overall camera.

Physically its very easy to hold. The shutter button is large and the zoom toggle can be worked easily without moving your hand much. The mode selection dial is large, easy to read and easy to use. Two minor issues with handling - I have a tendency to put my left hand over the auto focus assist light. Only a big deal at night and something that I will eventually adjust to. Second is on the opposite side. I have managed to press some of the navigation buttons on the back of the camera with the palm of my had. Again, not a big deal since Panasonic wisely choose to make the shutter button override any selection on the back panel. One factor on handling - I have the lens hood adapter attached all the time. It makes the "lens" longer and I think easier to hold. More on this later.

Picture taking is very easy in Program mode. 90% of what you will want to do is covered by Program. Even if you want to use the Aperture, Shutter or Manual modes, you can use Program to pre-shoot to get "default" speed and aperture information which is displayed on screen. The auto-focus is very fast during daylight and as fast as any I have used in low light conditions (as long as you don't cover the focus assist light!). I was having some issues with close up focus until I found the selector for macro focus. Problem solved. The built in flash is reasonably powerful. One drawback of the camera is the lack of a hot shoe or flash sync. This limits the usefulness of the camera but if that is a feature you need, you probably need a full dSLR. Unlike many digital cameras, the flash does not pop up automatically in low light conditions. You must release it manually and once released, it powers very quickly. At first I found this to be a drawback but the Optical Image Stabilizer is good enough to make low light shots possible. More than making them possible, by not having the flash as a default, you avoid taking pictures of darkness from the flash bumping up the shutter speed but not being powerful enough to light the area. The OIS makes pictures at 1/30 possible with little effort. Using even the most basic stabilization techniques makes 1/15 possible with stationary subjects. Beyond that is tough. Indoor pictures, even with a room lit with halogen lights, tend to be yellow without the flash but they are relatively easy to clean up in Photoshop. I haven't been able to tell the difference between the two modes for OIS in normal use. The zoom is very fast and from 1x-6x there is almost no loss of detail. At 12x there is noticeable fuzziness when you view at the pixel level but nothing you would not see on almost any other 400+mm lens. OIS helps make 12x zoom actually useable in hand held mode.

I don't have the space or the brain power for the full matrix of file and image sizes but at maximum (7 MP 3072 x 2304) size files come in at roughly 1.7MB at maximum JPG compression, 3.4MB for "fine" compression and 11MB for RAW. The camera has 27MB of built in memory but given the file sizes, this is really only useful for emergencies. Getting the pictures out and off the internal memory is quite a challenge at first - You can copy them to the memory card or pull them off using the USB connector. If you have a card in, you can only copy them and you cant delete them unless you take the card out. In fact, with a card in, you might never know there are any pictures in the camera. This can be used for your benefit - take a picture of your contact information with the built in memory. Protect the image. If your camera is ever lost or stolen, you can identify it. Write speed is good but not great on a 2GB 60x card. RAW write times are noticeable in their lag. Still, the FZ8 is far better than ANY Nikon I have used. In fact, slow write speed was a major factor in NOT buying the new Coolpix P5000. Same with stutter lag. My Nikon CP5400 took stunning pictures but the shutter lag made it unusable for anything even remotely fast moving. The FZ8 gets the shot and is ready for another before my 5400 would have finished focusing. There are over 20 scene modes but most replicate post processing done in Photoshop so I prefer to shoot "unprocessed" Two that I have used are Beach and Night and both work well at making exposure adjustments to prevent problems.

Picture quality is excellent. I read many reviews of the FZ8 with complaints of over processing and picture artifacts. I have not had any complaints. The first picture I uploaded of a sunset was taken with nothing more than a steady hand and the OIS. At ISO 100 there are no artifacts. It was pretty dark when I took this so I think it represents a good example of what the camera can do in low light. This image was resized by 50% and at 50% additional JPG compression (Photoshop Elements 4.0 Mac "Save for Web"). The second shot is in shaded bright light. It too was resized by 50% and at 50% compression. You can see some artifacts from the internal processing but nothing that would make the picture unprintable. Again, if you need more, buy a dSLR. Remember what you are paying for! The final picture is a slice of a RAW picture of flower. Using Adobe Camera RAW v4.2 I made no changes (As Shot) then saved it as a 100% JPG. The edge quality is excellent. Movies are nice but frankly, buy a video camera to do movies.

I have not used the provided software. I use a combination of iPhoto (v6.0.6) and Photoshop Elements (v4.0.1) with Adobe Camera Raw v4.2. No problems.

Battery life is excellent. In fact, it is the best I have ever used. The battery charges very fast and I have not managed to run it down past two bars even on a 400 picture day. The charger is small but is an outlet hog covering two outlets on a normal wall or power strip. It has a flip out plug which is nice for traveling but not always the easies to plug in to odd shaped or placed outlets. I have a small 3 outlet strip I travel with and that solves any issues with plugs.

There is a single issue that prevents me from giving this camera stars. The USB connection from the camera is the older 12Mbit/s standard rather than the newer 480Mbit/s USB 2.0. Given the file sizes of the pictures, this is inexcusable. For practical purposes, the only way to get pictures into your computer is to remove the memory card and use a reader. This might not seem like a big deal but it is unnecessary. I cannot imagine a reason for not putting USB 2.0 connections on the camera. The FZ8 has some features only found on more expensive dSLRs. With the lens hood adapter, you can attaché a 52mm filter for protection and for special composition. You can attach a macro lens for extreme close ups. Given these "pro" features, lack of USB 2.0 is even more glaring. Shame on you Panasonic!

I bought the FZ8 as a bridge to a dSLR next year. I needed a new camera but I think next years batch of dSLRs from Nikon and Pentax will be enough better that I wanted to hold off. The FZ8 will probably do far more than bridge! It has 75% of what you want out of a dSLR for less than half the cost when you consider the additional lenses you would have to buy to match the 36mm to 432mm equivalent zoom. The size and weight are great for traveling and combined with a seemingly bottomless battery, I will probably be using it long after next year. Despite the USB issue, highly recommended as the best value for your dollar by far.

I just got this last week and the quality of the photos are excellent! The videos are really good as well! No complaints so far. This is perfect for point-and-shoot folks but then the camera features a whole a lot more if you want to get creative. Just be careful in buying SD cards larger than 2Gb, but just make sure the SD card has 'SDHC' stamped on it. I made the mistake of buying a regular 4Gb SD card and it did not work on the camera. Good thing the SD card worked on my Nikon D50. Live and learn!

Leica makes the lens for this fine camera and it shows, yes if your looking for something to pick on noise
is a small issue up in the lower ISO settings but this won't be a problem for most who buy this camera.
You can always shoot in RAW, you couldn't do that with the FX7. Recycle time for the flash is good thanks
to the powerful Lithium-Ion battery, get a spare if you don't want to gat caught with a dead battery that
takes 2-3 hrs. to charge. Battery life is excellent! The noise reduction setting is best set on low, default too much.
All in all this is an excellent value, it's fast with a decent image stabilizer system, the 12X lens is top in it's class.
It comes with a lens hood that other brands sell as an option. The feel and finish makes my canon look cheap.
Take your time and read some reviews, most rate this model as excellent and after living with it I agree.

I have owned the Panasonic FZ7 for 1 year and was excited to purchase the FZ8. There are so many excellent qualities this camera offers.
It is very simple to use for a beginner and offers features to suit a professional. The preview screen is a perfect size with its bright and vivid colors. Settings are easy to change,Including: shutter speed, aperture, time and date, changing the focus point, and many other awesome features! The picture quality is awesome, even with the 12x zoom, my prints do not turn out grainy. Nice light weight and easy grip.
Now, the dislikes....only one. This camera does not offer an automatic pop-up flash. I have to remember to open it.
I cannot comment on the video of this camera, I use a Sony Handycam for all my video needs.
Overall, I would highly recommend this camera and even the FZ7 to anyone interested in starting out with a simple to use camera.

I bought this camera from Amazon, but returned it two weeks later.
Everything about this camera is good value except the lens, which is excellent.
There is a lot of noise even at the lowest ISO (100). I had a beautiful picture of my backyard in which noise was really visible in a shadow, thus making the picture appear grainy in that area...and this was in good light. If you're going to be limiting the printing to 4x6 or 5x7 and you don't look at the pictures full-size on your monitor, then this is the camera for you. I would recommend it 100% for people like that. I am not prepared to 'shoot in raw' and post-process either. I don't have time for that. Maybe some people do. Raw also takes up quite a bit of space (11.3 Megs each), and the shot-to-shot time is around 5 seconds(maybe 4).
The lens cap is nice and it comes with conversion adapter and lens hood. All work great, although the conversion adapter is plastic and will get chewed up by inserting and removing over time (again, a 'value' camera). If it weren't for the noise, I would have kept this camera. I like inspecting pictures on my screen, so I got frustrated when details like grass or foliage would be muddied up due to noise (or noise reduction, depending on how you have it set).
The flash is nice, although it loses power quick. You can't take more than 4 or 5 flash shots within a minute or else the power of the flash deteriorates. You have to give it time for the battery to cool down. In Panasonic's manual for this camera they indicate their flash performance is based on waiting 30 seconds between shots. Again, another value decision.
The preset white balances are fairly inaccurate, at least under the lights in my house. I had to use the custom white balances to get decent white-levels in my photos. This is ok, except I always had to have a white piece of paper with me and set it manually. The white-balance fine-tuning is pretty nice.
As far as photo quality, there was very little purple fringing. In fact, almost none. I only saw some at the full telephoto zoom end at the corners of the picture. Kudos to Panasonic for this.
Corner blurriness and distortion was not an issue either. This is an awesome lens. It's just too bad the electronics inside the camera don't match the quality of the lens. I would not take this camera above ISO 200. I would not use it for indoor pictures (unless using the flash). The optical stabilization works great though, so you can keep to ISO 100 more often than with other cams.
I decided that there isn't an ultra-zoom on the market right now that lives up to my expectations. The S5 IS is not very good due to lens distortion and purple(red)-fringing. Alas I might have to do what the market dictates I must do and buy a D-SLR.

I've owned the FZ8K for about a week now, and I've taken about 2,000 pictures and videos with it. It has many very good points and just a few not-so-good points.

The good side:

Pictures are sharp and clear. The autofocus is smart and fast. The standard settings for sharpness, contrast, and color intensity work well for me. On previous cameras I had to use "vivid color" to get shots that I liked.

Set it to fast burst and you get up to 5 pictures in what seems like about two seconds. I've set the camera to operate silently, so that there are no clicking sounds to disturb my subjects.

The anti-shake feature works well. At mid zoom my hand-held videos are quite steady. At max zoom the videos aren't so steady but I wouldn't expect them to be. Still photos, however, taken on cloudy days, are sharp even at max zoom, which was a bit of a surprise. But don't expect miracles - nothing helps if the light level is too low.

The optical zoom feature is configured intelligently. If you shoot at less than 7 megapixels you get added optical zoom past the nominal 12x out to, for example, 14.4x at 5 megapixels. This is like cropping the central portion of the photo from 7 to 5 megapixels in an image editor, except that you don't have to shoot at 7 megapixels all the time (filling your HDD faster) to get that advantage.

The lithium-ion battery is a champ. I've taken over 400 shots, many with flash, before it even dropped from 3 to 2 bars. I use a couple of Lenmar batteries as extras, and they seem to work as well as the OEM battery.

The camera is reasonably small and light, and the two viewfinders work well.

The flash is strong and charges relatively quickly.

When you take a video the camera gives you a 640x480 jpeg of the first frame. I find this useful in reviewing videos because Windows XP doesn't give you a thumbnail of the Quicktime video mov file as it does with avi and mpg video files.

The not-so-good points:

Somewhat slow downloads to the computer. I've tried three cards in this camera. Two of them were 2-gigabyte SD cards rated at 110x and 150x. One is an 8-gig SDHC card rated as Class 6. Although none of them gives the camera a write problem, they all read slowly through the camera cable. I believe it is a USB 1.0 system. This was a disappointment. My older Canon SD-400 and Casio EX-S600 both download at USB 2.0, noticeably faster, even when the FZ8K is set to 5 megapixels.

The 5-shot burst mode has no memory feature. My old Minolta Z-2 has a feature that shoots continuously as long as my finger is on the shutter button, shows me each shot as it is taken, and then keeps only the last 5 when I release the button. This saves memory-card space. But I suppose, now that memory cards have gotten so big and so cheap, that the Panasonic way is not that much of a disadvantage.

Learning to use some of the features required me to read the manual. Not that great a hardship, but with other cameras I've been able to teach myself how to use them just by tinkering.

Overall I'd say this camera is well worth the price, under $250 as of the time of this writing. The Canon S5 is also worth considering, though it costs about $100 more. It offers the option of optical zooming during video shooting, which is a nice feature. I decided against it mainly because it uses NiMH batteries. Lithium-ion batteries, as used in this Panasonic camera, stay near full charge much longer.

0) Value for money. (Important to me)
1) It is an excellent DSLR "LIKE" camera, but it is not a DSLR. So there is some noise at ISO 400 and above, expect this.
2) Very solid build quality and ergonomics is very good.
3) Nice list of features with superb 12x optical zoom.
4) Effective image stabilization (Mega OIS).
5) Bright, clear, high resolution LCD and excellent EVF.
6) Super useful Extended Zoom with no lose in image quality.
7) Able to use filters and lens right out of the box. It includes 52mm adapter or you can buy Panasonic DMW-LA2 for 55mm filters and lens.
8) Movie mode in Quick Time format, 30 sec (VGA, 30 FPS) uses about 15 MB.
9) It supports SDHC.
10) Did I mention superb value for money?

I was going to give this camera 4 stars because it does collect noise in shadows even at ISO 200 (100 isn't so bad). However, I decided to give it 5 stars for value.

When I bought this camera, I put it head-to-head with the Kodak Z712 IS. The kodak is a good camera with comparable quality and features. I eventually decided that I enjoyed using the panasonic more because of its high quality LCD screen, included rechargeable long-lasting battery, variable speed zoom, better feel (IMHO), and manual focus (a feature I could not find on the kodak and do not believe it has). I also like that the ISO is hidden away in the menu; I don't accidentally change it while I am taking pictures in manual mode. The kodak takes less-noisy pictures but uses a longer shutter speed to do it.

I really enjoy the portability of this camera. It weighs less than a pound and has a ton of features and options not found in a regular point and shoot. I like its intuitive controls. In the end, I decided the noise wasn't as big of an issue for me because I usually only print 4x6 photos. If I need to print bigger pictures, I can use Gimp (photo-editor) to easily soften the noise while preserving most of the detail. One major lacking feature in the panasonic is the inability to zoom (or shoot photos) during movie mode. If you cannot live without these features, do not get the panasonic. You could get these features in either the Canon S3 IS (zoom and photos) or the Kodak Z712 IS (zoom only).

I bought this camera about a month ago and have been using it in my digital photography class. It had all the options I needed to be able to learn all I needed to know about manually adjusting your ISO,f stops, shutter speeds, and all that good stuff. It allows you to become an artist in the process and not just a button pusher, so it's better than a basic point and shoot. Also, it has RAW format which conserves more of the data for later use in Photoshop editing. It takes spectacular pictures in most settings and is a very good looking piece of equipment.

Now, about the issue of VenusIII noise it does make me uncomfortable after 400 ISO but if you have a tripod or are a steady shot you should be able to pull of most shots, and can get by with the flash and a tripod at night or in low light. But, it is very good for a point and shoot. Some others may be better in low light but this one can take very good pictures for most of your shots and the Leica lens is super. Another gripe is that it does not have the field of view that I would have liked, which others have if you shop around. Over all I think it is a solid camera and if I could do it again I would have a hard time replacing it for the price.

And no, in my experience with other peoples' cameras, it does not compare to a DSLR as many have said these advanced point and shoots can. If you are a really serious amateur and can afford an SLR get one. If you are unsure about your seriousness or want a comparable camera, in most situations, get this one. But, if the shot is in a difficult environment with low light you want an SLR.

If I could do it all over again I'd save the money for an SLR. If you need one immediately for a class or just to learn there are cheaper cameras to learn on by Canon that have all the quality and features that you need to learn. If you are not serious and want to take pictures at BBQ's buy a simple point and shoot. If you just want one all around camera that you want to use for a while and take high quality photos, but not seriously, get this one it is pretty good for the price and will be hard to beat.