In Brief:

Panasonic DMC-TZ7*

Image Quality

Color: 

The Panasonic TZ7 creates images with a nearly perfect saturation of 101.3%. The automatic white balance showed an ambivalent behavior: Darker neutral grays are shifted into the blue and magenta areas, the brighter gray fields have a tendency to be more apparent in yellow areas.

Sharpness:
The camera offers a nominal resolution of 3.648 x 2.736 pixels. In our tests the Panasonic TZ7 reproduced the ISO 12233 chart with 2.244 pixels in picture height which is an acceptable result for a compact camera. All images have a sharp look, only softened by some noise filtering especially in higher ISO speed settings.

The standard box demonstrates the good optical quality. There’s average distortion even in the extreme wide angle setting (25 mm!) and nearly no chromatic aberrations on contrast lines. Sharpness is reduced at the corners of the image.

The Panasonic creates fewer chromatic aberration effects and therefore a crisp reproduction of fine details. Imatest indicates an over sharpening of 3.81% which is a good result for consumer camera.

Noise:

Even in lower ISO speed settings the luminance noise level is extremely high: y-factor=1.05. That’s the reason why the Panasonic uses an intense noise filtering, especially to get rid of color noise.

Nice colors with a little shift into yellow in the bright background: The portrait shows good colors and sharp and crisp details like hairs and fabric of the t-shirt.

With 10.4 f-stops in ISO 80 mode the camera offers high dynamic range images. Using standard ISO speed settings like ISO 100 or ISO 400 will reduce dynamic range to 9.74 and 9.07 f-stops which is still a good result.

A very slim and compact camera with a 12x zoom lens: The Panasonic DMC-TZ7 combines good image quality (10 MP resolution) with HD-video capabilities (1.280 x 720 pixels)

The Panasonic doesn’t offer manual settings. Focusing and exposure settings are controlled by automatic systems. Only white balance and an exposure compensation of +/- 2 EV-stops are available. A lot of scene modes will help to get correct image results. The camera is able to select an proper scene mode by itself (five most important scene modes like “portrait”, “landscape”, “portrait at night”, “landscape at night” and “macro” out of a total of 27 scene modes).

Even with the zoom fully extended the camera is very compact.

The camera offers HD-video. Panasonic created a new video standard called “AVCHD-Lite”. While standard AVCHD-camcorders will take videos with a resolution of 1.920 x 1.080 pixels, the TZ7 offers movies with 1.280 x 720 pixels and 25 frames per second (50 frames interlaced). Automatic focusing and exposure settings are activated while taking video shots. Sound is recorded with a stereo mic on the top of the camera.

The dial on the top shows only a few image modes. The user can save two individual scene modes out of the 26 different scene modes. The camera uses a stereo mic on the top for sound recordings.

The camera uses a 3 inch LCD which offers a very high resolution of 460.000 pixels and therefore crisp menu text elements and sharp images.

The cameras is supplied with a rechargeable lithium-ion-battery. It uses 40 MB internal memory or optional SD-/SDHC-cards for image storage.

Pro:
+ compact body, especially for a multimedia tool with HD-video
+ HD-Video in professional AVCHD-quality
+ many scene modes for beginners
+ large hi-res LCD

Con:
- missing manual settings
- missing optical viewfinder
- missing raw-mode

The standard box demonstrates the good optical quality. There’s average distortion even in the extreme wide angle setting (25 mm!) and nearly no chromatic aberrations on contrast lines. Sharpness is reduced at the corners of the image.

* Editor’s Note: Test images and comments supplied by Betternet as part of Shutterbug’s TIPA membership. Comments and test results are from an independent source and are the opinion of Betternet.

www.panasonic.com