Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 10.1 MP Digital Camera with 12x Wide Angle MEGA Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3 inch LCD (Black)

My family and I own five other cameras - all Canons, from their little Elph to a high-end DSLR. My wife thought I had changed religions when she saw the Panasonic/Leica Lumix. I take a LOT of pictures. I have a color-calibrated monitor and printers and a 5000°K (color) room, with special paint, lights and carpet. In other words, I am PICKY!I wanted a camera I could take everywhere, and use everywhere. That meant that PORTABILITY was my number one criteria for this purchase. The camera HAD to fit in shirt pocket or pants pocket. Than means that the lens had to retract with a cover, like it does on the Lumix. That said, the question was, "How good of a camera can you get in that small package?"The answer is, "UNBELIVABLE." The most important thing for any photographer in a camera is the optics ("glass," we call it). The Leica lens has to be the most sophisticated lens in a camera this size. Although the motorized lens folds flat into the body, it has 10 elements (pieces of glass in the lens), including three aspheric surfaces and two made out of extra-low dispersion (ED) glass. A couple of years ago a single piece of aspheric glass in a lens meant that lens would sell for $800 or more. In other words, Leica used amazing new technology inside this lens, which is why the pictures look so amazing. I can't say enough positive about the picture quality from this small camera.For most people, the most important thing in a point-and-shoot camera like this is USABILITY. What that means is getting the pictures you want with the least amount of fuddling around. It is one thing to read a list of 50 features before you buy; it is quite another thing to hunt through dozens of tiny, cryptic menus to figure out how to turn off the flash, or whatever.It is in creating a new standard of USABILITY that I think Leica/Panasonic deserves an award. The buttons are easy to get to and despite their size, they have confident feel with a real click. And they are LABELED! The on/off switch says, "ON OFF." There is a dedicated flash button and a dedicated delete button (with a high contrast picture of garbage can next to it). There is a dedicated movie button, although I won't be taking any videos with this camera.The menus are in ENGLISH. (Can whoever decide that reverting to Egyptian icons from written language be taken out and cut into 10.1 million pieces, please!) The menus use color intelligently, and are in type on the 3" LCD screen large enough for people to read without putting on reading glasses. The most important features are the fastest to get to. Somebody talked to real photographers in designing the user interface.There are too many well-thought-out usability features to list here. For example, the top knob has two programmable positions where you can store your favorite settings. I love that!For me, the feature that triggered my purchase decision was the ability to record five or ten seconds of audio annotation with each photograph. If you are at a party, you can speak the name of the person after you take the shot. If you are on a trip, you can name the location. This, for me, is HUGE!I have to talk about the zoom lens. Obviously, 12X optical zoom is unusual. Most photographers don't like zoom lenses because the sacrifice in image quality is too great. However, the optical quality out of this camera is AMAZING. The wide-angle setting is unusually wide. I have used it liberally. The word is, FUN. You can shoot in a crowded room full of people and get every single person. You can shoot a big scenic and get all the mountains, lake, sunset--everything. You can shoot a puppy's nose from three inches away. All wide-angle lenses suffer from a problem known as chromatic aberration, which means that at the corners of the picture you get green and purple fringe around objects. This lens does not do that. I don't know what magic they used.Panasonic includes an optical image stabilizer. I have used this feature in the past on my high-end DSLR, and it is magic. However, until this camera, I had never seen it work well on a small camera. I have taken some ultra-zoom pictures that came out 100% sharp. I haven't done enough testing to know the limits of stabilizer, but under average conditions the results are AMAZING.There is macro capability, which means the lens can focus as close as few inches. I took a photo of a bumble-bee.Battery-life. We went on a three-hour hike. I had the camera on nearly all the time, with the display on, and the flash forced on, and the lens in auto-focus. One hundred photos later, the battery showed two-thirds left. Your mileage may vary, but I think that kind of battery life is amazing. And yes, I always carry a spare, charged battery with me.The camera does not come with accessories. Plan on buying: a soft case, an HD-SC memory card (the faster the better - look for a minimum speed of "6"), and an extra battery. The camera has a tiny amount of internal memory - I could take about nine photos with NO memory card installed. So I could play with the camera while I waited for my later purchase to arrive. Thank you, Panasonic.I should name some negatives. There is one big one and one small one. The big one is that the LCD is not visible in sunlight. Nobody has an LCD that fixes this problem, yet. But I wish they did. There is no viewfinder, so for outdoor photography you are pretty much blind. I know you can buy sun-shades, but you shouldn't have to buy some after-market, glue-on band-aid to this problem. And, you need more than a sunshade to see the screen in daylight.The small problem is that there is no "raw" mode. Us picky types like to adjust contrast and color in post-production software. A camera like this goes to a lot of trouble to give you an acceptable picture with no tweaking. The camera does a good job, but I like my sky blue, not white. I have found a work-around, but what I really want is, "raw."The user manual is printed paper and well written. Very well written. My biggest complaint is that nobody makes a small case for this camera with a dedicated compartment for the user manual.I almost gave this camera a rating of 3 stars, just so people would read my review. But that wouldn't have been fair. You have to buy the products you respect so the manufactures build more good products like this wondrous camera, instead of the discount drek you see everywhere.Thank you for reading. I have never written a review longer than a couple of sentences before.

I purchased this camera as an upgrade to my aging Canon A520 camera. 2 things that were prompting me to upgrade - pictures taken of my daughter's basketball games in the dimly lit gym were not very good (either too dark and grainy or a streak of blur instead of a clear action shot). Second was video capabilities - the Canon just took 30 sec. max of small grainy video.I got this camera a week ago and have to say I am very impressed with it! For issue #1, I took it to my daughter's ball game on Saturday and tried it out. The pictures were definately an improvement. I will say that this scenario is very difficult for any point and shoot (low light - fast action - needing to zoom to get a close enough shot - not a good combo for a small lens). So, I wasn't expecting miracles, just an improvement over the Canon and that is exactly what I got. The pictures were brighter and sharper - very usable. There was still some blur in extreme situations - shooting the basketball. There just isn't enough light to completely stop the action. And if you look closely at the brighter shots, they are a little grainy due to higher ISO settings. But, unless you blow the picture way up, you don't see it at all and it is still a huge improvement over the aging Canon.The part that I didn't expect was issue number 2. I expected longer recording times and better video quality. But what I got was nothing short of absolutely stunning video. I took video of my daughter's choir concert. The stage is well lit with spotlights and I expected good video. What I got was razer sharp wide screen video that looks so good on my 50" 1080p Plasma (Panasonic - so I can play the AVCHD video right from the card) it was hard to believe. Next I tried the basketball game - much less light. Again the video was nothing short of amazing. The picture looked just as good as it did with the well lit stage. Absolutely no noise or grain - just bright, colorful, beautiful video. I even compared it to my older Canon true camcorder (digital, but not HD) and the picture is better by far in bright light. In dim light, it is even more pronounced - the camcorder has a washed out grainy look - the ZS3 looks stunning. I always hated finding a tape with room, getting it to the right spot, charging the battery and lugging the camcorder along with a normal camera. Now, I don't have to and I can still get stunning video. Condition 2 met wonderfully.I haven't tried all the features and modes yet, but with the auto mode working so well, I probably won't use them much. A few thoughts:- The mode wheel isn't super stiff like on the Canon, but it's tight enough that it doesn't move on its own.- The battery lasted for about 45 min. of video, about 30 flash pictures and a whole lot of playing around with menus, settings, etc. It charged in just under 2 hours.- If you look around you can find a couple batteries that do work with firmware 1.2. I ordered on from Amazon for $25 that should arrive soon. The two hour charge time compared to my old 15 min. AA charger has me wanting the second battery for backup.- The AVCHD plays wonderfully (no additional software) on my Windows 7 Core2 Quad machine. I had to install the included software and it still plays a little jerky on my Core2 Duo laptop. So I'm thinking you may need a decent machine to play the native video. However, I believe the included software can convert it to a less demanding format (with probably some quality loss) - I haven't tried it.- The zooming works well in video mode - it is plenty fast and while I did notice an occassional tiny amount of refocusing during the ball game while zooming, it was very slight and nothing more than my old camcorder did - especially in the low light.- It appears to be very solidly built. I haven't dropped it - yet, but even the controls and doors are hinged and solidly built - unlike the rubber covers on my Canon.- The record button for video is a little awkwardly placed - I have to hunt to find it to stop recording and I think I will probably end up hitting it accidentally a few times when I don't mean to.For now, I am very happy with the still picture quality (understanding the limits of a compact point and shoot) and am totally amazed by the AVCHD video quality. I can see I'll be purchasing a 1 TB drive soon to house all the video I'll be taking now that it is much more convenient than my dedicated camcorder.Edit - Since my last review I have used the camera a little more and have a couple minor complaints:- The video I just took using the AI mode was a little overexposed - a band concert on a spotlit stage. Same stage as the Choir concert so I'm a little surprised by the different results. There is probably a better setting to have used, but I didn't try. That leads to one of my minor gripes. Because you can't see what the video mode will look like until you press the button and start recording, it's kind of hard to tell if you need a different mode. It would be nice to be able to preview (and see how much time is left) before starting the video recording. If there is a way to do that I haven't found it yet.- I still don't find the zoom too slow in video recording (like some other reviewers), but I did find it a little touchy. It was a little difficult to get just the zoom I wanted. I found myself zooming in and out too much trying to get just right framing. Might just be a getting used to it thing.These are minor quibbles and don't do anything to reduce my love of the camera. Just something to be aware of...One final thing - I am using a class 4 8GB SD card and it is works fine for AVCHD video - not sure about Motion JPEG, but the AVCHD works fine with class 4.