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Panasonic DMC-FX500

Low: $399.95
Avg: $399.95

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	10.10 Megapixels
	5.00x zoom
	3.0 inch LCD

Panasonic FX500 Intro

The Panasonic FX500 marks something of a first for the company, being the first Lumix-series digital camera to include a touch-screen LCD display. This not only helps keep the number of external control buttons to a minimum, but also helps to free up space for Panasonic to include a larger-than-most 3.0" LCD display panel with 230,000 dots of resolution.

Panasonic FX500 Features

The FX500 is set up to allow some pretty nifty things to be achieved courtesy of the touch-screen. For example, in record mode you can touch anywhere in the picture (a stylus is included for accuracy) and have the autofocus and autoexposure systems do their work on the specific portion of the image you selected. You can also adjust the aperture and shutter speeds in the relevant modes by dragging the FX500's on-screen sliders. In Playback mode, you can even add titles to your images with an on-screen keyboard!

Touch-screens aren't perfect though - they can sometimes make it a bit tedious to quickly scroll through page after page of menus, for example. To avoid this problem, the Panasonic FX500 design also includes a joystick within convenient reach of your right thumb. Unfortunately, we do have to note that a common trade-off has been made to fit in that huge LCD panel. There's no optical viewfinder in the Panasonic DMC-FX500, but if you can live with that (and most folks these days are content to do so) then there's plenty else besides to capture your attention.

For one thing, there's the Panasonic FX500's lens. The Japanese consumer electronics giant opted for a Leica DC Vario Elmarit branded 5x optical zoom that provides an impressive 25mm wide angle, far wider than the vast majority of compact digicams are able to manage. Given that so many consumers are likely to want to take photos in relatively enclosed spaces where they can't just back up a bit to fit everything (or everyone) in, this is arguably much more useful to the average person than the telephoto end of the zoom range. That's not to say that the Panasonic Lumix FX500 skimps on the telephoto necessarily - you'll still get a fairly respectable 35mm equivalent focal length of 125mm, a moderate telephoto. As you'd expect of a Panasonic Lumix camera, the DMC-FX500 includes true optical image stabilization in its design.

Should you want a little more reach than the zoom lens can provide, the Panasonic FX500 features a 4:3 aspect ratio CCD image sensor with 10.1 effective megapixel resolution that should give plenty of room for cropping while still leaving enough resolution for a good-sized print. The Panasonic DMC-FX500's ISO sensitivity ordinarily ranges between 100 and 1600, with the ability to boost this to ISO 1600 - 6400 in a special High Sensitivity scene mode. Burst shooting is possible at 2.5 frames per second for up to three frames (full resolution, JPEG fine mode), and at reduced resolutions (2.5 megapixels for 3:2 shooting, and 2 megapixels at other aspect ratios) it is possible to boost this to a handy six frames per second, although burst depth isnt specified in this instance.

Another interesting feature seen on some of the company's other recent models has made it into the Panasonic FX500 - an Intelligent Auto scene mode that automatically determines the type of scene you're shooting - either Scenery, Portrait, Macro, Night Portrait or Night Scenery - and then optimizes the camera settings accordingly. The autofocus system in Panasonic's DMC-FX500 is also uprated compared to past models, with subject tracking now possible. The Panasonic FX500 also offers autofocus- and autoexposure-linked face detection capable of detecting 15 faces in a scene, as well as intelligent exposure and ISO features that tweak variables to correct common exposure problems and prevent subject blur, respectively.

The Panasonic Lumix FX500 draws power from a proprietary Lithium Ion battery pack rated as good for 280 photos on a charge, and stores images in 50MB of built-in memory or on SD / SDHC / MMC cards. Connectivity options include USB 2.0 High Speed for data transfer to computers and the like, as well as both NTSC / PAL standard definition and component high definition video output.

Panasonic FX500 Pricing and Availability

The Panasonic FX500 will ship in the USA from May 2008, priced at US$399.95.