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Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ15

By: Dave Etchells

Panasonic introduces a four-megapixel digicam with the high quality optics of a 12x Leica lens.

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Page 10:Image Storage & Interface

Review First Posted: 10/30/2004

Image Storage and Interface

The DMC-FZ15 uses SD/MMC memory cards for image storage. An 8MB SD memory card is supplied with the camera (a total joke, the smallest I've seen shipped with a digicam in the last 3-4 years), so you'll want to immediately purchase a larger capacity card to accommodate the large four-megapixel maximum resolution. Entire SD/MMC cards cannot be write-protected, however, the DMC-FZ15's Play menu allows you to write-protect individual image files, protecting them from accidental erasure, unless the card is formatted.

Still images can be saved at one of five resolutions (2,304 x 1,728; 1,600 x 1,200; 1,280 x 960; 640 x 480 pixels or "HDTV," 1,920 x 1,080 pixels), while movie images are recorded at 320 x 240 pixels. Still images also have two JPEG compression levels available: Fine and Normal, plus an uncompressed TIFF setting that records the RGB image with no compression at all.

A full complement of interface software comes with the DMC-FZ15, as does a USB cable for speedy connection to a PC or Macintosh computer.

Following are the approximate resolution / quality and compression ratios for the furnished 8 MB card. (Compression numbers are based on my own computations. - You can see how pointless the 8 MB card is, able to hold only four images at the camera's best JPEG size and quality setting.):

Image Capacity vs
Resolution/Quality
8 MB Memory Card
TIFF Fine
Normal
2,304 x 1,728 Images
(Avg size)
none
13.4 MB
4
1.8 MB
8
921 KB
Approx.
Compression
- 7:1 13:1
1,600 x 1,200 Images
(Avg size)
1
6.4 MB
7
1.0 MB
15
526 KB
Approx.
Compression
- 6:1 11:1
1,280 x 960 Images
(Avg size)
1
4.1 MB
12
656 KB
22
361 KB
Approx.
Compression
- 6:1
10:1
640 x 480
Images
(Avg size)
7
1.1 MB
37
213 KB
60
131 KB
Approx.
Compression
- 4:1
7:1

 


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