Panasonic FZ300 First Shots posted: Let the long zoom image quality comparisons begin!

posted Thursday, August 27, 2015 at 3:40 PM EDT

The Panasonic FZ200 has been a vastly popular camera on our site for many years now, and for good reason. This was the first all-in-one long zoom camera to sport a bright constant (f/2.8) aperture across the focal length range, therefore drawing the interest of long zoom fans and wildlife shooters craving both faster shutter speeds as well as shallower depths of field for their work.

The successor in the form of the Panasonic FZ300 is now here, sporting the same generously long and bright 25-600mm eq. f/2.8 lens, but getting a major refitting to both the exterior in the form of improved weather sealing and beefier controls, and also to the interior in the form of a Venus Engine processor reported to render better image quality among other improvements, especially as ISO rises.

Our FZ300 sample touched down in our test laboratory this morning, and we've been champing at the bit to bring you our test lab First Shots. You can use these to see how the FZ300 fares across the available ISO spectrum as well as compare test lab images side-by-side in our Comparometer against the FZ200, other long zoom cameras like the Canon G3X, and anything else we've ever tested.

To get you started, below are a few side-by-side comparisons from our Comparometer showing our Still Life images shot at base ISO and ISO 800 with the FZ200 and FZ300. These are in-camera JPEGS shot with the default setting for noise reduction, but from our Samples tab you can also access the RAW files as well as images shot with the lowest level of noise reduction (usually labelled with "NR1" in the filename).