It’s always worth writing these things down in case they’re useful for someone, somewhere… I just took delivery of a Panasonic TZ7 which we’re going to be taking on our travels with us. Here’s a bunch of thoughts / reactions etc…
- It feels very like the TZ5 / TZ3 that I’ve played with that friends have. It feels solid, but not too heavy. The charger for the battery is very lightweight, which is good for our rucksacks!
- Basic shooting seems dead simple, but it’s a horrid dreary day here, so I haven’t really tested it well.
- It came with firmware version 1.2, which means it will only take original Panasonic batteries (cheapest I’ve seen them is £35 a piece) not third party ones (anywhere from about £8 each). At the moment I’ve decided not to downgrade to 1.1, but I may yet be convinced into saving myself about £50 on getting 2 new batteries for it. It just feels scary running the risk of bricking a brand new camera!
- Having just come from a Canon, I already miss the ability to tune the shutter speed. However I don’t think I used that much in practice and will just need to get used to the scenes / exposure settings etc…
- I knew it had face detection, but it also has face recognition – in other words it can recognise pre-registered people in photos and tag the photos with their name 🙂 It even spots them when you’re framing a photo, labels them with the names you’ve put in and makes sure they’re the most in-focus faces!
- I hadn’t realised this, but video recording on this version is limited to 15min bursts regardless of the size of memory card (I believe this is down to some form of import tax avoidance). Not a big deal for me as I pretty much just want it for photos, not video.
- The tripod attachment point is in the middle – YAY! On our old Canon it was right at one side which made it virtually impossible to use with our GorillaPod mini tripod. Am sure this will work better, but will have to check tonight.
Anyway, it’s actually slightly worse than my expectations, but then perhaps they were just too high in the first place!
This is from fiddling with it for about an hour… I’ll hopefully post some more updates on here about my experiences if I can be bothered 🙂 Might even include some pictures too! Bet you can’t wait!
UPDATE: Some pictures
Here‘s my first batch of photos with the camera… here’s a teaser:
