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Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1 Review – 10 megapixel Long Zoom Camera

Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1 can be an option if you’re looking for a compact camera with a long zoom. Featuring 10 Megapixel, 12x Optical Zoom 25-300mm lens with the aperture of f3.3-4.9, and 2.7 inch LCD screen (230k resolution) this camera passes the standard of nowadays pocket camera trends.

Lumix DMC-ZS1 build was good, and looks quite appealing. This longzoom compact camera with its dimension (2.4 X 4.1 X 1.3 inches) can snug well into your pockets. Panasonic also designed the controls of DMC-ZS1 camera pretty remarkably, giving its user an easy to use interface, eventhough for some people, the dial spins was a little bit too free and tends to move out of place when they use the zoom ring or pressing ZS1’s shutter release button.

Panasonic DMC-ZS1 offers ISO levels from 80 to 1600 you can choose, but it also provides Intelligent ISO mode to limit the sensitivity and the capability to set the minimum shutter speed from 1 to 1/250 second. There are several scene modes available in ZS1, but if you don’t feel like choosing one of them, you can let this camera choose by themselves with Intelligent Auto feature that select the Scene, adjust focus, brightness and prevent blurring in your photos. The camera support Face recognition, AF tracking, and can focus on up to 11 multi point location .

Lumiz ZS1 start up time is pretty quick compared to other camera in its class, you only need 2.3 seconds to make your first shot from the ‘off’ state. Surprisingly, the shot – to – shot time in this Panasonic camera is slightly higher, approx 2.5 seconds. And the shutter lag performs rather slow, especially when your scene didn’t have enough lighting, even though it is still a good one. When you fell like using ZS1 burst mode, it provides 3-5fps ability, and its pretty fast for a point and shoot camera.

You can hope in your DMC-ZS1to produce good image. ZS1 longzoom usage didn’t give you much trouble. The result from 80-100 ISO was sharp, detailed and have vibrant colors. Using higher ISOs will result in softer images to compromise with the noise, even though the details was still pretty good for ISO 200-400.

And not to forget Panasonic ZS1 video recording baility that gives good VGA quality (640×480 resolution) with monoaural sound. You can even use its zooming ability while doing the record. If you feel like VGA resolution is not enough for you, and you prefer a HD quality from your Panasonic compact camera, then you’ll might considering to get Panasonic DMC-ZS3 instead that gives you HD recording capability with stereo sound, HDMI output, and better inteligence feature, with an extra $100 from ZS1’s price. To conlude in this Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1 review, it is a good longzoom compact camera, with wide angle lens and friendly interfaces, especially when you’re not putting too much attention in HD recording in your activites.