Lumix DMC FZ50 digital SLR
The Lumix DMC FZ50 originally came to our attention after our Pentax Optio X died for the 3rd time. I really loved the compact Optio and its rotating viewfinder - it was like a miniature version of my old Nikon CoolPix 995. It was smalll, inconspicuous and I could work by looking down, as if using a Rolleicord or Hasselblad. It’s amazing how much less intrusive it is in public situations when the photog is not pointing the camera from eye-level.
A number of the N Judah portfolio pix came from the Optio, before it died. It has since been repaired again, but is clearly not robust enough to work every day, or at least the way I was using it, so it’s now tucked away in a backup role at gulker.com. It’s handy for light duty - like snapping things nearby for the blog - e.g. these 2 pix of the Lumix.
The Lumix was originally priced in the $600 - $700 range before the holidays, and Leica had a $900 version called the V-LUX 1. I couldn’t see that Leica had added anything beside the red Leica badge for the extra $$$, so that was out, and the Lumix was a bit too expensive, and I thought, less suitable for the ‘unobtrusive’ mission, so I passed on it.
Apparently the Lumix didn’t sell as well as intended over the hols, and Amazon dropped the price to $490 the day after Christmas - only $40 more than the Optio had been, and this was a 10.1 MP camera with an amazing Leica DC Vario-Elmarit lens on it. So I decided to take a shot, and ordered the Lumix. The Lumix is a full-on DSLR, with both electronic eye-level view finder as well as a flip down 2″ screen that swivels and rotates. My concern when ordering continued to be that its larger size and more obtrusive appearance would make it harder to use unobtrusively.
Amazingly, the heads down approach, even with the larger camera, continues to make it easy to take pictures unobtrusively on CalTrain and the Marguerite shuttle, as well as at the various train stations and other haunts mandated by my new eco-friendly mobility.
The lens on this camera is pretty amazing: the equivalent of a 35mm to 420mm (!) in a package that’s only about 6 inches long. This lens is very sharp and its become a pretty indispensible tool the more I carry it around. I can do things like snap a picture of an unfinished paper to-do list on my way out the door at Adobe or home, and have a crisp legible copy to read on the train or whenever I’m back in an office close to a CPU. I use the camera a lot as a visual note-taker: e.g. I snapped a high-angle shot of the garden one morning, and used it to figure out what needed doing this weekend.
I’ve also bee using it to copy old 11×14″ prints stored in boxes in my garage. With a careful lighting set up, it does a good job producing 10.1 MP RAW image files, and is way faster than the 11×17 Mustek Scanner I’ve been using. I may well be able to get a new project, the Gulker Photo Archive, up and running much more quickly thanks to the Lumix.
As a camera, I wish the wide end of the zoom was 28, or, better, 24mm, but 35mm is, in practice useful, and the camera has produced some wonderful images. Indeed the blog is now pretty much photographed completely with the Lumix.
Purists will argue about the noise in this machine’s CCD, but, us old film guys like noise, depending, because we liked grain. At ASA 1600 there are sometimes pretyy rough transitions to featureless shadow areas, but otherwise, I like the image quality. One hand feature is a custom button where I can set, and easily return to, camra parameters. So the copy-stand settings, daily shooting mode, etc. are easy to set up and get back to. Verdict? Well worth the $500.