Last week Panasonic unleashed its latest batch of Lumix snappers, and among them was the Panasonic DMC-FZ38, a corking 12.1-megapixel bridge camera packed to the gills with features. Well, we’ve just got our mitts on one of these DSLR-bothering babies, so read on for our initial thoughts… and lots of lovely pics!
The Panasonic DMC-FZ38 favours a pretty standard bridge camera design, with chunky grip, protruding zoom lens and electronic view finder, plus a crisp rear LCD and top-mounted selection wheel.
The wheel lets you speedily switch between shooting modes, from pro-friendly manual, aperture and shutter priority to scene presets (landscape, portrait etc.) and Intelligent Auto, which adjusts all the settings for you and lets you get on with the business of snapping away. There are also a wider selection of scene settings available, plus an HD movie capture mode (at a maximum 1280 x 720 resolution).
The lens is a Leica-made 18x zoom, offering a range equivalent to 27-486mm on a 35mm film camera, plus a bright f/2.8 aperture at the wide end.
The Panasonic DMC-FZ38 also features an HDMI output and an SDHC card slot, and there’s a removeable lens hood included in the box. Stay tuned for a full review in the near future.
Out September | £TBC | Panasonic
