Panasonic’s DMC-FX48 is a great camera, no gubbins needed
Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-FX48 has a 25mm ultra-wide-angle Leica DC lens which you can use with an optical — not digital, which has no relevancy — zoom. That’s as if you had picked up a Leica MR and had the same features you would be shooting roughly between 25mm to 125 mm. Cartier Bresson would have married the camera on the spot.
Then there is the nonsense, the gubbins. Panasonic’s DMC-FX48 boasts a tracking technology that allows a camera to focus on a subject even when they move around. One can, just, perhaps see an use for that in blue movies but ordinary life is about movement. Do we want to lose that?
Our great- great-grandparents has their portraits taken with iron clamps on their necks to keep them still. It this not just the same thing in electronic form?
Forget all the electronic gubbins which we are quite sure are important. To the sales people.
Concentrate instead on a lens which has given us most of the world’s great pictures. What astounds me is the PR department has picked on this aspect to suggest you can get more into the frame. They have rocks in their head. The wide-angle is used to give a different perspective on the world. To allow the photographer to use creativity. Not to make sure Aunt Ethel is left out of the side of the picture.
The next bit is technical. Duck under here and come up in three paragraphs if it is going to bore you witless.
The 25mm Leica DC Vario-Elmaritlens with 5x optical zoom has 7 elements in 6 groups, including 4 aspherical lenses with 6 aspherical surfaces.
Notably, an unevenly thick concave meniscus EA (extra high refractive index aspherical) lens makes it possible to achieve the 25mm ultra-wide-angle high optical performance while keeping the lens unit thin and the body slim.
The 25mm ultra-wide-angle lens records almost double the viewing space at the same shooting distance compared to ordinary 35mm cameras.
OK , come up now and continue reading.
We are told Pansonic’s iA (intelligent Auto) mode has been enhanced within the new Lumix 12.1 megapixel DMC-FX48, which allows the camera to give auto focus and auto exposure priority to a single person in a group of people. Who, apart from that smart young chap in the marketing department who has hopes of better things, cares? Yes, with 12.1 megapixels you can play silly buggers because even if you only use half the shot you take you can still get a mind-blowing A4 print. So, in a sense, it is technically mistake-proof.
We are also told the tracking lets the camera keep the subject in focus and well-exposed even if it moves around. Even if it was obvious what was meant — and it is not — it seems to be a device for a camera designed more for a Peeping Tom than a Panasonic in the great tradition with a Leica lens.
Or perhaps I am just being snobbish.
More gubbins. The Venus Engine V — how wonderful to boast your camera has a Venus Engine V — which, we are assured, integrates these advanced functions and controls camera operation with high-speed, high-performance, and low power consumption. Or, to put it technically, more gubbins.
What is not gubbins is that this is a pocketable camera with a slim profile, a battery that will take the equivalent of 10 rolls of 35mm film which is 350 frames and a style which is a little ostentatious — what is not these days? — which I suppose you could have spray painted matte gray. My model is at the bottom of the page.
As with more of these cameras it will also make movies. My hang up on this is when I am shooting stills my eye, my mind, my creativity if you like, is thinking stills.
When I am shooting movies I am another person because there are so many more things to control especially and absolutely the sound. I have come to no resolution on this but mull it a lot. The camera I use most of the time — no fair to name the make — will also make movies. I have never used that facility. May be it is my own problem.
The camera looks seriously snazzy and I am told I can have one in black if I pay the full market price. Which is a hell of a lot better than pink.
The FX40 will be available from April 2009. It will cost under $400. Me, I would pay that for the lens.
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