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(More customer reviews)I've purchased my Panasonic DMC-ZR1 still camera via Amazon just a few days ago because I needed an ultra-compact backup for may Nikon D90. When you travel there might be some situations when you are not in the mood or just can not use your DSLR. So I was looking for a small camera, which could produce high quality outdoor pictures and HD video.
I'm an advanced amateur photographer. I take pictures mostly on weekends and vacations when I prefer to have in my pocket a small but sophisticated camera which I can forget about during the day but which can take great shots when it is needed. That is why my best cameras were Sony DSC-T1, T30, and recently - T100. The latter one was nominated as the best ultra-compact in 2007, and it indeed was. But time flies and a new 16:9 wide format came to still cameras and video, which T100 did not support. So about a year ago I purchased Panasonic DMC-TZ5 and a little bit later - FZ18. I bought FZ18 because of its incredibly bright 18x super zoom lens. I believe that each of above mentioned cameras was an absolute champion in their class at that time, but now I wanted something almost as good as that but in a small package.
After doing a lot of research on Amazon.com and dpreview I've chosen ZR1. My first impression - it's a very good camera. I like a solid build quality of its metall body. There are no flimsy elements or grinding sounds while zooming or focussing. Zoom itself is very smooth both optically and mechanically. While taking stills it is very fast, however it has some inertia. While shooting video it's relatively slow, which allowes autofocus to do its job well.
What I like very much about my Sony T100 - when shooting video of a moving subject the autofocus keeps it in focus all the time by doing a very small adjustments which you can hardly admit. Many other P&S cameras either do not allow zooming on video or hunting focus most of the time. That was the issue with the original TZ5, which was significantly improved in software update ver. 1.2. From my prospective the new ZR1 has as the same great autofocus mechanism as my T100 - when you follow a moving subject or apply zoom ZR1 keeps it in focus nicely (and without producing any noticeable sound). But when you do a panorama without a central moving object - do it slowly to allow the camera to decide, which next part of your picture should be in focus. On still pictures the autofocus is very quick and precise.
The 8x zoom Leica lens is just great: very good colors fidelity, contrast, and color saturation in the entire zoom range from wide to tele. The wide 25mm (equivalent) is great, but it comes at some cost: for the distant subjects the barrel distortions and the decrease of sharpness of the peripheral areas are pretty visible, however when you shoot from a relatively close distance around 1.5-3 m it seems some special processing is involved because there is almost no any visible barrel distortions or loss of sharpness. I have to admit all three my Panasonic cameras behave the same way but for ZR1 it's more noticable because of its incredibly wide 25mm lens. If you apply a little bit zoom the resolution becomes pretty even accross the picture and with no barrel distortions. I did not perform any special stress testing but on all the pictures I've got I did not see any chromatic aberrations or vignetting in the entire zoom range. Physically you can zoom in the only 8x range but it is possible to increase it up to 15.6x for the lower 3MP picture resolution. Normally you might want that if you're taking pictures of some specific subjects like kids, birds, or animals. Just imagine - having 400mm equivalent telephoto lens in your pocket - it's just amazing, and IMHO those 3MP shots look pretty good on my 24" monitor (if you do not crop them more).
A new ZR1 has the impressive 12MP comparing to 9MP of TZ5 but on the same sensor size, and as a result - more noise. On the [...]site you could read that Panasonic did a great job by separating the entire noise into its low-frequency and high-frequency wavebands and also splitting the color and luminance noise and handling them separately. My comparative edge-to-edge testing of both ZR1 and TZ5 shots showed that ZR1 does exactly what was stated and does it pretty good. On the ZR1 picturese taken at dim light conditions the noise was remarkable less than on the TZ5's ones! However at a very-very dark conditions when the pictures become very grainy you can see that the level of noise from ZR1 is somewhat bigger, than from TZ5. Another good news is that the white balance in ZR1 is almost perfect: the night pictures taken by TZ5 and FZ18 were either colored red or had some other weird colors while ZR1 in alomst dark situations showed as the same correct white balance as if the pictures were taken at a day-light time.
If you're shooting on a bright sunny day your pictures might be too much contrasty and either shadow parts like trees can be darken to black or the blue sky or some other light areas might be completely washed out. The camera menu does not allow you to adjust the contrast directly but you can set an Intelligent Exposure mode instead. Then it constantly analyzes the scene and if it has too much contrast the camera automatically applys either slower shutter speed or higher ISO and reduces the overal contrast. I found that on ZR1 that feature is not that good as on TZ5. Another way is to switch the mode dial to "MS" or "SCN" mode and select "High Dynamic" scene. In that case camera unconditionally and remarkably decreases the overall contrast (more than in Intelligent mode) and adjusts the shutter speed or/and ISO the way that even dark areas are well exposed, and that really works well.
There are the two things which are still better on my T100 than on ZR1 or TZ5: the quality of the VGA video and the clarity of sound. However having the HD video mode you might not need VGA at all. The quality of HD video on ZR1 is as the same great as on TZ5 and the image stabilization is even slightly better. But for stills the image stabilization was much more improved, I guess more than the 2 times as they stated. On the maximum zoom in low light many of my TZ5 pictures were slightly smeared, while the ones taken by ZR1 at the same time were perfect.
I like the ZR1's menu and controls - they're similar to TZ5' and are very clear and intuitive. Plus there are some additional functions. It allows you to set some parameters manually, but do it only if you're very clear about what you're doing, otherwise let that sophisticated camera do it for you. For example: you might be taking a picture of a tree and the system sets the ISO=100 and shutter speed 1/20. But then you see a small squirell and apply the 15.6x zoom to have it big enough on your screen. As a result system might change ISO to 500 and shutter to 1/100. You might be thinking that the camera got crazy, but actually it detected that your hands are shaking too much for the big focal length you set and so the shutter speed needs to be much faster to prevent the shot to be blurred. It's intelligent mode is pretty good.
UPDATE: This ZR1 camera has an incredible display: it shows pictures at any angle and even in the direct sunlight. A while ago I was going on vacation to Cancun and I purchased a Kodak V1273 ultracompact camera because of its wide-screen stills and HD video. But when I tried to use it on the beach I was totally confused - nothing, absolutely nothing was visible on display on a sunny day! If I did not have my Sony T100 as a backup all my vacation would be completely spoiled. In the direct sunlight the image on the T100's display looks like a black-and-white reflection, but at least you can point and frame your shots and use the menu. ZR1 does even better - the picture in the direct sunlight has all the colors, just looks darker and not that contrast. On the TZ5's display if you slightly turn camera around the horizontal axis the brightness and contrast of the image is changing pretty much. On the ZR's one picture remains the same regardless of from what angle you are looking at it. It means you're not going to regret the display is not swivable as well as you will not miss the optical viewfinder because you can see the pictures even in the direct sunlight. Only one thing: it seems the palette of that display is a kind of limited and it might not show some subtle tints of colors, so don't judge colors until you see it on a good monitor.
UPDATE2: Recently I did some comparative testing of the picture quality of my ZR1 and TZ5. A side-by-side comparison has shown that the general resolution and sharpnes of the ZR1's pictures is remarkably higher than of TZ5's ones. From the detailed analysis I got an impression that around 20% of that improvement comes from higher sensor resolution (12MP verse 9MP), 30-40% because of the better noise reduction, and about 40-50% because of the stronger internal sharpening in ZR1 than that in TZ5. When I did some sharpening to my TZ5's photos using the Nero Photoshop the difference became less visible. For better understanding why the more sophisticated noise reduction might help pictures to look sharper you can think about it this way: as the same as contrast is a difference between light and dark areas, sharpness is a difference between plain areas and edges. The less a certain area has noise, the more it looks "plain", and so it more differentiates from edges making a sharper impression. Also because the original purpose of this purchase was to have a backup for my Nikon D90 I did some comparison of their HD video capabilities. Would you believe or not - ZR1 provided much better moving picture resolution than D90. Of course the ZR1's movies show some noise (as the same as any other compact P&S camera) while D90's ones don't. That noise is not...Read more›
Click Here to see more reviews about: Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZR1 12.1MP Digital Camera with 8x POWER Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.7 inch LCD (Silver)
Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZR1 Point & Shoot Digital Camera - Silver 12.1 Megapixel - 16:9 - 8x Optical Zoom - 4x Digital Zoom - 2.70
