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Panasonic has introduced a new 10.1-megapixel point-and-shoot camera with a 3-inch touchscreen and a wide-angle 5x zoom lens. The Lumix DMC-FX500 sports an optically stabilized f/2.8-5.9 Leica DC Vario-Elmarit lens with a focal-length range equivalent to 25mm-125mm on a 35mm camera. Its 230,000-dot LCD offers both a generous view and access to controls, in conjunction with a mini joystick on the back of the camera.
In addition to advanced automatic functions, the FX500 offers manual and priority exposure modes. The camera's shutter-speed range runs from 1/2000 to 60 seconds, and it has a top light-sensitivity setting of ISO 6400. Sliders on the touchscreen LCD can be used to make adjustments to aperture and shutter speed, and autofocus and metering points can be selected by touching the screen as well. The FX500's advanced features include tracking autofocus, autobracketing, white balance fine-tuning, and adjustable contrast, sharpness, saturation, and noise reduction levels. There's also a generous selection of autofocus modes, from 1-point and spot to 9-point. For automatic shooting, there are 21 scene modes, face detection, and an Intelligent Auto mode that opens up dark shadow areas, boosts the ISO and shutter speed as necessary to keep images sharp, and evaluates scenes to automatically set the camera to Scenery, Portrait, Macro, Night Portrait, or Night Scenery mode.
In continuous-shooting mode, the FX500 can capture 3 or 5 full-resolution photos (depending on the compression setting) at 2.5fps at full resolution or an unlimited series of 2-megapixel shots at 6fps. There are also 1280x720 high-definition and 848x480 widescreen video modes, and the camera can output both video and photos directly to an HDTV with Panasonic's optional DMW-HDC2 component cable. The camera has a voice recording feature for annotating stills, and can save frames from video clips as JPEGs. Other notable features in review mode are the FX500's Title Edit function, which allows photographers to tag photos with text, and a dual-image mode for side-by-side comparisons.
The FX500 will be available with black and silver finishes for a $399.95 retail price in May 2008.
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