Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic DMC-LZ5EBS Digital Camera [6MP, 6 X Optical Zoom, 2.5" LCD]

This camera was bought from pixmania as a replacement for a kodak DX6340, which suddenly and mysteriously died recently. However I was able to use the cards from my Kodak in this camera-it gives about 168 photos on a 512MB card when on top quality settings. I took the camera on a 4 day expedition, where the weather was less than ideal, but it still produced good photos. The battery life from the supplied Oxyride battery was excellent-it lasted the whole trip-and when using rechargeables later, they gave good performance too. The 2.5 inch LCD is clear and bright, but as with any screen its hard to see in bright sunshine, and there is no viewfinder. The camera starts up and is ready to use in little more than a second, and about 4 shots can be taken almost instantaneously with little lag. However, once these 4 are taken, it takes the camera a few moments to store them. The optical zoom is excellent for a camera of this size, and it is useful that if you set the quality to 3MP, you can get up to about 8X optical zoom-a great idea! As an added bonus the video quality can be set very high (VGA, 30fps), but there is no built in speaker, so you can only hear the sound when you download it to your computer. Overall, very happy with this camera in the short time I have had it.