Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic Lumix TZ7 Digital Camera - Silver (10.1MP, 12x Optical Zoom) 3.0 inch LCD

I won't write War and Peace about this item like some contributors.

Good Points:
1. Focus in INSTANT and RELIABLE
2. Video quality is OUTSTANDING
3. Lens is great - very WIDE (with unavoidable distortion) with a huge range of focal lengths
4. Anti-shake is fantastic (though it kills the battery - see below).
5. The screen is VERY BRIGHT (but again, kills the battery)

Bad Points:
1. Battery life is APPALLING - if you are going out and taking a days photos, take a spare battery with you - I had to buy another. I can't put into words how shockingly bad it is.
2. The MODE dial at the top of the camera is constantly being knocked leaving you in the wrong preset.
3. Flash exposures are POOR and the flash mode button requires you to cycle through the flash modes and then press another button to select each one - crazy, slow and out of the ark. The fill-flash mode isn't as good as my 5 year old Canon which I had to use to get nice flash shots of my daughter's birthday party.
4. The zoom control is a bit hit and miss and coarse in operation.
5. There is a simple push control on the back of the camera to cycle between Photo and Video Mode - this also gets knocked and puts you in the wrong setting - REALLY IRRITATING. Considering how relatively rare will be your use of video, this button should be out of the way.

All in all, this is an outstanding camera, in many respects but it does have flaws.

The quality of results it can produce are excellent but I can tell you that's it's little foibles do get to you from the moment you first use it and don't become any more appealing over time.

I'm keeping mine because of the spec which is quite simply unequalled on any other camera but I can't say I love it because of the drawbacks that reduce its appeal more than you would think.

Very easy to use, intelligent auto the best I've ever used!Lens is good,especially given the very neat packaging, Image stabilizer very impressive for still photography, not as good as I expected from a top video camera manufacturer in movie mode though.Autofocus a little slow and quite ponderous in low light again not great in movie mode where youd expect the much lower resolution to really speed things up! The good news for movie mode the image quality is very good and the audio good fidelity if a tad noisy. The real let down is the battery life, how can Panasonic market this as a travel camera when you cant take it away from a mains supply even for a day, my Fuji F3 Will actually take the 550 shots they claim and it's a few years old, Panasonic claim 300 for this, more like 150!!!

After comparing lots of cameras in this price bracket, some 12 or even 14mp, I went for this one because it had the extra optical zoom. I can only say it is a breeze and delight to use and I am truly pleased with my choice. I can take high-def movies of the children, take macro zoom pictures (look stunning), and its an ease to use for everyday photos.

Some reviews I read complained about battery life, but for me taking family photos it has not been a problem. The newly removable batteries make it easy to recharge or carry a second if you needed.

My only grip is the software Panasonic supplied only works on Windows, not my Mac. This is not a big issue since I never really use them anyway, preferring to just load the pictures/movies onto my hard-disk (iPhoto is all I need). But the first few movies it recorded were in a format you can't load directly from disk access, you can only see them via the Windows software package. Once I managed to recover these I switched to jpeg movie recording that can be seen as a regular file and copied along with your photos.

I did my research first and found that this was the camera that best fitted my requirements: high res (10 Mp), HD video (720p), takes high capacity SD cards (up to 32 GB), good macro, optical image stabiliser, clear screen, high zoom (12x optical), zoom while using video, intelligent modes to ensure correct exposure, and a good lens.

I have not been disappointed with the results from this camera.

Some specifications not mentioned here by Amazon: screen size is 60 x 45 mm, measuring 74 diagonal. Stated screen size of 3 inches (76 mm) is obviously incorrect, unless perhaps you include the black border where nothing can be displayed.

It does come with a wrist strap, but it was not as good as the one I used on my Canon camera (which this camera replaced due it breaking down after 3 years and over 10,000 photos), so I used the one from my Canon. It also comes without a case, so I used the one from my very old film camera, an Olympus, which was a similar size.

As for battery life, as another reviewer wrote here, it does eat up power quickly. I purchased a spare battery and on a day out taking lots of photos, I needed the spare battery. I also needed a bigger memory card, as the 2 GB card I was using only stores about 300 photos at 10 Mp resolution, so I had to resort to using the small amount of inbuilt memory (45 MB) and using a 5 Mp resolution to give me another 20 photos.

I was very impressed with the video, having seen an example online that someone else made with one of these cameras. If you do a good job, it can look as good as broadcast TV (to a certain extent), but you are limited to only 15 mins continuous recording time (with a large enough card). So it's good for making short videos, rather than having to lug around a camcorder.

I now have an 8 GB high capacity SD card (SDHC) which gives me 1345 photos at 10 Mp, although I might use some of that for video.

The one annoying thing, is that on the screen when zooming, it shows the min focus distance in feet, instead of metres. The manual specifies the distances in metres. I would prefer the screen to just use metres. Maybe there is an option to change the display but I cannot find it. I asked Panasonic about it but they have not bothered to reply. This is a small design fault which can be rectified if they updated the firmware, otherwise I cannot find any other faults with this (so long as you have a spare battery when using it a lot).

If you want good quality photos and video, then this camera is hard to beat, unless you have thousands of pounds and are buying a DSLR. This is certainly the best compact digital camera I have seen or used.

Following a lot of research I decided to buy the Panasonic Lumix TZ7 Digital Camera - Silver (10.1MP, 12x Optical Zoom) 3.0" LCD. The quality of the still pictures and HD video is as expected, very high. The selector dial is as described by others a little vague sometimes, but at least you can see on the screen what you have chosen. The screen is large and clear and the pictures options are easy to choose between. I would highly recommend this camera to anyone looking for something small, but very versatile and producing excellent quality still pictures and HD video.